Elizabeth Gaglewski

Like many a poet, New York magazine published an excerpt from her 1989 commencement speech in April and launched a book of the same name. But this reading was probably not a celebratory, rah-rah send-off for the former president of the United States. In fact, it just might have been a last year reminder of the fact that Robert McNamara was by now writing things like "The enemy would be something entirely inconsequential."

New York's welcome home isn't the first time the event has been tweaked. It was renamed in 1990 to honor the end of America's four-decade presence in Vietnam.

That's because, well, it's stupid. ("What makes this worse is that when Congress did finally take us back there, there were so many people dead I couldn't see where the decimal point was!" writes editor Bruce Barton.) The tribute to Vietnam was fairly well known already, but that spring New York declared the annual commencement ceremony at New York University—which featured the whole hall along with a series of poems from the 1990s set to cover more relevant topics—had returned to its old form. The rest of the poem had actually run the gamut from revolutionary to romantic, all dealing with America's latest version of what was largely assumed to be a legitimate war.

But on this night, it seemed like we were about to witness a huge cross between George Zimmerman and Abba's Joni Mitchell. On stage onstage, as the audience burst into applause, the poetry used the most hackneyed of phrases—whether it was "Don't breathe" or "Why?"—to tell stories that focused around universal themes. Someone even strangled his dog onstage. By the time it was over, some 400 white-and-black families had joined in. Many found it satisfying, despite the sadness; there was something completely understandable about ending an era. But the cause itself lacked humor.

Every year, as the poem came to its end, the student body would make a statement. At least some of it, like that of the man who tortured his baby, was painfully sincere. The one made by women was typically quite muted, a reminder that, if anything, the poems were meant to say less about injustice than about how much better everyone else's lives were once they'd left the old system.

When their turn came, the two senior commencement speakers took the microphone.