On Poetry and Practical Politics

From a New Yorker article on the poetry reading planned for the inauguration:

"Is it too late to convince the President-elect not to have a poem written for and read at his Inauguration? The event will be a great moment in the nation’s history. Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings."

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"On all these occasions, the incoming President seemed to be claiming more for his arrival than he deserved, and to be doing it by pretending that poetry means more in American life than, alas, it does."

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"Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry."

Goodness gracious--so poetry has disintegrated from a public to a private activity and now we will be denigrating things to include poetry there? I mean, how exactly do we seek to make poetry more public again except by including it at public events? Do we take things like music away from the inauguration, since it "needs no heightening"? Granted, I would be very surprised if the poet composed something very great for the inauguration. Which is all the more reason to choose a great poem from the past, as opposed to feeling absolutely compelled to compose something new (an anecdote in the article about Frost reinforces this point).