Reflections on “The Hill We Climb”
Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Poem
On January 20, 2021, watching — like everybody — the momentous event of the US Presidential inauguration, I hadn’t looked into details about the inaugural poem’s author — although I’d heard there would be a poem. When 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman stepped into view and began to speak, this was the first I’d heard or read from her work. The poem she recited is entitled “The Hill We Climb.” Of course a Presidential inauguration is a very tour-de-force situation & she rose to the occasion. For this sort of poetry, hearing is far better than merely reading on the page. That might be somewhat a truism for poetry in general, yet it holds deeper layers of truth in an event of this nature: where the recited poem — in a lone human voice — at once celebrates, reflects on & participates in a historical moment. It’s also so due to the character of Ms. Gorman’s poem.
One thing I especially like is how fully her writing integrates the qualities & strengths & techniques of rap / hip-hop / spoken word traditions with a well-read / wide-viewed / keen literary sensibility. It was (so to speak) rap for a politically thoughtful intelligentsia: hip-hop’s verbal stylings with a spiritual vision & a humanitarian core.
The very nature & special excellence of this contemporary stream of writing is that it’s primarily a performative form. The poised poet’s performance was superb: channeling & articulating the hopes & needs of the moment; verbally imagining a way through the morass; sketching for us a morality tale whose lesson reads: keep your appointment with destiny, at this turning-point hinge in collective history.
Such occasional poetry indeed meets a need: what we know & experience requires utterance in lucid language for it to become fully “real” in our shared culture, or even (to a degree) to realize it in our personal awareness. If the Presidential address is the main course of the occasion, if the inaugural poem is arguably a flavorful dessert — yet the latter complements the former & can serve to codify & encapsulate the day’s gestalt in personal & cultural memory. Thinking about this pulls me back into the memory of Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” (recited January 20, 1993, for President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration: the only inauguration & inaugural poem recitation I’ve managed to catch in person). I recall lounging on the sprawling, sunny lawn of the Capital Mall, taking in those resonant words that began “A Rock, A River, A Tree” (words of a senior poet who’d already seen & written much — delivered in a slower, more contemplative cadence, a perhaps less overtly urgent / less emergency-born cry of the soul) that pensively embodied the values & ideals of that ostensibly not-so-distant time. But it’s a vanished moment in a gone world that feels so complexly far from today’s nascent weltenshauuang in the wake of the Trumpian typhoon. Today’s emerging meaning requires today’s fresh summation; the tally of yesteryear cannot suffice. In the words of an Urdu poet: “That alone I find meaningful: what’s said as of now.”
Ms. Gorman’s arresting recitation perhaps inevitably made me thoughtful about how rhyming is employed so differently in this tradition than in the sonorous (or, be as it may, plodding) metrical formalism of olden English poesy (as it were). Here, rhyming is frequently as much internal rhyme as end-rhyme, it’s more surprise-rhyme than a measured sequence of classical pirouettes; less regulated, more discovered-at-roadside-on-a-road-trip-to-somewhere (intentionally cutting against the grain of ticky-tacky boxes): it fetches up improv-expressionist arabesque blossoms / it bestrews rococo free-form explosions of redolent language:
When day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry, a sea we must wade.
We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken,
but simply unfinished.
Alliteration (we’ve braved the belly of the beast … / and the norms and notions … / Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation) appears almost as frequently as does the ornament of rhyming. One is put in mind of English sagas of seven centuries ago (as in the Arthurian Sir Gawain & the Green Knight) when alliteration was the norm & a formal requisite in every line.
Ms. Gorman’s lines aren’t short, but the voice runs through their angel-hair pasta with a rhythmic pulse at an insistent pace; they’re punctuated by repetition & by repeated surprises of word-play. (The quoted passage starts with two couplets, then pulls the rhyme inward in the fifth line, followed by another couplet; then follows an internal slant-rhyme: witnessed / unfinished. Throughout, metrical uniformity is studiously avoided.) The peculiar salvo of the opening line offers a counterintuitive paradox: When day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? Clearly, although day has come, we utterly fail to recognize it; for we are absorbed in our own preoccupations, the legacy of our troubled or traumatic past. The never-ending shade is [t]he loss we carry, which is a sea we must wade. This shade, this ocean of darkness, is an overwhelming sense of loss we bear within, which we must wade through to get through. Then comes an enigmatic image: We’ve braved the belly of the beast. One thinks of Jonah in the belly of the whale; yet the Urban Dictionary clues me in: to be buried in the belly of the beast in street argot denotes being locked up in jail. The beast being the justice system. Those who’ve braved it are inured to its quiet, which isn’t always peace. With her nuanced distinction between what “just” is & justice, we pause to savor the spontaneous combustion of the poet’s mot juste.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. (The poet’s monologue stage-directs a turn in the plotline.) And what we’ve weathered and witnessed? — We’ve witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but [is] simply (like the slant-rhyme) unfinished. This locates our place in the process. What is that place? Mid-process. As always with a Presidential inauguration poem, the state of the nation is its ultimate subject. The young doctor’s diagnosis? Unfinished. Its finishing must be our collective sequel.
(A personal footnote: This business of “unfinished” business reminds how my mother took me to hear the dynamic civil rights activist Angela Davis at Pasadena City College in the mid-1960s. I might’ve been 11 years old. All I really remember is Professor Davis writing on the blackboard & talking about TCB: “taking care of business.” There’s a direct through-line from Prof. Davis’ TCB to Rep. John Lewis’ “good trouble.”) We still have a hill to climb, as an equitable society; we’re still climbing it. The poet proceeds:
. . . We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
The sowing of division — the impulse toward tribal dualism — whether cultivated algorithmically or broadcast oratorically: this fatal tendency is arguably the largest imponderable anthropological quandary that has emerged to plague us in America & globally in the past two decades. Social media, with all of its boons, carries this occult poison. The poet names the problem (the sowing of division) & seeks to shoulder us past it through an act of intense affirmation, a statement of collective & growing dedication.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
When the poet writes, We seek harm to none and harmony for all, the conceit half-suggests an etymological paradox. Google tells me the English harm is of Germanic origin (linked to the German harm and the Old Norse harmr: grief, sorrow); whereas harmony traces back through Old French to the Latin harmonia (joining, concord) and the Greek harmos (joint). When fancifully linking the two words in telling juxtaposition, the poet (using her incantatory pen) underlines the universal idea that harmony defuses & ameliorates harm. It’s an idea as old as Gautama Buddha’s formulation:
Hatred is, indeed, never appeased by hatred in this world.
It is appeased only by loving-kindness. This is an ancient law.
When the poet writes, Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: / That even as we grieved, we grew, the first line seems to recollect Gautama Buddha’s earth-touching gesture. That gesture’s significance in Buddhist mythology & iconography was parsed in this way by W.S. Merwin:
The Buddha reaches down, and with his finger, touches the earth. He says, “The earth is my witness.” He said, “Mara, you are not the earth. The earth is right here beneath my finger,” and the earth is what we’re talking about. Accepting the earth, not owning the earth, not possessing the earth, but the earth just as it is, abused and exploited and despised and rejected and plowed and mined and shat on and everything else, you know. It’s still the earth . . . we owe everything to it.
Concerning Ms. Gorman’s next line, That even as we grieved, we grew, Dr. Justin Frank has noted how this formulation linking grieving with growth accords with the singular national memorial event President Joe Biden and his cohorts lodged in our brains & sensibilities & in the collective memory on Inauguration Eve. This one line contains multitudes.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. / That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare. What might it mean that the making of bridges (the establishment of human connections) is “the promise to glade”? As noun, a glade is an open stretch amid a forest that gleams with sunlight. In the poet’s effervescent invention of a verb “to glade”, the promise is of opening, of making green & sunny. Such a glading, such a green opening, is our aspiration, i.e., the hill we climb. By building bridges rather than wielding knives, we open a space to move forward, a space to be filled with light. This glading may also suggest, by synecdoche, the entirety of the Green New Deal (& kindred efforts: the bridge-building works project of the new century)— which is to repair the world (Tikkun olam in Hebrew): an eternal promise or obligation Ms. Gorman recognizes or posits at our nation’s heart: because being American is more than a pride we inherit./ It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. Our fraught past (burdening our troubled present) is what we must step into with the intention to rectify it, to make it right — to repair it. Acknowledgement of historical harm is how we begin the healing.
The poem’s rhythms are shifting / fluid / staccato / driven, and often favor a dactylic canter; they’re beautifully repetitive & changing; with full-rhyme / slant-rhyme / no-rhyme / feminine rhyme, anything goes; the voice runs along, then delivers a jab, then a punch, then a caress in duress, with emphasis on a lot said in a few added syllables, followed by more, and still yet more, with the fleetness of a freshet, the urgency of a cascade: the rhymey rumination finessing telegraphic summation while zeroing in on & narrating core meanings — through surfeit / overdrive / overload, approaching long form / long line / poetic exuberance that flows from Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg, cured with a dash of bebop. Rap formalism remains most attentive to the compactness of short phrases delivered in relentless clusters, with conceits of surprise-rhymes lacing strands of sinuous syllables. The language is energetic, feisty, unpredictable, emphatic: at times it strains against grammar & usage or invents its own. It stocks a battery, lades an arsenal, packs a wallop, it sparks & flashes & sparkles. Here, in a quick-witted / deep-thinking practitioner such as this Youth Poet Laureate, all pizzazz & sparkle unfolds in service to a strong intuition of the fiery light that it reflects.
Where 19th century Whitman achieved a new collective American consciousness through removing & eschewing the formality of rhyme & meter, this 21st century Gorman poem (& the contemporary tradition it embodies) takes a different tack (& achieves a different take) on a yet-again-new collective consciousness through pulling the color & melody of rhyme back into the language, in a categorically / stylistically / radically dissimilar way (dissimilar from old-timer foursquare rhymers against whom Whitman’s prose-poems so volubly rebelled). I feel there should be a confectionary comparison for the difference in approach to rhyming. Both employ the sucre / the sukham / the sweetness of rhyme — but organized via a different method (or a different madness). If only I knew the varieties of extreme candy inventions better, I could probably cite an apt confectioners’ simile.
Of course rhyme is one device; cadence, assonance, alliteration, allusion, image, symbol, metaphor & story are others in Gorman’s copious, spitfire arsenal. The devices are deployed extravagantly & playfully — while out of this play emerges the poet’s plaint, out of a cloud of pell-mell dazzlement peeks a sharp dagger of truth. She pleads for adamant courage: she pleads that we dare to become a new humanity.
The poet crafts her quasi-spontaneous trills with a strong & knowing hand, a jeweler who delights in her devices — but she has something to say. She’s not idly decorating a rhetorical cake; she’s decorously coaxing us to step out of the shadows of inertia & pessimism, to step aside when the new dawn (the spirit of the future) appears: we must submit & follow & permit our natures to be transformed. Not spinning a meringue of bluster or pleasantry, the poet (our Greek chorus) describes what lies ahead, what our destiny requires:
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.
With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the golden hills of the west.
We will rise from the wind-swept north-east where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked south.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.
In every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country,
our people, diverse and beautiful, will emerge, battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
The new dawn blooms — its light not extrinsic, but rather an inner light that we’d hidden under the bushel of our ego-minds / pessimism / shellshock / inertia. The new dawn blooms — emerging out of ourselves — as we free it. / If only we’re brave enough to see it — and be it.
I didn’t instantly recognize this allusion when taking in Ms. Gorman’s recitation on January 20th. But reading the above passage a few days later, the repeated phrase “We will rise” rang a bell & jumped out at me — for it directly echoes (& courteously hat-tips) a repeating phrase threaded through Ms. Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” (1978). As an African-American woman offering a US Presidential Inaugural Poem, Maya Angelou (1928–2014) is of course an ancestral predecessor to Amanda Gorman (born 1998). The late poet’s 20th century words are worth remembering:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise. . .Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise. . .You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise. . .Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
Portions of the January 20th Inauguration poem were written subsequent to the January 6th Capitol insurrection riot. The bard alludes to that harrowing event in her narrative, when she chants:
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
This effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith, we trust,
for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared it at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour,
but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So while once we asked, “How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?” now we assert, “How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?”
The poet continues:
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be:
A country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change, our children’s birthright.
In poetry, one may say anything; for poetry — a construct of language — exists within its own realm of imagination. But what is the relationship between imagination & reality? There’s is constant traffic between these parallel realms! In poetry, one may assert that a responsible credo will prevail against lawless chaos. In poetry, one may affirm that compassion will transform autocratic impulses. God-willing, saying it is a first step toward realizing it. Language can draw a blueprint for lofty possibilities.
A passage from Ms. Gorman’s Wikipedia entry underlines the seriousness of the gifted writer’s aspirations & ambitions — which are literary as well as extra-literary:
In 2017, Gorman said she wants to run for president in 2036, and she has subsequently often repeated this hope. After she read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for this 2036 aspiration.
The poet references this dream autobiographically in the poem, with an immediate & wakeful twist:
We, the successors of a country and a time where 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.
We’ve much to look forward to, friends, in Joe Biden’s promising Presidency in concert with Kamala Harris’ Vice-Presidency, following their weirdly beleaguered triumph over a vile, dystopian, atavistic nemesis — in the wake of the latter’s one-term, two-impeachment, pandemic-riven, world-embarrassment, nightmarish White House tenure. “We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover,” Ms. Gorman assures us.
We also can look forward to new voices from a new generation, schooled in the lessons of our American past & ready to clear a way for the new dawn. Maya Angelou’s “a daybreak that’s wondrously clear” anticipates Amanda Gorman’s “new dawn [that] blooms as we free it.” Ms. Gorman’s ringing voice sounds brightly to us from out of that near-future realm of light.
SUPPLEMENT — notes / quotes / links:
The Hill We Climb: the Amanda Gorman poem that stole the inauguration show (Amanda Gorman, The Guardian — the full poem in text & video)
The Twenty-Two-Year-Old Poet Who Lit Up the Stage at the Biden Inauguration (The New Yorker — full video with text in subtitles)
Amanda Gorman reads poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at inauguration (Amy B. Wang and Stephanie Merry, Washington Post)
‘Not Broken But Simply Unfinished’: Poet Amanda Gorman Calls For A Better America (Camila Domonoske, NPR)
‘An inspiration to us all’: Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem stirs hope and awe (Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian)
Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman Delivers ‘The Hill We Climb’ (Now This tweet with 5 min 35 sec video)
Amanda Gorman: Inauguration poet calls for ‘unity and togetherness’ (Will Gompertz, BBC)
What made Amanda Gorman’s poem so much better than other inaugural verse (Seth Perlow, Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2021) — Perlow writes:
Gorman drew upon the contemporary style of spoken-word poetry, which emphasizes the rhythms and rhymes of the poet’s voice as she speaks. Spoken-word poets treat poems as performances, rather than texts for silent contemplation. Many people learn in school to read poems like regular prose, without pausing at line breaks or stressing the rhymes, but spoken-word poets do the opposite, foregrounding the rhythmical, musical qualities of language. This approach works perfectly for an inauguration: It makes a poem an event in itself, something we experience together. . .
After [Robert] Frost [in 1961], no poet read at a presidential inauguration until 32 years later, when Maya Angelou recited “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s first swearing-in. Angelou is the only inaugural poet whose delivery comes near to Gorman’s. She sounded careful and deliberate at first, with a tone of declamation that underscored the size of her audience, the 800,000 present in person and the almost 30 million watching at home. But as Angelou gained confidence and momentum, she placed more emphasis upon the galloping rhythms of her words: “Here, on the pulse of this new day / You may have the grace to look up and out / And into your sister’s eyes, and into / Your brother’s face, your country / And say simply / Very simply / With hope — / Good morning.” (In a possible nod to Angelou’s theme of morning, Gorman’s poem begins, “When day comes.”)
Since Angelou, every inauguration of a Democratic president (and no inauguration of a Republican) has included a poetry reading. . .
The spoken-word performance style draws upon multiple African American traditions, including hip hop and church oratory. Spoken-word poetry is also quite popular among the young people whom one might expect a youth poet laureate to reach. My students sometimes send me links to spoken-word videos on YouTube or Tik Tok, asking how these relate to the more conventional poets I usually study and teach. I am not always sure how to answer, but Gorman’s performance suggests that spoken-word techniques can help to increase poetry’s stature and spread its joy to broader audiences.
It is a truism among academics that poetry is foremost an art of the spoken word, but we rarely live up to this ideal. Yes, the inaugural poems by Angelou, Alexander and the rest exhibit beautiful aural effects. But so many of our encounters with poetry are silent and solitary. We read the assigned poems in private. If we like them, perhaps we bristle as a fellow sophomore botches the recitation in class. This buttoned-up style has dampened every inaugural poetry reading — until now. With her exceptional performance, Gorman reminds us how poetry, delivered well, can enrich public life.
Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural Poem is a Stunning Vision of Democracy (Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, Jan. 21, 2021) — Gessen writes:
Among the firsts in Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” is the concept of democracy that it assumed. Democracy, according to the twenty-two-year-old poet, is an aspiration — a thing of the future. . . Both times the poem raises “democracy,” Gorman pairs the word with “delay,” which tells us that democracy is a thing expected, anticipated — not a thing that we have built, or possessed, but a dream. This is not the way that politicians or even political theorists usually use the word “democracy,” but it is one way that philosophers have used it. Jacques Derrida, the French deconstructionist, used the term “democracy to come.” Democracy, he wrote, was always forged and threatened by contradictory forces and thus is always “deferred,” always out of reach even in societies that adopt democracy as their governing principle.
Poet Amanda Gorman to read at Biden’s inauguration (PBS News Hour, Jan. 15, 2021):
Gorman says she was contacted late last month by the Biden inaugural committee. She has known numerous public figures, including former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former first lady Michelle Obama, but says she will be meeting the Bidens for the first time. The Bidens, apparently, have been aware of her: Gorman says the inaugural officials told her she had been recommended by the incoming first lady, Jill Biden.
She is calling her inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb” while otherwise declining to preview any lines. Gorman says she was not given specific instructions on what to write, but was encouraged to emphasize unity and hope over “denigrating anyone” or declaring “ding, dong, the witch is dead” over the departure of President Donald Trump.
The siege last week of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the election was a challenge for keeping a positive tone, but also an inspiration. Gorman says she has been given 5 minutes to read, and before what she described during an interview as “the Confederate insurrection” of Jan. 6 she had only written about 3 1/2 minutes worth.
The final length runs to about 6 minutes.
“That day gave me a second wave of energy to finish the poem,” says Gorman, adding that she will not refer directly to Jan. 6, but will “touch” upon it. She said last week’s events did not upend the poem she had been working on because they didn’t surprise her.
“The poem isn’t blind,” she says. “It isn’t turning your back to the evidence of discord and division.”
Lesson of the Day: Amanda Gorman and ‘The Hill We Climb’ (New York Times — “In this lesson, students learn about the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history and consider her work as part of a tradition of occasional poetry.”)
A Full Transcript of Amanda Gorman’s Breathtaking Inauguration Poem (The Oprah Magazine) [caveat: this “transcript” has textual errors, based on which initially I went to some length to interpret phrases “our shade of flame” and “the new dawn balloons” and “we’ve graved the belly of the beast”. None of these phrases were actually written by the poet! I leave this note as a curiosity & a caution; for correct text of the poem, please see Ms. Gorman’s own version published in The Guardian, link above] [Some of Melanie McDonagh’s hatchet-job nit-picks (in The Spectator) were similarly caused by her use of an inaccurate version of the text, although others may be attributed to the critic’s rigidity or obtuseness or lack of respect for or fluency in methods & conventions of the oral traditions within which Ms. Gorman’s poem locates itself; Ari Melber (on MSNBC) is one of the few mainstream pundits to habitually cite hip-hop lyrics with canny appreciation; but the general literate world is somewhat slow to catch up (with a bit of help flowing in from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton).]
Amanda Gorman and other inaugural poets: Their poems in books (Zoe Mallin, NBC News) [“The 22-year-old is only the sixth poet in U.S. history to read their work at a presidential inauguration, according to Jen Benka, executive director of the Academy of American Poets. As it stands, just four American presidents have included a poetry reading at their inaugurations: Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, Kennedy being the first to ask a poet to read at a presidential inauguration in the U.S. Benka was excited that President Biden became one of the few presidents to continue the tradition in 2021. . . Since Gorman’s books have grown in popularity overnight, we took a look at the other inaugural poets to have read for presidents, alongside the poetry books including those poems.”]
The Six Presidential Inaugural Poems in US History:
- Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” (1961) for President John F. Kennedy
- Maya Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993) for President William J. Clinton
- Miller Williams, “The Ways We Touch” (1997) for President William J. Clinton
- Elizabeth Alexander, “Praise Song For The New Day” (2009) for President Barack H. Obama
- Richard Blanco, “One Today” (2013) for President Barack H. Obama
- Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” (2021) for President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Of the six poets who’ve offered Presidential Inaugural Poems to date, three of them (Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander & now Amanda Gorman) have been African-American women.
At the Inauguration, Amanda Gorman Wove History and the Future Into a Stirring Melody (Dwight Garner, New York Times, Jan. 21, 2021):
. . . After four years during which language was debased — when it meant anything at all — Gorman offered a fortifying tablespoon of American plain-spokenness. She offered lucidity and euphony. Her hand motions were expressive, as if she were conducting an orchestra of one.
If her performance made you vaguely feel that you’d had a blood transfusion, it was perhaps because you could sense the beginning of a remade connection in America between cultural and political life. A sleeping limb was tingling back into action.
If the poet seemed like a character from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” sprung to life, well, Gorman, who studied sociology at Harvard, is a member of Generation Hamilton. She has said she listened to the soundtrack while preparing to write her poem, and she specifically referenced the musical in it.
In the poem, she writes: “For while we have our eyes on the future / history has its eyes on us.” This echoes “History Has Its Eyes on You,” sung in “Hamilton” by George Washington.
@CNN Tweet (Jan. 22, 2021) (with link to video clip of interview with the poet by Anderson Cooper [8-min 15-sec]):
“I felt like that was the type of poem I needed to write, and it was the type of poem that the country and the world needed to hear.” — Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first-ever youth poet laureate, on how the US Capitol attack influenced her “message of hope and unity and healing.”
Amanda Gorman, Poet, Gets Modeling Agent and a Stage at the Super Bowl (Sandra E. Garcia, New York Times, Jan. 27, 2021)
Interest continues to grow in inaugural poet Amanda Gorman (The Associated Press, via New York Daily News, Jan. 28, 2021):
. . . Interest in the 22-year-old Gorman and demand for her work has not slowed down since much of the world discovered her and “The Hill We Climb,” a highlight of the ceremony marking President Joe Biden’s assuming office. Two books [authored by Gorman] scheduled for September, the picture story “The Change We Sing” and a poetry collection featuring “The Hill We Climb,” have occupied the top two spots on Amazon.com for the past week. The release of the fourth-ranked book, a standalone edition of “The Hill We Climb,” has been moved up from April 27 to March 16 and will include a foreword from Oprah Winfrey.
Each of the three books has generated 1 million copies of its first printings, Penguin announced Thursday, numbers that virtually no poet would dare even fantasize about. Gorman, who at 17 became the country’s National Youth Poet Laureate, is a longtime Los Angeles resident who credits poetry with helping her work on a speech impediment.
“The incredible attention Amanda is receiving as a poet is entirely unprecedented,” says Jennifer Benka, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets, which saw traffic on its website soar after the Jan. 20 inaugural. “Her poem and presentation has provoked a response to a poet we’ve never seen.” . . .
Regarding “In the words of an Urdu poet”: specifically, Mir Taqi Mir (1725–1810); from his couplet:
نکتہ دانانِ رفتہ کی نہ کہو بات
وہ ہے جو ہووے اب کی بات
Which (with help) I’ve rendered as:
Why speak of skillful speakers who’re dead as of now?
that alone I find meaningful: what’s said as of now
d.i.