. . . as these words break from my lips

 

But there was one more very important thing left to do: practice the delivery of the poem. Surprisingly, the inaugural committee didn’t coach me in any way or ask me to recite the poem for them beforehand. They completely trusted me, but I knew I had to practice—and I did in a most unusual and unexpected way.

A few weeks prior to the inauguration, my brother and nephews had visited us during the holidays and made a snowman that was still “alive” in the field below our deck. One morning I woke up to find Mark on the deck setting my reading folder and a photo of President Obama atop a makeshift podium he fashioned out of a cardboard box. Read to the snowman, he insisted. You should rehearse outside. Feel what it’s going to feel like.

At first I thought it was a silly idea and that perhaps Mark was cracking under the stress. But then it occurred to me that at the inauguration I would indeed have to read into an immense open space before hundreds of thousands. It would be a good idea to envision that moment and get a sense of reading outdoors, especially in the cold. If I could handle the Maine winter with ten-degree highs, surely DC wouldn’t be a problem. One sun rose on us today . . . I began, feeling the stare of the snowman’s stony eyes—he was a tough audience! I shifted my gaze toward the sun—my sunflower—afloat over the Presidential Range (how ironic) of the White Mountains in the distance. I spoke into the wind breezing through the pine trees, aimed my words up to the blank blue sky, and heard them fall over the ground frozen with all its surprises for spring, as if standing inside the very poem I had written when the first blush of the moon’s face appeared.

My greatest fear, of course, was that I’d stumble over the words while I was at the podium. So I memorized the poem during the days before we left for Washington. Like a madman, I read it out loud in the shower and while driving into town, mumbled it to myself while jogging on the treadmill and walking down the grocery store aisles. More than merely memorizing, I was rehearsing the poem’s performance as if it were a song to be sung, internalizing it physiologically: the timing of my breaths, the cadences, the sound of each syllable, until the poem was embodied in me. Poetry was born in the oral tradition, something I have always strived to honor, believing that reciting a poem should create an experience for the listener unique from that of simply reading the poem on the page.

The delivery of “One Today” was especially important as a poem that would be heard before it would ever be read. I had about five minutes—one chance—to captivate Americans and connect with them. As such, I continued to revise the poem like a musician, reworking phrases that sounded off-key or felt too convoluted for the ear, marking dramatic pauses and underlining words like notes I wanted to hold.

After rehearsing the poem for about a week, I knew it was time to put it away, let it rest for a while, and trust it as I trusted that the snow would melt even as I watched it fall outside my window that January. Believe in it as much as I believed the bulbs Mark had planted would break through the wet earth into pink and yellow tulips come spring.