Quick: What’s this line of poetry from?:

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other's eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

It’s the opening lines from “Praise Song For The Day,” Elizabeth Alexander’s poem composed for the Obama Inauguration.

It’s been maligned, unfairly, in my opinion. It takes several careful readings - or listenings - to appreciate some poems, some songs. I didn’t like many of the poems I return to often until after several readings.

I mean, for the first couple’s first dance, Beyoncé sang Etta James’ classic “At Last,” not some goddamned original composition by John Williams or Aaron Copland.

My advice: Read more poems at White House events, but go with the tried and true. Something familiar and appropriate for the occasion.

Something patriotic and historical: Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” (“The shot heard round the world”).

You want to strike the somber note of recession? Read Poe’s “The Raven.”

When will stocks approach 10,000? Quoth the Raven: “Nevermore.”

See what I mean? Who doesn’t like “The Raven”?

So, to communicators always looking for something “innovative” or creative, a piece of advice: Execute the tried and true really well: The profile, the interview, the narrative.

When John Kennedy asked Robert Frost to read a poem at his 1961 Inaugural, Frost was so familiar with it, having read it publicly hundreds of times, he could pretend that the cold January light was so bright for his old eyes he’d try to recall it by memory.

Here it is:

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.