Amanda Gorman The Hill We Climb: part poet, part preacher, part performer, this is solid gold
What a performance! Amanda Gorman’s astonishing recital of her poem The Hill We Climb at the presidential inauguration ceremony yesterday showed the power of the spoken word in no uncertain terms.
22 year-old Gorman, who was named the nation’s First Youth Poet Laureate at the age of 19, delivered her poem - a rousing call to arms for healing a divided country in the wake of violent protest - with poise, grace and confidence.
Dressed in a sunshine yellow coat and brilliant red headband, she shone as a beacon of youthful hope in stark contrast to the audience, made up of mostly older politicians.
The poem was nothing less than a stirring anthem, with a powerful motivational message to unite the whole country: “We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.”
In her repetition of the phrase “we will rise”, she carefully - and crucially - acknowledged that ‘we’ included everyone from every part of the country, from “the golden hills of the west” and “the wind-swept north-east” to “the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states” and “the sun-baked south".
The poem had strong evangelical undertones as well as a nod to Hamilton the Broadway musical: “Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid,” and later: “If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change, our children’s birthright.”
Nor did she shy away from the personal: “We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.”
As important as her message was her expressive performance.: part poet and part preacher, gliding over her words and phrases with consummate ease, even if the lines didn’t exactly scan.
As poetry and spoken word performances gain more traction among millennials, Gorman has understood the power her words will have on young people - who are after all the future - and who might otherwise turn a blind eye to politics and world events.
Not surprisingly she and her poem went viral. Overnight her Twitter following has grown a hundred-fold to over a million and will continue to rise exponentially. Her debut poetry collection, The Hill We Climb, is currently due for publication in September but the publishers must surely be trying to rush it out now. They’d be fools not to. Amanda Gorman is solid gold.
