Ask any two people which poets they admire, and you’ll touch a nerve that rings down to their very souls. Why does Emily Dickinson resonate with me, and Maya Angelou with you? Why Seamus Heaney for this man, or Langston Hughes? Why Dante’s “Paradiso”, or Liliuokalani’s translation of the “Kumulipo”? Poetry, which is often so personal and private, can also be public is so many ways.
It can be read at a wedding to mark the binding together of two souls. It can be read at a funeral to mark grief and to celebrate life at its extreme verge. It can be read at a graduation to signal a beginning. And it can be used politically as well—to mark the end of a war, to legitimize a royal line, or to draw a country together during a difficult time. We expect something different of our political poetry. Political poetry is public and egalitarian, common tender for tender national moments. There is poetry that marks our most sacred occasions, and then there is public poetry, and sometimes, very rarely, the sacred and the political come together.
Political poetry is public in the most public of senses. Unlike the poetry we choose for funerals and weddings, which are intensely personal and are therefore colored by the intensely personal choices of those who choose them, political poetry has the expectation built into it that it should speak for us all, should speak to a whole nation. It must be at once accessible, emotional, and proper. And so, when Amanda Gorman, who is only 22 years old, rose to the task—no—exceeded it, in her stunning poem, “The Hill We Climb,” I found myself proud to live in a nation who chose her as the youth poet laureate, proud of her, and hopeful that we are entering a new era where poetry can be perhaps more central in all our public and private lives.
Yesterday’s inauguration was unique because it followed a violent insurrection on the capital spurred on by the former president himself. Since Joe Biden rightfully won the election as president of the United States, the outgoing president, in an unprecedented move, failed to acknowledge Joe Biden as the rightful winner, spread lies about a “stolen election,” and spurred his followers to violence. The transition of power to Joe Biden is the 46th time our nation has seen such a transition, but this one was different. If poetry can bind our souls together in the most difficult times, we need it now more than ever—at a time where everything is but certain in our nation. We face a pandemic that is projected to claim half a million American lives within the next month. We leave behind a dark political era of division, deceit, and racial disharmony, spurred on by white supremacists inside the hallowed office of the presidency and outside of it. We need poetry that can touch us all—not just poetry written for academics, or scholars, or literary types—but poetry that can touch the heart and soul of our divided and aching nation.
While Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” is indeed accessible, it is not without rich allusion. She alludes to the words of Barack Obama, whose optimism in the face of our “unfinished” American project inspired him to write in his introduction to “A Promised Land:” “I am not ready to abandon the possibility of America.” To this, Gorman writes and responds: “And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.”
Words can rip us apart, or tie us together. Donald Trump’s words inspired men and women to shatter the windows at the heart of our nation, to spit and shit on the floor of the capital where the mechanisms of the peaceful transition of power were moving, and are still moving, despite him. Gorman writes: “And so, we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.” For so many of us, the last four years have been a national tragedy, a daily trauma to watch our cherished institutions trashed. Gorman reminds us that we are not crushed: “That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped; that even as we tired, we tried.”
What I also adored about Gorman’s inaugural poem was its subtle references to Lynn-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Drawing from the Hamilton songbook, where George Washington sings about stepping aside as president a time when something like that was unheard of, Gorman writes: “Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree.” And with these words, Gorman traces the fine and fragile thread of succession, the humble acts of many men who gave up power in service of the nation’s greater good. Miranda’s Hamilton and Washington sing, “History has its eyes on us.” And Gorman doesn’t fail to include this line in her poem, too. Washington had the foresight to know he didn’t want to be king, and didn’t want to live in a nation of kings. The peaceful transfer of power represents our national commitment to country above ambition.
And Gorman also invokes the words of Maya Angelou who told us she would rise, and we are told that we, too, will rise. And because poetry can make the unbelievable believable, bring hope to the hopeless, heart to the grieving, I believe her.
The promise of America is not guaranteed. We live in a nation built on slave labor, built on stolen land, built on disparities between the wealthy and the poor that run counter to our ideals. It is up to us to own this history, and more than own it, to improve it. Gorman writes that it is “the hill we climb if only we dare it. Because being American is more than a pride we inherit; it’s the past we step into and how we repair it.”
I feel so hopeful for poetry in America. We have a president who actually reads poetry.
We read poetry not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because it gets us through the hard.
When Joe Biden recited lines from Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy,” in one of his speeches, it left me breathless. And when Lynn-Manuel Miranda recited the poem during the evening celebration of the inauguration, it left me weeping. “The Cure at Troy” is an adaptation from Sophocles’s “Philoctetes.” In plain language, it lays out the bare truth. “Human beings suffer / they torture one another / they get hurt and get hard.” There is compassion in these lines for those who have hurt us.
Things fall apart. “But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.” Poetry has this power. In so few words it can at once reminds us of the great well of pain from which we rise, and still tell us to “believe in miracles.” The miracle, Heaney writes, is healing. Poetry heals.
Poetry, like art of any kind, cannot exist outside its context. No, indeed, it is tied to its context, bound to the circumstances of its birth just like we all are in our ways. But poetry can also at times exceed its context. I think of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” and I think about Shakespeare’s soliloquys, which transcend the bounds of the plays for which they were written. Will Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill I Climb” surpass the circumstances of its creation? Only time will tell. I will say this—she has given me hope as a poet.
I have given my life to poetry, studied it in graduate school, spent years writing, and then not writing it, spent years only reading it, weeping it out. I can’t think of a better time to be a poet in America.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.