Amanda Full Poem

[Timothee Cazares]

AmandaGorman, who has become something of a phenomena since her wonderful performance on Inauguration Day, is definitely a "spoken word" poet. Her poems are meant to be read aloud, just as she reads them, with full voice and attention--it's then that her use of alliteration and rhyme, her insistent rhythm and poetic drum beat will come alive. So find your inner Amanda Gorman and shout out her poem--and may we all enjoy a Happy and Healthy New Year!

The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

In this excerpt from the show, I frame the significance of the poem in the context of the evening and Amanda tells the story of its composition. (The isolated audio of the poem appears below the video.) Please enjoy.

In the old times, they say, the men came already fitted with brains

designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run,

to hurdle blindly into the unknown,

and then to find their way back home when lost

with a slain antelope to carry between them.

Or, on bad hunting days, nothing.

The women, who did not need to run down prey,

had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them

left at the thorn bush and across the scree

and look down in the bole of the half-fallen tree,

because sometimes there are mushrooms.

Some mushrooms will kill you,

while some will show you gods

and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.

Others will kill us if we eat them raw,

and kill us again if we cook them once,

but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away,

and then boil them once more, and pour the water away,

only then can we eat them safely. Observe.

And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk

and watch the world, and see what they observe.

And some of them would thrive and lick their lips,

While others clutched their stomachs and expired.

So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate.

And science, you remember, is the study

of the nature and behaviour of the universe,

based on observation, experiment, and measurement,

and the formulation of laws to describe these facts.

Jan Vogler plays a 1707 Stradivari cello made during Bach's lifetime. He compares it to learning to swim in an Olympic pool: "the pressure on me is more to have imagination to match the instrument." Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR hide caption

Gorman was making history as America's youngest inaugural poet. Around the same time, a documentary was in the works about Vogler's collaboration with actor Bill Murray, whose amusing readings and occasional dancing punctuated a piano trio. So Vogler had an idea: what about pairing the Bach Cello Suites with Gorman's poetry? The two join forces on stage at New York's Carnegie Hall on Saturday, Feb. 17.

"We're bringing something from the past into a modern, contemporary feel. And we're doing it with poetry that I have never performed with music before," said Gorman, a self-avowed "huge fan of cello." It's unclear whether the collaboration is a one-off event or whether it might organically lead to additional public happenings.

Amanda Gorman declares herself a "huge fan of the cello," noting it's "one of the instruments I relate to the most," and enjoys writing to its music. Danny Williams/Sun Literary Arts hide caption

At turns simple and complex, the suites express the whole range of human emotions. Performing, and especially recording, the entire set is dubbed the "Mount Everest" of cellists. Vogler has already completed the feat.

For their joint project, Gorman reads some of her poetry, including "New Day's Lyric," while Vogler plays the first, third and fifth Bach cello suites. That poem speaks of struggle and resilience, ending with "Come over, join this day just begun. / For wherever we come together, / We will forever overcome."

Use this handout with the text of the poem to give to your students for this lesson. And, can we all just take a minute to appreciate that Amanda Gorman herself gave this lesson her stamp of approval?!

Thanks for reading! As always, please share your awesome poetry teaching ideas and student work (with their permission, of course) and tag it #TeachLivingPoets! If you would like to write a guest post for TeachLivingPoets.com, please DM me @melaltersmith or email me at msm...@lncharter.org.

Now, granted, it is a good speech. It has random rhymes with no real pattern (just like a speech). It has a nice flow, but no real meter (just like a speech). It has poetic metaphors, phrases, and analogy, but no set structure (just like a speech). It is a good speech, but it is a speech. It is not a poem, except for the fact that it has odd spacing when printed.

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. We seek harm to none, and harmony for all.

My only point is that she earned her spot on the stage as a really good speech giver. She did not earn her spot on the stage as a poet. In the same way, Justin Timberlake earned his spot in the concert as an excellent performer. He did not earn his spot in the concert as an opera singer.

To illustrate my point even further, I am going to give the same treatment to a poem by Robert Frost, which has meter and rhyme. I am taking away the spacing and capitalization, but when you read it, you can still see that it is A POEM:

SHOULD you ASK me WHENCE these STORies?

WHENCE these LEgends AND traDItions

WITH the Odors OF the FORest

WITH the DEW and DAMP of MEADows

WITH the CURLing SMOKE of WIGwams

WITH the RUSHing OF great RIVers

WITH their FREquent REPeTItions

AND their WILD reVERBerAtions

AS of THUNder IN the MOUNtains?

The poet who will carry on a tradition and present her new work, "The Hill We Climb" at the inauguration this week is already quite accomplished at the age of 22. Jeffrey Brown talked to Amanda Gorman to learn more, as part of our ongoing arts and culture series, "CANVAS."

The poet who will present a new work at the inauguration this week is quite accomplished, and yet only 22. She sounds many of Martin Luther King's themes and follows in the footsteps of poets, including Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Richard Blanco.

While we might feel small, separate, and all alone, our people have never been more closely tethered, because the question isn't if we can weather this unknown, but how we will weather this unknown together.

And then, as I was around halfway through, we had the insurrection at the Capitol. And I don't want to say that my poem took a drastic left turn, because it was already going towards a location, but those events just solidified for me how important it was to have a poem about unity and the new chapter of America in this inauguration.

So, for me, it's trying to make a poem that is both robust, but also accessible to anyone who might be watching, that they can feel that they are represented and well-established in this poem. So, it's a really difficult dance to do.

One of the most rewarding moments of my career is when I'm speaking to a child who tells me they have the same speech impediment that I had to overcome and that they're going to keep writing or sharing their voice after hearing my story.

So, it's a huge aspect of who I am. Writing wasn't just a form of expression. It was a form of pathology by embarking on spoken word over and over and over again and reciting my poems. No matter how terrified I was, because I had the support of others, I was able kind of to slowly climb my way to the place I am at today.

This luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Now in paperback and featuring an interview with the author and a discussion guide, Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.

Sometimes the world feels broken. And problems seem too big to fix. But somehow, we all have the power to make a difference. With a little faith, and maybe the help of a friend, together we can find beauty and create change.

Amanda Gunn grew up just at the edge of the woods in southern Connecticut with two older brothers. She is a poet, teacher, and doctoral candidate in English at Harvard where she works on poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, she worked as a medical copyeditor for 13 years. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford and was the inaugural winner of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize honoring Jake Adam York. Her poems can be found in Poetry, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Baffler.

Amanda Bales hails from Oklahoma and completed her B.A. in English and Theater at Oklahoma State University. Since then she has lived in various places, including a dry cabin in Fairbanks, Alaska, where she completed her M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The Nashville Review, Raleigh Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a Lecturer in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.@amanda_bales amandabales.wordpress.com

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