Inauguration poet Amanda Gorman ‘preserves the memory of a pandemic’ in new collection
Amanda Gorman, who became the youngest inauguration poet in US history when Joe Biden was sworn in as president, says she is attempting to “preserve the public memory of a pandemic” in a new collection published this week.
Gorman shot into the public eye when she recited her poem The Hill We Climb at the inauguration in January, speaking of how “there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it, / If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
A selection of her early work was published by a small press in 2015, but this first major collection, Call Us What We Carry, which was published on Tuesday by Chatto & Windus in the UK, includes both Gorman’s inaugural poem and her response to Covid-19.
In Fugue, she writes: “Every cough seemed catastrophe, / Every proximate person a potential peril”, capturing how “we fell heart-first into the news, / Head-first, dread-first …” Monomyth takes the form of a film script, laying out events in scenes, from December 2019, when “a new pneumonia-like illness is identified in Wuhan”, through the 20 January inauguration of Biden, when “Amanda Gorman, a skinny Black girl descended from slaves, becomes the youngest inaugural poet in US history”, to its ending.
The 23-year-old told the Guardian that the collection was “my attempt to preserve the public memory of a pandemic”, because “nothing is as harrowing as the thought that the losses and lessons of this moment might be lost to collective amnesia”.
She said: “I approach poetry as a method of social inquiry as well as a finding in itself, wherein we can both interrogate and rediscover our common humanity.”
Many of the poems in the collection are written from a collective viewpoint. In At First, Gorman writes of how “When asking how others were faring, / We did not expect an honest or full response. / What words can answer how we’re remaining alive?”
The poet said she had made a conscious decision use a collective voice. “When I began writing the collection, I would often start a sentence with ‘I’ and the thought would suddenly transition to ‘we’ and I realised that the ‘I’ from which I was writing from is actually a contingent of the ‘we’,” she said.
“‘I’ is part of the ‘we’, not mitigated by it, which is why the book speaks with such a pluralistic voice.
“I was discovering as I wrote that every pain and onus that I was writing about was owned, in part, by someone else as well. It wasn’t my own singularly, but it was a collective type of experience.”
Fugue by Amanda Gorman
Don’t get us wrong.We do pound for what has passed, But more so all that we passed by— Unthanking, unknowing, When what we had was ours.
There was another gap that choked us: The simple gift of farewell. Goodbye, by which we say to another—Thanks for offering your life into mine.By Goodbye, we truly mean: Let us be able to say hello again. This is edgeless doubt: Every cough seemed catastrophe, Every proximate person a potential peril.We mapped each sneeze & sniffle, Certain the virus we had run away from Was now running through us.
We slept the days down.We wept the year away ,Frayed & afraid.
Perhaps that is what it means To breathe & die in this flesh. Forgive us, For we have walked This before.
History flickered in& out of our vision, A movie our eyelids Staggered through.
We added a thousand false steps To our walk tracker today Because every step we’ve taken Has required more than we had to give.
In such eternal nature, We spent days as the walking dead, Dreading disease & disaster.We cowered, bone shriveled As a laurel in drought, our throats Made of frantic workings, Feet falling over themselves Like famished fawns.We awaited horrors, Building up leviathans before they arose.We could not pull our heads From the raucous deep. Anxiety is a living body, Poised beside us like a shadow.
It is the last creature standing, The only beast who loves us Enough to stay.
We were already thousands Of deaths into the year. Every time we fell heart-first into the news, Head-first, dread-first, Our bodies tight & tensed with what now? Yet who has the courage to inquire what if?
What hope shall we shelter Within us like a secret, Second smile, Private & pure. Sorry if we’re way less friendly — *We had COVID tryna end things. Even now handshakes & hugs are like gifts, Something we are shocked to grant, be granted.& so, we forage for anything That feels like this: The click in our lung that ties us to strangers, How when among those we care for most We shift with instinct, Like the flash of a school of fish.Our regard for one another Not tumored, Just transformed.
By Hello, we mean: Let us not say goodbye again.There is someone we would die for. Feel that fierce, unshifting truth, That braced & ready sacrifice. That’s what love does: It makes a fact faced beyond fear.We have lost too much to lose.We lean against each other again, The way water bleeds into itself. This glassed hour, paused, Bursts like a loaded star, Belonging always to us. What more must we believe in.
•Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.