Books, Arts & Manners: Check-Out Time

Hotel Lautréamont, by John Ashbery (Knopf, 240 pp., $23)

PRESIDENT Clinton’s decision to ask the poet Maya Angelou to read at his inauguration is significant to those who care for the life of American culture. Here as elsewhere, he means to follow the example of John Kennedy, who asked the aged Robert Frost to read, and also of Jimmy Carter, who chose macho man James Dickey. Lyndon Johnson didn’t have a pet poet, but then he probably never opened a book in his adult life. Obviously the Republicans didn’t have one, first because no real poet would be caught dead at a GOP event, and then because, as we all know, Democrats are inherently more “cultural.”

JG

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James Gardner

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Hotel Lautréamont, by John Ashbery (Knopf, 240 pp., $23)

PRESIDENT Clinton’s decision to ask the poet Maya Angelou to read at his inauguration is significant to those who care for the life of American culture. Here as elsewhere, he means to follow the example of John Kennedy, who asked the aged Robert Frost to read, and also of Jimmy Carter, who chose macho man James Dickey. Lyndon Johnson didn’t have a pet poet, but then he probably never opened a book in his adult life. Obviously the Republicans didn’t have one, first because no real poet would be caught dead at a GOP event, and then because, as we all know, Democrats are inherently more “cultural.”