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. 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). 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. 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. 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. The very nature & special excellence of this contemporary stream of writing is that it’s primarily a performative form. It was (so to speak) rap for a politically thoughtful intelligentsia: hip-hop’s verbal stylings with a spiritual vision & a humanitarian core. 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. 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. For this sort of poetry, hearing is far better than merely reading on the page.
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. 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. 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. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer” (courtesy PBS News Hour) “Amanda Gorman ’20, the first Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, is pictured in Harvard Yard at Harvard University.
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