America tilts from prose to poetry
Last Wednesday, my son and I sat down with my iPad to watch the videos from President Joe Biden’s inauguration. I clicked on the inaugural address, and my son noted that, at 21 minutes, it was as long as some of the shows he watches on PBS Kids. Then, at about 11 minutes in, he had decided that, though he likes to play with his Biden action figure, listening to him talk is another matter.
Next I clicked on Amanda Gorman’s performance of her poem “The Hills We Climb.” He was immediately much more interested, something that was probably due — at first — to her bright yellow coat and golden makeup. She shone like a sun, and her poise demanded attention.
The words soon sucked him in, and his head bobbed to the rhythm of the poem. When one of her quick internal rhymes bounced out, he turned to me and grinned, his face lighting up. He did this several times during her reading, and I’ve read aloud to him enough to know that he eats up language that flows and pops and surprises us with unexpected sizzle.
As I bounced around online later that day, I saw her name pop up everywhere, and each time it was in caps or followed by exclamation points and fireworks emojis. There were a number of posts about her bright yellow coat, and many more about her maturity (only 22!) and stage presence. But, satisfyingly, most were about the power of her poetry.
I see that many of us have been starving for poetry. After years of the ugliest prose imaginable, subliterate tweets, bullying provocation, and disingenuous prevarication, the poet pulled us up out of the muck with a graceful turn of phrase.
A lot of the ugly rhetoric we have endured is, in some weird way, comforting. It is easy. It does not take a lot of effort to unleash our more brutal selves and then sit back and watch the carnage. The comfort derived proves unsteady, however, and ends up making us feel sick, much like gorging on a party-sized bag of Cheetos and downing it with two liters of Diet Coke. The insurrection of Jan. 6 proved to be a civic epiphany as that diet of junk food came rushing back up. We barely made it to the bathroom in time.
The new president’s words served a medical role, a soothing pink dose to fix our troubled guts. The poet, though: She offered us possibility. She showed us that the work of nurturing our better natures repays us in myriad ways. She showed us that the bitter comfort of nursing our resentments leaves us bereft. To climb out of the pits of our hatred requires effort.
This exemplifies the beauty of poetry in general and Amanda Gorman’s poem in particular. Poets ask us to look at things in a new and different way, to “tell the truth but tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson put it. When we lean to the side and cast our eyes upon things in a new way, we see the way to change.
When the poet strode to the podium and began to read her poem to us, she spoke to us in the way that poetry does so well. She spoke to our intellect but also to our better natures. As Emerson points out, poets serve to liberate us. In this year of pandemic, we have learned the value of science and medicine, but we have also rediscovered a crucial truth, that art may not save us from a virus, but it will save us from ourselves.
I see that many of us have been starving for poetry. After years of the ugliest prose imaginable, subliterate tweets, bullying provocation, and disingenuous prevarication, the poet pulled us up out of the muck with a graceful turn of phrase.