Amanda Gorman: Who is the poet of Biden’s inauguration? – Culture

The world agrees: neither Joe Biden, nor Kamala Harris, not even Lady Gaga were the stars of Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday in Washington. But the 22-year-old poet, until now little known, Amanda Gorman. As soon as he stepped up to the microphone in front of the Capitol, a second sun seemed to rise. When he began to recite his poem “The Hill We Climb”, many of them visibly caught their breath under their medals and dark coats.

With his words, his voice, his hands, he made the audience dance at the happy but rigid event, at least on the inside. Instead of the “consideration” one often expects and receives from poetry, Gorman was electrified by verses that sounded more like music than marble, more rap than hymn. He chained rhymes, played with alliterations, sounds, and ambiguities, and carried them forward with such urgency that you had to grab an armchair away from Washington.

It was all the more astonishing since Gorman had long suffered from a speech impediment. As a child, she couldn’t pronounce an R. Like many others who have faced similar obstacles, she attributes her sensitivity to language to this fact.

Gorman, who studied sociology at Harvard, has hardly published anything, but his talents have not gone unnoticed. At age 16 she was selected as the “Youth Poet Laureate” in her hometown of Los Angeles, and later became the first American “National Youth Poet Laureate.” For a long time it was clear to her that she was destined for great things. “I’m running for president in 2036. You can put that on your calendar,” she explained in 2017. She did not make Biden and Harris the stars of her text, but herself: “A skinny black girl descended from slaves and Growing up with a single mother can dream of being president and then reciting a poem for you. ” Exactly this message was, of course, intended by Biden: I am aware of my age, my privileges, the color of my skin, he said, others, the younger ones will soon take over.

John F. Kennedy was the first president to ask a poet to address his inauguration. It was Robert Frost. Miller Williams and Maya Angelou later wrote for Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Alexander, and Richard Blanco for Barack Obama. The idea dates back to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the “Poet Laureate”, which in turn is linked to the tradition of the laurel-crowned state poet of old. For more than 500 years, the UK has appointed Poets Laureate to write poetry for major national events.

The rest of Europe is skeptical about this. It is good that the state hires poets for the purpose of national self-reflection. On the other hand, it is based on an understanding of art that has long been outdated.

Gorman’s poem is arch-conventional in many ways. She dances, but on the beaten path of national redemption, which Biden also likes to walk: America is great, but far from where it should be. If we stick together, our shared vision for this country will become a reality.

But update this topos with calls for non-violence, inclusion and diversity. It evokes unity, but not of the same, but of different. The danger does not threaten her, as it usually does, from outside, but from within, as in the “terrible hour” of the storm on the Capitol, under whose impression she wrote her poem. And Americans will not come out of the fight for utopian America as vigorous heroes, but exhausted and battered, but “beautiful.” And not only the new headline, not only the Americans spoke to them, but “the world”, which will become a “wonderful” one “wounded.”