Inauguration Poet

Where's the outrage over Obama's choice of an Inauguration Poet?

Right here, actually: George Packer says it would be better to cancel Elizabeth Alexander because she was born after 1874:

[H]er poems have the qualities of most contemporary American poetry—a specificity that’s personal and unsuggestive, with moves toward the general that are self-consciously academic. They are not poems that would read well before an audience of millions.

You can evaluate Elizabeth Alexander's poetry for yourself. Not to our taste, we confess. But apparently the question of the day should be, do you detect in it traces of the Poetry Industrial Complex?