The striking-looking young woman's performance and sheer presence left me temporarily so light-headed that my mind (normally a sturdy, responsible, grounded thing made of sensible intellectual Kevlar) became a light and frivolous wedding balloon.

Beguiled by Ms Gorman it, my mind, got away from me, and, like a tipsy bridesmaid's helium-filled wedding balloon slipping out of her champagne-numbed grasp, it floated up, up and away and off across suburbia.

Following it, I eventually caught up with it. "I don't know what came over me," it kept apologetically muttering as I drove it home.

But of course all good people desperately hoping for hope-stoking things to begin to happen in the unhappy USA (Ms Gorman's poem is meant to be a hope-stoking thing and her performance of it was optimism-packed) are to be forgiven for being carried away by the occasion.

As it happens your columnist, a poetry lover and a student of poetry, his better mind retrieved now, can see that the poem itself is dreadful. While my mind was a party balloon that wasn't obvious at all although even now, my faculties restored, I'm not sure that it matters all that much.

But far more astute critics than me have winced at the poem's badness. Melanie McDonagh in The Spectator thought Amanda Gorman was let down by a bad poem.

In The American Conservative a curmudgeonly but discerning Malcolm Salovaara seethes "Stop pretending the inauguration poem was any good" and goes into great detail about the poem's flaws.

"It is nothing less than an embarrassment to our country. A caricature of a parody, unworthy of the name of poetry ..." he rasps.

"But what made it so bad?" he marvels.

"First of all, its emptiness. Its platitudes. The fact that, if presented in prose form and unburdened of its opportunistic rhymes, it might be mistaken for a New York Times op-ed. There appears to be a belief among slam poets that this quasi-rap, pseudo-freestyle, lilting rhythm ... is an acceptable substitute for substance."

Yes, I agree with all that.

And yet perhaps when we come to a performed poem for a performance occasion and at an American time like this it won't do to examine the poem through an aesthete's cold, scholarly microscope.

Perhaps Ms Gorman's performance and the poem performed should be judged more as we might judge a song written and performed by Bob Dylan (Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature - deservedly in my view - even though he may be the world's Worst Famous Poet In English) because poems sung as serious songs can achieve their effectiveness in ways they never can when just lisped at wussy poetry readings.

Ms Gorman's performance initially filled my mind with helium not only for the reasons I've just so poetically described but also because she is a poet laureate. I have long been calling for Australia to sprout poets laureate in imitation of the way they spout so profusely in the USA and the UK.

In the USA every state and almost every adult city has a poet laureate, almost always someone who is admirably writing-accomplished, modestly remunerated by the local powers-that-be.

That Australia doesn't have poets laureate seems a disappointment but that this smart, sensitive, dreaming federal capital city doesn't have them seems a tragedy. How shameful that this is never a priority of ACT governments.

Does a city that doesn't have poets laureate even deserve to be called a city? I think poets laureate are as essential to a real city as an NRL football team, a symphony orchestra, a light rail network, a plethora of great galleries and all the other things (including the scandal and the vice, I love it!) that give a real city its swagger, its heft, its unique voice.

The best poets laureate are never the puppets of the bodies that hire them, and no government worth its salt ever expects its poets to be toadying servants of their employer.

But although we must not tell our Canberra poets laureate (when we get them) what to write about we might, politely, invite them to consider certain things. So for example he or she might think the official opening of the wondrous new promenade to be built at West Basin, at last enabling Lake Burley Griffin and the City to meet and be friends and to frolic together, worthy of a celebratory ode.

In recent weeks my daily drive across Commonwealth Avenue Bridge towards the CBD has featured the heart-gladdening spectacle of seeing a hitherto watery waste of space being filled in with the stony rubble (brought in by giant trucks) upon which the grand 500 metre promenade will be built.

Seeing every day, the reclaimed space reaching further and further out from the shore, is a buoying experience, rather like seeing a hitherto bleak swathe of ugly, useless desert reclaimed for the growing of essential green and nutritious crops.

What joy the completed promenade will give to Canberrans! Families will frolic there (with their exuberant dogs), lovers will rendezvous there, poets, seeking (like Wordsworth) lakeside inspiration will walk there.

We will see those poets there. One moment they will be clutching their foreheads in melancholy despair, the next moment breaking into skips of existential bliss, for true poets (is Amanda Gorman one of them? I'm not sure) are subject to these extremes of emotion.