Obama Juvenilia

So the New York Times has published two old poems by the nineteen-year-old Barack Obama. I have to admit, despite the fact that I'm predisposed nowadays to dislike the man, that they're not at all bad. Of course, they're in free verse, with all the free verse techniques that have been done to death by a thousand adolescent poets, and yes, the longer one is about a pretty stereotypical adolescent topic, but the guy is clearly a writer of real skill.

It's true, I'm not crazy about the "amber stain" in the first poem because I'm afraid it might refer to semen and not Seagrams, which would be unnecessarily vulgar -- truly adolescent. And the apparently glaring lapse in grammar (misplaced modifier) in the second sentence of the second, otherwise perfect, short poem bothers me. But these things stand out only because the poems are so good otherwise. The young Obama is actually thinking about where to break his lines, how to combine sounds and reintroduce metaphors. This is not just the artless effusion typical of adolescent poetry.

Anyway, it's interesting -- and quite easy, actually, to imagine his now-familiar voice reading these aloud. It's also interesting to compare these poetic efforts to those of other men who sought or attained the presidency. Washington's youthful verse was pretty dreadful. Lincoln didn't become a halfway decent poet until he was well into adulthood and always tended toward doggerel (though his prose, of course, was as great as anyone's has ever been). As for more the poetry of more recent presidents, well, the less said the better.

Finally, it bears noting that even Obama-haters praised the style of his first book, Dreams of My Father. Is it possible that this guy missed his calling?