Why? Let Ted Cruz be named sole spokesman to explain it.

A half empty chamber and the press afraid to ask why lest the door be opened to a discussion of the crime that dare not be named.

It would not be a State of the Union in any event, his first year.

Why participate is a charade?

It’s been awhile since I researched the matter, but such an address requires both the convening of a joint session, and an official invitation. The president is not Ceasar, he cannot just walk into the chambers and harrangue as he pleases.

I understand that at least theoretically it matters, or should matter in the normal course of things. But in this case I don’t think it matters because I don’t think he’s at all in charge, and I think that the people who are in charge are in massive agreement on things and therefore there won’t be any disputes of the sort you mention. I think that in an emergency they would act, and we would never know. I think they have been in charge from the moment it was decided that he would be the candidate.

I’m not ordinarily into conspiracy theories, but in this case I do believe in what I just said.

I’m not sure it’s the cryptic nature of the work itself as much as it is critics using the techniques to pretend meaning exists where none actually does.

Mike

I read somewhere – don’t have time to check it out now with any thoroughness – that when an official SOTU address wasn’t given by the new president, most of the time that president addressed a joint session of Congress early on, in a speech that wasn’t called a SOTU address but stood in for one.

To take one example: Trump:

he 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, gave his first public address before a joint session of the United States Congress on Tuesday, February 28, 2017. Similar to a State of the Union Address, it was delivered before the 115th United States Congress in the Chamber of the United States House of Representatives in the United States Capitol.[6] Presiding over this joint session was the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, accompanied by Mike Pence, the Vice President of the United States in his capacity as President of the Senate.

I once wrote a book of poetry containing an appendix in the back with my comments on what was on my mind when I wrote each poem. I would tell people, “The answers are in the back!”

My idea was gently subversive. IMO people have been so bludgeoned by cryptic poetry, lyrics and literature that they’ve given up trying to encounter a work any more deeply than “That makes me think of butterflies and I feel good when I think of butterflies.”

That’s OK. There’s truth to the notion that people get what they get and that’s fine. It’s not the artist’s or the critic’s job to supervise them. But I say much is missed by settling for the subjective surface like that.

January 2017 (Trump)
January 2009 (Obama)
January 2001 (Bush the Younger)
January 1993 (Clinton)
January 1989 (Bush the Elder)
January 1981 (Reagan)
January 1973 (Nixon)
January 1956 (Eisenhower)
January 1946 (Truman)
January 1945 (Roosevelt)
January 1944 (Roosevelt)
December 1932 (Hoover)
December 1931 (Hoover)
December 1930 (Hoover)
December 1929 (Hoover)
December 1928 (Coolidge)
December 1927 (Coolidge)
December 1926 (Coolidge)
December 1925 (Coolidge)
December 1924 (Coolidge)
December 1920 (Wilson)
December 1919 (Wilson)

The addresses in January 1969 and in January 1977 were delivered by the outgoing President (Johnson and Ford, respectively).

Wilson’s in-person delivery in December 1913 was the 1st in 113 years. In 1919 and 1920, his wife and his doctor were hiding him from the vice president, the cabinet, and everyone else. Coolidge and Hoover elected to bag in-person delivery. Roosevelt revived it. The adjustment in delivery dates occurred after the 20th Amendment came into effect. The last year in which the President was inaugurated on 4 March was 1933. Roosevelt in January of 1945 was less than three months from death; his inaugural address ran for 560 words – less than one single-spaced typed page in the old elite font. Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack in September 1955 and was presumably on light duty.

I didn’t realize there were any skips. It’s not all that unusual. What is unusual is that Biden’s been hiding for a year and has been in office for seven weeks without taking questions from the most compliant media any president has ever faced (with the possible exception of the press during WWii). Other presidents who delayed taking questions were preoccupied with personnel matters (Bush II because it took so long to certify the election and Trump because he had to improvise a recruitment and vetting system); these delays were around half as long as Biden’s delay thus far.

Well, magicians don’t tell their tricks. Or appreciate others doing so. It’s understandable.

I’m with poet Lew Welch:
_________________________

Guard the Mysteries!
Constantly reveal Them!
_________________________

That doesn’t mean there aren’t tricks or it’s pointless to consider or discuss them.

Andrew Klavan explains a trait he shares with other writers I know of (I think Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger were also famous for this) in that he never answers questions about meaning regarding his stories and scripts. He believes, regardless of his intent when writing, works of art take on their own lives once created, and, like your story about your poem, the creator may not even completely understand the creation.

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”

? Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huck Finn

William Henry Harrison fits that definition. His inauguration speech was one speech too many.