Amanda Gorman: Poetry and the Public Sphere

Amanda Gorman:

random reflections on poetry and the public sphere

This time our extra special guest writer and American Studies creator Hans Bak shares his thoughts on Amanda Gorman’s iconic spoken word performance during president Joe Biden’s inauguration. A poem, an act of activism, individualism, and collectivism all at once, her poem left a mark one cannot deny.

Hans Bak

The jubilant reception of Amanda Gorman’s performance of “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration, resonating beyond the borders of the US, was also a pointed reminder – reinforced by the recent controversy in the Netherlands about the choice of a suitable translator – that the days when poetry could be composed and consumed as autonomous art dissociated from its personal, political or public context (“a poem should not mean but be”) have long receded into the once-hallowed New Critical past. A flood of public praise followed Gorman’s performance – a chorus led, not coincidentally, by Michelle Obama, senator Stacey Abrams, Oprah Winfrey, Bernice King (daughter of) and Hilary Clinton. Within a day Gorman reputedly had two million followers on Instagram. Meet the poet as influencer, as projected 2036 presidential candidate, as pop idol (the first poet to perform at the Super Bowl), as fashion icon (dressed in a spectacular Prada-design outfit, she was contracted by IMG, one of the world’s leading modelling agencies), as blockbuster (two volumes announced for September are pre-publication bestsellers) – the interweaving of art and commercial branding, of poetry and the public sphere was seldom as self-evident.

Generically, “inauguration poetry” is a mode of “occasional” poetry, commissioned – Gorman was “invited” to write her poem by Dr. Jill Biden in late December – and by definition in the service of a public cause: the polar opposite of l’art pour l’art or “confessional” poetry. Inauguration poetry celebrates public themes – the power and promise of the nation, the hopeful affirmation of American democracy (always “unfinished”) – with emotional and rhetorical effectiveness that serves to boost the incoming President’s political hopes. It lives by grace of the moment and the quality of the performance, and seldom outlives the public occasion that inspired it. Time-bound, it rarely makes it into anthologies of American literature, and, in the United States, has a very short history: only five “inauguration poets” have preceded Gorman, all of them commissioned to read for Democratic presidents (Kennedy, Clinton, Obama and Biden), the best among them Robert Frost (1961), Maya Angelou (1993) and Elizabeth Alexander (2009). Before Gorman, with the possible exception of Angelou, the inauguration poem was hardly a memorable moment in the ceremony, perfunctory rather than spectacular.

A greater contrast is hardly imaginable than that between the first and the latest inauguration poet. In 1961, a young, dynamic, arts-minded Kennedy invited an aged Robert Frost to read at his inauguration. Frost, 87, was at the end of a long, distinguished career as America’s best-known poet, and stood as the popular incarnation of a (mostly white male) mainstream literary establishment. He had composed a (rather dreadful) new poem, “Dedication,” but slanting sunlight made him bungle the reading and Frost resorted to declaiming, from memory, an older poem “The Gift Outright.” In 2021 an aging white male President listened to a vibrant, swinging, innovative performance by a young black woman, who effectively, and subversively, brought the genre of “spoken word” poetry from the periphery of poetry slams and political activism to the center court of US politics. Rooted in African-American oral traditions and the social and racial protest of the 1960s, and closely affiliated with the rap and hip-hop musical modes of commercialized street culture, Gorman’s spoken-word performance did what an inauguration poem by the National Youth Poet Laureate was expected to do – “The Hill We Climb” echoed effectively with the themes of Biden’s address: the grief over massive loss (400,000 Covid-19 deaths), the systemic racism and injustice, the necessity for healing, reconciliation and unity after an unprecedented attack-from-within on American democracy. But delivered by a young black woman at the august platform of American democratic politics, it resonated as a symbolic moment of emancipation, visibility and recognition for an underprivileged and unacknowledged “America” – and the promise of a “new dawn.”

Gorman’s impressive performance moved hearts and minds: resolute, self-assured, eloquent and emphatic, it was perfectly timed, with a fabulous feeling for rhythm and rhyme. Playful and dramatic, she made words dance, and underscored her declamation with graceful body language and refined, almost oriental gestures. Decked out in spectacular fashion – bright-yellow Prada coat, red-satin headband over braided hair – she manifested her claim to the self-evident beauty of “natural” African-American hair and clothing that we know from Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Amerikanah).

Another subtext of her performance – as of the Biden inauguration – was the visibility of disability as an integral part of American diversity. Like Biden, Gorman grew up as a “special needs” kid, hampered by a speech impediment which into young adulthood gave her difficulty pronouncing a liquid “r”. Poetry exercises – as well as reciting “Aaron Burr” from the musical Hamilton – proved therapeutic, enabling her to overcome her handicap. A historic first, the Pledge of Allegiance was delivered in both spoken and sign language by Andrea Hall, the first black woman to become a fire-fighter captain in South Fulton, Georgia (a crucial swing state).

Beyond the personal, “The Hill We Climb” proposed a path to healing and hope for a scarred and torn nation that only days before had “seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.” Poem and inauguration celebrated the nation’s recovery of faith in American political democracy and the US judicial system, but – in the wake of Trump’s divisive, demagogic, populist tweets – also resonated with a plea for a language of integrity, compassion, decency and truth. As Mark Twain already knew, the corruption of language precedes the corruption of morality. As Gorman told Michelle Obama in a February 2020 interview for Time: “We have seen the ways in which language has been violated and used to dehumanize. How can I reclaim English so we can see it as a source of hope, purification and consciousness?”

On January 20 poem and inauguration resonated with the language of biblical rhetoric and American political scripture – American Studies students will have picked up the echoes of the Constitution, the Pilgrim Fathers (Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill”), the Founding Fathers, and famous orators from Frederick Douglass to Abraham Lincoln, from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama. More pertinently, Gorman interwove such public echoes with personal resonances crediting her “honorary ancestors.” As a poet Gorman is aware of standing in a long African-American tradition of, in particular, women poets – from Phyllis Wheatley to Zora Neale Hurston, from Gwendolyn Brooks (“A Street in Bronzeville” echoes in Gorman’s magnificent “bronze-pounded chest”) to Maya Angelou (she wore a ring symbolizing a caged bird). “I would be nowhere,” she tweeted to Oprah Winfrey, “without the women whose footsteps I dance in.”

A close reading of the poem’s multi-layered language might illuminate where Gorman’s verse is searingly beautiful and touchingly wise, where sentimentally cheap or wilfully contrived, where it skirts the cliffs of cliché or self-indulgently relies on assonance and alliteration.

current aFFairS But a formalist focus on intrinsic literary merit would miss the point that performance poetry like “The Hill We Climb” needs to be seen and heard rather than read. More pertinent is to recognize the dramatic brilliance of its delivery and its rootedness in popular cultural genres like rap, hiphop, dance and music (from Woody Guthrie to Hamilton).

For Gorman poetry and public activism are indissolubly connected. In a 2018 TED-interview, she recited the mantra with which she starts her every performance: “I am the daughter of Black writers, we are descended from freedom fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.” Poetry for her is personal and public and political: “Using your voice is a political choice.” From Emma Lazarus to the protest slogans of Black Lives Matter, “poetry is actually at the center of our most political questions about what it means to be a democracy” and hence serves the struggle for change and justice. “The Hill We Climb” is unmistakably rooted in the specifics of the black experience – “A skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one” – but also aims to transcend it: poetry is not “the language of barriers” but “the language of bridges.” The “we” in the poem’s title is all of us. Gorman may perform her poetry-cum-political-activism with a disarming charm that makes her the darling of the cultural elite (watch her March 20, 2020 performance before the august audience of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), but she also aims to lift poetry out of this elitist domain by, as she told Michelle Obama, “highlighting and celebrating poets who reflect humanity in all of its diverse colors and breadth.”

Such convictions ring with special poignancy in the light of the recent controversy over Gorman’s choice of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld as her Dutch translator, and Rijneveld’s subsequent withdrawal after curator and activist Janice Deul objected that the choice for white non-binary Rijneveld, despite their demonstrable affinity with Gorman’s sensibility and inclusivist vision, and despite their internationally recognized artistic credentials, inexcusably and painfully bypassed the availability of a suitable “spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black.” Students of American literature will have heard the echoes of discussions about literary merit versus representation and the legitimacy (or not) of cultural appropriation that governed the American canon and culture wars of the 1990s (and earlier – think of the response of African-American readers and critics to William Styron’s appropriation of a black man’s voice in his 1967 Confessions of Nat Turner). Though a good novelist or poet is not necessarily also a good translator, both Rijneveld and Gorman share a conviction that art lives by provocation, by stimulation, by pushing people out of their comfort zones – and by bridging barriers that divide and polarize rather than unite, heal and reconcile. Like Martin Luther King, who dreamt of a time when both black and white children would be judged “not by the color of their skin but the content of their character,” Gorman testifies the power of poetry is our best hope for human empathy and compassion:

That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried. […] For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.

In the same spirit, Rijneveld’s poem “Everything Inhabitable,” written in response to the controversy, and published simultaneously in four languages, counters Deul’s objections by reaffirming the power of art to cross the “gap” of difference through human empathy, against all odds, and make another person’s sensibility “inhabitable.” As rendered effectively by her – very competent – translator Michele Hutchinson:

[…] the point is to be able to put yourself /

in another’s shoes, to see the sea of sorrow behind another

person’s eyes, the rampant wrath of all wraths, you

want to say that maybe you don’t understand everything,

that of course you don’t always hit the right chord, but that

you do feel it, yes, you feel it, even if the difference is a gap.