A Comprehensive New Book by Famous Poet and Opening Amanda Gorman

To recite at the inauguration of a US president is to occupy the largest poetry platform in the world. When Amanda Gorman Performed on January 20, there was a collective head turn: Who he? The opening poet was 22 years old and had read a work of about 700 words. The record of the poem was optimism, the language direct, and the images simple: light, dawn, shadow, sea. The poem’s prescription of “let us leave a better country behind than we left behind” has deliberately turned into a cliché, but Gorman held the descent—partly because of context and mostly because of its presentation. It was exactly the right text for this situation.

The poem “The Hill We Climbed” drew on Gorman’s strengths: the rhythm of his syllables, the liveliness of his performance, and his ability to hide his razor blades in pillow-like lines of hope. Take the following continent:

We are heirs of a country and a time
Where’s a skinny Black girl,
descended from a slave and raised by a single mother,
Can dream of being president,
Just to find yourself reading for someone.

The knife, if you missed it, is “Finding yourself reading only one” which can be read in at least two ways. Perhaps it is an explicit acknowledgment of Gorman’s victory; He was one of six poets recited at the American inauguration and was by far the youngest. Perhaps this is a stark observation of performing a service (an honorable and prestigious service, but a service) for a politician with a troubled track record of race, among other things—something Gorman, who is intimately involved in American history, would not have. missing. This “only” is either an expression of surprise or, when read as “only”, it is an eyebrow raised in doubt. The ambiguity of the line contains another ambiguity embedded in the expression “finding yourself”. Finding yourself is an act of self-invention; Finding oneself doing something suggests the passive and aimless opposite of self-discovery.

What this all means is that if Gorman’s performance were widely perceived to exist in a single mode – an enthusiastic call to action and a meditation on unity per task – his impact on the page would have been more subtle and pervaded with devastating explosions. . “The Hill We Climb” is the latest in “Search for What We Carry,” a vast collection of influences from “Ghostbusters” to Shakespeare, Carly Simon to Plato, and influences including Anne Carson, Lucille Clifton, Abraham Lincoln, and Homer. is poetry. .