BRATTLEBORO — Amanda Gorman's performance of her poem “The Hill We Climb” stole the show during the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20. Her grace and beauty, the eloquence of her voice and gestures, and the power of her words captured an audience that had already witnessed many powerful moments that day.
It was a wondrous experience to watch her, and she quickly became a media darling, with CNN's Anderson Cooper almost at a loss for words as he interviewed her.
“Seeing how effectively and deeply Amanda Gorman has lit the hearts of America, this severely ripped torn angry America, this really shows just how medicinal poetry is,” said Toussaint St. Negritude, an afrofuturist and oro-shamanic poet from northern Vermont.
We learned about the circumstances of her childhood, about how she was raised by a single mother and how she overcame speech and auditory processing difficulties that made it difficult for her to pronounce the sound of the letter “r.”
We learned that she would like to be president in 2036, the first year in which her age would permit her to seek that post.
A wave of adulation spread across some parts of the United States, though not, presumably, within the 74 million voters who opted for Trump on Nov. 3.
Social media feeds were filled with reposts of her reading, and our request for thoughts on the Brattleboro, Vermont Facebook page elicited scores of reactions and more than 20 comments.
“Simply put, wise beyond her years,” said one post. “Deeply moving.”
“It made me cry,” said another post. “It felt like a moment of light and inspiration we all needed.”
Gorman has two books already in the works: the poetry collection The Hill We Climb and a youth project, Change Sings: A Children's Anthem, both due to be published in September.
They both shot to the top of Amazon's bestseller list this week.
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Amidst the hoopla, some elements went missing from the mainstream narrative - elements that could deepen the deserved attention focused on Gorman's moment in the D.C. sunlight.
One element was the sheer technical power of her work and the way in which it operates within traditions that are often marginalized within mainstream contemporary poetry.
We don't expect Anderson Cooper to talk about assonance and consonance, cadence and interlacing rhyme, but it is worth noting that much of the power of the moment came from the craft of the poem and its delivery.
“Her wordplay was really something - the contrasting pairs vibrating with initial or medial consonance or alliteration,” said Adam Silver, editor/publisher of CX Silver Gallery Press in Brattleboro. “And her expression paired in radiance with her voice.”
“In addition to her humanism, and wonderful engagement with the occasion,” poet Andrew McCord said, “I thought her sheer writing made vivid what poetry adds to the public square, where rhyme and cadence and oratory add to reason rather than distract from it.”
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This is an important point for us, because in the gushing over Amanda Gorham's presence as it was that day - filled with grace and articulate gesture, as well as the clarity and perfection of her oratory - it is easy, perhaps, not to recognize how deep her craft is and how much labor was required to attain it.
It is also possible for those who loved her reading not to see how deeply embedded her work is within African-American traditions that may be more familiar within the Black community than they are to most white folks.
“It was poem-as-oratory, with kinship to pulpit oratory and the great 19th-century orators as well as to Black poetry and Whitman,” wrote the poet Owen Andrews in a private message. “It was perfect for the moment, occasional in the most glorious sense. She has serious poetry slam chops in her resume and that came through, too, so people in that movement should feel validated.”
The roots of the power of Gorman's poetry lie in Black American traditions that came with slaves when they were stolen from Africa and that were sustained through centuries of oral tradition that is central to the Black and African diaspora as a way of being in the world.
The spoken-word tradition that shows up now in college slam events has roots in the oratory of the Black American church and also in the griot, the tribal storyteller who held the oral traditions of the tribe and made their speech memorable through the use of the same kinds of techniques - repetition, cadence, rhyme, and sound associations - that Gorman used so brilliantly in her poem.
Rap and hip-hop use the power of these same tools as well, and the best hip-hop lyrics display intricacies of sound, rhyme, and beat that have not really been seen within the English tradition of poetry since the Elizabethan age.
These forms are marginalized to some degree within contemporary American poetry, and they are meant for performance, not the page.
Perhaps one good thing that may come from Gorman's performance is that closer attention will be paid to the poetry that already surrounds us in these forms of spoken word and song.
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Another element that interested us is how Gorman was presented almost as a victim, with the single mother, the language difficulties, and perhaps what we all know about what it means to be born with black skin in America.
The reality is that from the standpoint of the Black community, Gorman has had a hard-earned, fortunate life: a secure home, a mother with a stable job as an educator, 12 years of private education, and a scholarship to Harvard, which plucks out some young, bright Black Americans each year to give them the benefit of one of the best college educations in the world.
This is not to detract from her brilliant talent and deep motivation. She puts her money where her mouth is as a writer and activist.
But we did think, amidst the feel-good narrative of her story, how many other narratives of the Black American experience there are, and how her own story highlights the stories of those who did not have her advantages and all of those who never had a chance from the start.
We also thought about all those folks lining up to buy her forthcoming books on Amazon, and we wondered what else is on their shelves.
Do they know who Lucy Terry Prince is, or Paul Laurence Dunbar, or Sterling Brown? Have they read more than two poems by Langston Hughes or Gwendolyn Brooks? Are they familiar with the work of Tracy K. Smith, or Jericho Brown, or Terrance Hayes?
The tradition of Black American poetry is as deep and rich as the traditions of jazz and the blues. Kevin Young's new anthology, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, makes that clear, but it was already clear in 1970, when Hughes and Arna Bontemps edited their anthology, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1970.
We wonder how many folks are going to stop and click on Young's new anthology when they click on Gorman's work.
We can't help but believe that most of those standing in line to buy Gorman's new work are not aware of the tradition and that Gorman will be one more passing fad within the star-making machine of American media.
It's a good poem, “To Climb the Hill,” and Gorman obviously has a great path before her. But there are a lot of more important Black American poets to be reading right now.
For us, this just seems like yet another feel-good cultural moment, soon to be forgotten. Maybe not. We'll see.