Amanda Gorman gets four stars
Ever since 22-year-old Amanda Gorman delivered her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, people have asked me how I reacted to it.
To respond, I have to distinguish between me as a sentient human being, and me as a technician with words.
As a human being, I endorse her message 100%. I’m inspired by WHAT she said, and the context in which she said it.
As a technician with words, though, I have to deal with HOW she said it. So I approach her poem, any poem, differently.
Many people, I suspect, would wonder why it was called a poem. She didn’t read it the way people expect to hear poetry. Every line wasn’t same length. Every line didn’t have four beats. Every line didn’t end with a rhyme…
Typically, with simple rhymes like moon, June, and spoon. Maybe, triune.
Rhymes do not a poem make; they are the icing, not the cake!
A fixation on rhyme identifies the amateur poet.
That was not true in the past, then, when people read poetry out loud... They demonstrated their erudition by reciting poetry to an admiring audience. Poets used rhymes as a memory aid. The pattern of rhymes helped the orator remember what came next.
But we don’t declaim poems anymore. We’re more likely to read poetry in meditative silence.
In that context, rhymes often become toys for poets to play with. Composers, especially. Here are just two from Cole Porter: “Too hot/ not to cool down…” and “Lithuanians and
Letts do it/ let’s do it…”
In fact, Amanda Gorman did use rhymes. Lots of them. But she hid them in her text: “If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change, our children’s birthright...” -- that line alone contains four rhymes.
Or, later, “The dawn is ours before we knew it./Somehow we do it.”
Sometimes she rhymes long lines with shorter ones:
“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.”
Gorman is not a Wordsworth or an Eliot — not yet. She likes too much the abstract noun, the generic description: inception, redemption, illumination, intimidation…
I want her to put flesh and blood onto those generic labels — to render them incarnate, if I may use an abstraction myself.
As Poet Laureate, Masefield didn’t wax eloquent about sea voyages. He described a “dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smokestack”
Carl Sandburg didn’t philosophize about weather. He gave us an image: “Fog creeps in on little cat feet.”
Dylan Thomas didn’t enthuse about awe, or sleep; he wrote of “pebbles in the holy streams…” and “owls bearing the farm away.”
Real-life detail makes poetry, not flowery abstractions.
Canadian poet James Deahl once led a workshop on writing and editing poetry. “Knock out all your adjectives and adverbs,” he advised. “If your nouns and verbs still move the reader, you’ve got a poem. If they don’t, you’ve got an essay.”
I don’t say that, in any way, to denigrate Amanda Gorman’s effort. I’m filled with admiration. When I was 22, my poems dealt with little more than my hormones.
Remember, I'm addicted to words the way some people are addicted to drugs, or power. I want poetry to give me an ecstatic high. Gorman’s poem comes close, but doesn’t quite fly me to the moon.
Still, I love the way she uses the rhetorical device of repetition, while working subtle changes into the pattern, like English bell ringers:
“That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried...”
Or later,
“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...”
And she ends with another great example: “There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
—