Why Yahoo! News commissioned inaugural poems for Barack Obama (Kevin Young)

We commissioned work from two Pulitzer Prize winners, James Tate and Paul Muldoon; the Japanese-American superstar Brenda Shaughnessy, whose latest book was called “monumental” by The New Yorker; and Kevin Young, whose recent book “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness” was just nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. For good measure—and yes for a little glamour—we included James Franco, the movie star, who has a book of poetry forthcoming from Graywolf Press.