San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Artist Katie Ruiz aims to thrive while in isolation
At the Biden inauguration, Amanda Gorman revived a nation’s cultural hopes for the future
Our new president is a man for prose. In his inaugural address, on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, Joe Biden defended the value of truth, facts, science. He spoke forcefully of the seemingly unachievable need for a sense of shared purpose, in the face of a pandemic and so many other grim challenges.
Then, the nation and the world heard something else. We heard something else. We heard something foreign and elusive for too long in American public life: a touch of the poet.
Biden set the table. National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman filled that table with her Inauguration Day poem “The Hill We Climb.” It turned her into an American superstar in roughly six minutes, reminding a hungry nation that this is what poetry and a different kind of truth can do for the spirit.
“History has its eyes on us,” Gorman read aloud at the podium, riffing on a line from Linmanuel Miranda’s musical “Hamilton.” Many, many millions of Americans (if they were watching) surely wouldn’t like what they saw that Wednesday. All that pluralism, all that history being made, so many indications of time and history marching right on past their dreams of an America in reruns.
For millions of other Americans, Gorman’s stunning command of imagery, language and her nation’s internal and external demons and angels lifted a tradition-bound transfer of power onto a higher plane.
Being American, in Gorman’s words, “is more than a pride we inherit — it’s the past we step into and how we repair it. 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, she said, “very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.”
Gorman’s mastery of performance poetry seized the moment and spoke to the deadly assault on the Capitol, mere steps from where she stood. The 22-year-old’s poem, she told one interviewer prior to Inauguration Day, drew inspiration from hip-hop as well as poets laureates past, from Robert Frost at the Kennedy inauguration to Maya Angelou at the first Clinton inauguration.
She studied her predecessors “to get a sense of what the core elements of an inaugural poem would be — (and) to find something that I might enjoy hearing in my living room.”
I was in our living room when I heard her speak, and I know I wasn’t alone in feeling something larger than simple enjoyment. This was sheer, blessed relief. And gratitude.
Aristotle said it: “Poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” Politicians can move mountains, now and then. Art, now and then, has a chance to outlast the mountain.
Until noon that Wednesday, Jan. 20, we were living in a state of cultural deprivation, the result of a White House administration almost comically hostile to the arts and humanities. In six minutes’ time, Gorman made a concrete bid for a different place to live. A place with some poetry to help make sense of it all.
Twenty-eight years ago, Maya Angelou delivered her inaugural poem “On the Pulse of Morning.” Its lines contain:
You, created only a little lower than / The angels, have crouched too long in / The bruising darkness / Have lain too long / Face down in ignorance, / Your mouths spilling words / Armed for slaughter.
Angelou knew America’s history, and how history rhymes forward. Biden knows it, too, by way of one of his favorite Seamus Heaney quotations, from “The Cure at Troy,” a verse adaptation of the Sophocles play “Philoctetes”:
History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave . / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme.
On Inauguration Day morning, the outgoing president took off on Air Force One to call it a term and get back to Mar-a-lago. As the plane left the runway, the mixtape piped through loudspeakers on the ground played “My Way.”
The same Sinatra ode to belligerence and not dwelling on
Aristotle said it: “Poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” Politicians can move mountains, now and then. Art, now and then, has a chance to outlast the mountain.
your many, many mistakes filled the air four years and two months ago at Trump’s victory celebration. As the Trumps danced, the faces of surrounding staffers asked the silent question: What do we do now? Just like Robert Redford at the end of “The Candidate.”
There’s a kind of poetry in that Paul Anka song, too, though. Now especially. We had a guy who ate it up and spit it out, over and over. And for now, anyway, we don’t.
I thought of a different sort of poetic truth in the wake of Amanda Gorman changing the temperature of America, imperceptibly, while delivering “The Hill We Climb.” In the South Korean drama “Poetry,” a stunner of a film written and directed by Lee Chang-dong, a fledgling poet, dealing privately with the greatest moral and familial crisis of her long life, is taking an introductory writing class. The instructor tells her that a poet must observe, reflect and then stride toward “the most honest thing” she can express about a subject. Any subject.
This is what we want, I think, whoever we are: the truth about the stuff of life. We deserve the prose of plain speaking and hard choices, confronted. And more than ever, we need the touch of the poets, a thousand ways and a million times over, so we can hear that truth in ways we didn’t know were possible.