On January 29, 2013, Hawaii News Now reported that Nabors married his partner of 38 years, Stan Cadwallader, at Seattle, Washington‘s Fairmont Olympic Hotel on January 15. (Same-sex marriage became legal in Washington the previous month.) The news program quoted Nabors as saying that though he had always been open about his sexuality to co-workers in the entertainment industry, he did not plan to get involved in the national debate over gay marriage.

Does anyone watch the series Spartacus? I watched the first season when Andy Whitfield was the gorgeous and badass Spartacus, but had not kept up with the series.  Recently, I have been watching it again.  Last night I watched the season premiere of Spartacus: War of the Damned.

Blanco—who, according to his Web site, has a “poetry dance—a little Michael Jackson-inspired shtick I do around the house in my pajamas when I am high from a good-poem day”—was a great choice for the inaugural honor. But “One Today,” in my opinion, falls flat. It reads like an early draft of what could be a good poem. I’m trying to restrain automatic prejudice against quickly made-to-order poetry, but I find the effort slapdash, and simply not very coherent.

It’s full of clichés: the din of honking cabs and buses, a songbird on a clothesline, the sun rising over the Rockies. Emotional clichés too: the father who, early in the poem, worked hard so that the son could have books and shoes, but still, later in the poem, couldn’t give his child what he wanted; the mother who rang up groceries so that the poet could write this poem. (Poets should be very wary of writing poems about writing poems.)

The title itself is awkward, elusive. Today we are one? There is only one today? Every day is today? I’m not sure.

Blanco’s imagery doesn’t resonate as clever or creative—which is, of course, the burden of poetry: pencil-yellow school buses, squeaky playground swings, the plum blush of dusk, the moon like a silent drum tapping on the rooftops. The word “howdy” should probably never appear in a poem, and certainly not sandwiched among a polyglot smorgasbord of howdies: shalom, buon giorno, namaste, buenos dias. “Crescendoing” is another word that feels out of place.

Blanco strains to bring in the 9/11 attacks, juxtaposing the handiwork of a person making the first brush stroke of a painting with that of someone completing “the last floor on the Freedom Tower / jutting into a sky that yields to our resistance.” I find this dubious, gratuitous.

Even more unexpectedly, Blanco works in a reference to the Newtown killings, in a passage that’s especially difficult to follow. A stanza that begins with images of learning and imagination takes a forced detour to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and ends oddly—it’s not clear how we got here—with churches, museums, and parks. Amid all this, in a jolting scene that strikes me as impious and insufficiently thought out, Blanco meanders into “the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain / the empty desks of twenty children marked absent / today, and forever.”

It’s not that poetry can’t or shouldn’t invoke last month’s massacre—but the decision to broach this tremendously raw tragedy should be accompanied by a sensitive, courageous, meaningful treatment that does justice to the pain as it is recalled in the poem.  There’s a heavy responsibility in writing about this. I don’t know exactly what is the right way to remember those poor children, but “marked absent / today, and forever” is not it. This misstep is a symptom of what’s too undigested, too unsettled, about “One Today” as a whole.

I think Blanco’s intent—a sensible one for the occasion—was to create a vast, varied portrait of our country. It’s the kind of task that Alexander achieved more subtly and comfortably in her poem four years ago, a smooth confluence of cultural and historical images which contrasted quotidian American life and the monumentally historic importance of Obama’s first inauguration day. Alexander’s poem has many thematic similarities with Blanco’s (children and parents, the hard work of living each day, the awe of a unifying moment in America), but she succeeds, where Blanco fails, at handling the task eloquently. I guess she works well under deadlines.

“One Today” is a frenetic mishmash.  No poetry dances here, I’m afraid.

The simple poem effectively wrapped around the otherwise “frenetic mishmash” that we as Americans are and that the Inauguration Day festivities likewise were.

Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the homespun images of diversity seemed both democratic and moving–hopeful, really, as I think the poet intended and entirely appropriate for the occasion. The image of the one moon “tapping on every rooftop and every window” is one that lingers.

Reliquary with Finger of John the Baptist

I don’t know how many of my readers are researchers.  I know that many of you are teachers and educators.  However, one of the things that drew me into history was the research.  I have always loved libraries and archives: the smell, the feel, the intimacy of the artifacts, etc.  Currently, I am reading Donna Leon’s novel, The Jewels of Paradise, which is a departure from her Guido Brunetti novels because it focuses on a musicologist’s search for the truth about a Baroque composer.  It’s all about the research, which in many reviews people seemed to hate.  I am also reading Danielle Trussoni’s novel, Angelology: A Novel, which is partly an exploration of the research of angels.

If you are not familiar with relics and reliquaries, here is a brief description.  Christian belief in the power of relics, the physical remains of a holy site or holy person, or objects with which they had contact, is as old as the faith itself and developed alongside it. Relics were more than mementos. The New Testament refers to the healing power of objects that were touched by Christ or his apostles. The body of the saint provided a spiritual link between life and death, between man and God: “Because of the grace remaining in the martyr, they were an inestimable treasure for the holy congregation of the faithful.” Fueled by the Christian belief in the afterlife and resurrection, in the power of the soul, and in the role of saints as advocates for humankind in heaven, the veneration of relics in the Middle Ages came to rival the sacraments in the daily life of the medieval church. Indeed, from the time of Charlemagne, it was obligatory that every altar contain a relic.

But isn’t this relic matter a little overdone? We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.