Praise Song for Blasé

It is not simply that Elizabeth Alexander is a terrible poet, nor even that occasional verse tends to be banal, but rather that Elizabeth Alexander's innauguration poem is the worst poem ever written, constructed with sufficient skill to avoid outright self-parody, too long and prosaic in tone to become doggerel, too plain to attain unintentional hilarity, too contemporary-precious to achieve the vital ridiculousness available to serial failed journal submitters and literary outsiders. It is, as we say in the medium of movies, so bad that you couldn't even laugh at it. It achieves a magisterial level of mediocrity, so utterly plain and forgettable that it transcends mockery.