Lots of poets and literary types have been dismissive on social media about the poem Amanda Gorman wrote for the Democratic National Convention in the States.
This is a beautiful essay, full of insights about the history of poetry, and a really valiant attempt to defend Gorman's poem, but I'm afraid I remain unconvinced! I think the problem is that her poem's intertexts are very clearly American political speeches, not poetry or literature. You can hear Obama, you can hear Martin Luther King, you can hear the pledge of allegiance, you can hear religiously-inflected DNC speeches, and maybe even a couple of sermons. But it has very little relationship to any verse tradition. That's very different from even prosy contemporary poems (which I'm not a fan of either), not to mention earlier political verse. And I can see why people find it off-putting: it feels like another aspect of the complete departure of the arts from public life in the US.
Thanks so much for commenting Julianne. The intertexts to me are primarily as you say political at the level of quotation, but scriptural and scriptural-adjacent (including religious literature) at the level of diction. Perhaps because I am an early modernist, I am not bothered by literary texts which start from and refer primarily to scripture (rather than or alongside other literature), that is pretty normal within the wider Christian tradition. I do think the extent to which it is a religious text, in its style and diction as well as its message, is very interesting. I don't think you'd find that in the UK now, though you would have done in earlier periods. I think you are probably right that the choice of a primarily religious rather than literary rhetorical framework points towards something important about the relative distance of "literature" from public life in the US. Thanks again for such a thoughtful comment and sorry for the slow reply, this week has been rather busy.
I find the delivery as Martin Luther King crossed with Rupi Kaur! From the former, a preaching* style drawing on the black American churches, the religious overtones, the sense of the great arc of justice bending towards an imminent secular new Jerusalem. From the latter, the highly dramatised use of the hands while speaking, the snappy dressing, the half-epigrams half-cliches (epicliches?) that I think people react against.
Like you, I'm not the target audience and, similarly, I neither love it nor am irritated by it.
*preaching here as literally preaching, not with negative moralising connotations
Thank you Joseph and apologies for the slow reply -- very busy week has meant it took me a while to get to all the great comments on this piece. The Rupi Kaur comment is v. interesting. Have to admit I've never watched a video of her delivery but I'm sure you're right and it would totally make sense as an influence.
Another well-written and erudite essay. You are right that some of the online criticism of Gorman is suspect given the prosaic character of much contemporary poetry. Still, I largely agree with Julianne Werlin's comments, especially her conclusion about the "departure of the arts from public life in the US." But this departure has been going on for a long time. An interesting comparison would be with Robert Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1960. I also wonder how you would evaluate political memorial poetry like Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," also first recited in 1960. It is certainly hard to imagine poems of this caliber having the same kind of impact today. But I know relatively little about contemporary poetry and would be happy to be proved wrong.
Many thanks for the comment Louis and apologies for the slow reply. I thought Julianne's comment was very interesting, and I think she has probably identified what upset or provoked a lot of "literary" people -- that sense that a certain, specifically literary rhetoric (I use rhetoric here in its neutral sense) is increasingly divorced from and inaccessible to US "public life" (in a way that is obviously not true in France, for instance); while what interested me particularly about the speech was the extent to which it depended upon a religious rhetorical framework for its impact (in its shape and register, and also to a considerable extent in its diction). Clearly that set of conventions still *is* functional, as it were, in the US public sphere (as it absolutely would not be in France, for instance, and I don't think is in the UK either, though for somewhat different reasons).
Thanks Gabriel. In an early draft of this essay I gave a few examples of notoriously terrible UK laureate poetry from the last few decades, but in the end I cut that bit as it seemed pretty mean. But on the whole I agree that Gorman is making a whole-hearted go of it in a way that I find quite interesting and unusual. Perhaps because she found herself cast in this way so young, so for better or worse it has shaped her authorial / poetic identity?
I’ll have to confess I’ve been on a news break most of the summer and completely missed Gorman’s performance. But I’m not sure what the big deal is. It’s three minutes on the third day of a political convention.
Gorman’s poem reminded me a little of a cento, a compilation of some of the best bits of historical rhetoric into one place. And even the best cento generally has a slight dissonance to it, simply because the source fragments have been repurposed and may not fit together seamlessly.
I wonder what critics of this poem would be willing to accept, assuming that the reading of a poem at a political convention is something that even needs to be done. One thing Gorman perhaps understands is that non-poets may have trouble making sense of poetry read aloud, so by slowing it down, using a lot of end-stopped lines (like song lyrics) and familiar-sounding phrases, she made it more accessible to them.
Many thanks for this comment and sorry for the slow reply. A cento is a great comparison, or more broadly the sort of "quotation-allusion" which is very common in early modernity -- where the use of the reference is intended to be pretty straightforward and easily spotted, rather than to set up some sort of subtle conversation or even tension (as is often considered to be the case in scholarly studies of allusion or intertext). And I agree that as a piece tailored to its specific occasion and performance context, she knows what she is doing.
Thanks for this detailed reading of Gorman's poem. From here in Scotland, it reads to me as a perfect poem for the occasion, though not in itself a great poem.
Terrific essay! As I tell students, there are lots of different kinds of poetry and they do lots of different kinds of work. (And you might not like them all, and that is okay.) Imagine a convention like this with a different poet from a different poetic tradition and a radically varied sound for each night... say Amanda Gorman/A.E. Stallings/Caroline Bergvall/Victoria Chang. That's what I will do when I am running for office and have a bajillion-dollar budget.
This was a really interesting essay and it does make me look at Gorman's poems a little bit more charitably, but I still find it pedantic in a way that I don't find Fletcher and Horace. Perhaps because of their invocation of divine, the exaltation is already abstract enough to not come across as overbearing. In Gorman's (secular) poem, it just comes across as empty patriotism trying to be universal through platitudes. I'm just not really in awe of anything. I also say this as someone who (I think) likes "slam poetry" more than the average person, Gorman's cadence feels more speech-like than poetic.
I honestly think much of the vexation comes from the fact that she is neither the current adult or youth laureate, and she seemingly hasn't made much of an impact beyond just reading for the government (she does have a Goodreads choice award and a Grammy nomination), so her media-driven branding as the literary voice of Gen Z is fairly irritating. But of course, it doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things!
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment. I find the (implicit) religiousness of the piece very interesting -- it only really works (insofar as it does) if you are able to buy in to that framework. Personally I found it conventional rather than platitudinous but perhaps that's a rather nice distinction. I don't love it or think it was particularly good, but I did think it was quite well suited to the occasion and certainly have no problem calling it a poem (given the current scope of what is described as poetry). I can totally see that the way she's been promoted as "the" voice of her generation is irritating especially if you know much more than I do about the alternatives. I suppose "public poet" is a particular kind of role, one that most acclaimed poets wouldn't want to play and wouldn't be much good at.
Good insights and knowledge, as always. I take the point about the context - the occasion, form and purpose of the poem. I mostly didn't like it because I found it schmaltzy, glassy-eyed; and am not keen on the idea of poem as politically commissioned eulogy, or poet as evangeliser. That's marketing, public relations to me. Still - I think Katie Dozier's criticism missed the point: it wasn't a poem intended for unravelling, but for immediacy.
Thanks for commenting Neil and sorry for the slow reply. Yes I think you speak for many in saying honestly that you just don't think poetry is for this kind of thing. That's an unusual perspective, historically speaking, but it's also I think the consensus one today. I have always found panegyric rather fascinating, but even classicists tend to steer clear these days!
You’ve set me thinking, maybe slightly at a tangent, about good and bad examples, although I guess it’s a long trajectory way back to those old Greeks. Kavanagh wrote a powerful poem-eulogy to the Irish Labour leader James Larkin - it still works as a poem, for all its particularity to the times. Can’t resist revisiting Neruda’s odes to Stalin - surely contenders for the most brutally delusional poems ever committed to print by a famous poet. They’re so bad they unintentionally funny. Yevtushenko’s riposte at Stalin’s mausoleum is superb in its dissection and subtle demolition of reputations.
This is a beautiful essay, full of insights about the history of poetry, and a really valiant attempt to defend Gorman's poem, but I'm afraid I remain unconvinced! I think the problem is that her poem's intertexts are very clearly American political speeches, not poetry or literature. You can hear Obama, you can hear Martin Luther King, you can hear the pledge of allegiance, you can hear religiously-inflected DNC speeches, and maybe even a couple of sermons. But it has very little relationship to any verse tradition. That's very different from even prosy contemporary poems (which I'm not a fan of either), not to mention earlier political verse. And I can see why people find it off-putting: it feels like another aspect of the complete departure of the arts from public life in the US.
Thanks so much for commenting Julianne. The intertexts to me are primarily as you say political at the level of quotation, but scriptural and scriptural-adjacent (including religious literature) at the level of diction. Perhaps because I am an early modernist, I am not bothered by literary texts which start from and refer primarily to scripture (rather than or alongside other literature), that is pretty normal within the wider Christian tradition. I do think the extent to which it is a religious text, in its style and diction as well as its message, is very interesting. I don't think you'd find that in the UK now, though you would have done in earlier periods. I think you are probably right that the choice of a primarily religious rather than literary rhetorical framework points towards something important about the relative distance of "literature" from public life in the US. Thanks again for such a thoughtful comment and sorry for the slow reply, this week has been rather busy.
I find the delivery as Martin Luther King crossed with Rupi Kaur! From the former, a preaching* style drawing on the black American churches, the religious overtones, the sense of the great arc of justice bending towards an imminent secular new Jerusalem. From the latter, the highly dramatised use of the hands while speaking, the snappy dressing, the half-epigrams half-cliches (epicliches?) that I think people react against.
Like you, I'm not the target audience and, similarly, I neither love it nor am irritated by it.
*preaching here as literally preaching, not with negative moralising connotations
Thank you Joseph and apologies for the slow reply -- very busy week has meant it took me a while to get to all the great comments on this piece. The Rupi Kaur comment is v. interesting. Have to admit I've never watched a video of her delivery but I'm sure you're right and it would totally make sense as an influence.
She's worth watching! I find it horrifying and mesmerising at the same time. Certainly a sense of presence on stage.
e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSiOE8FjdY from 5:00 in
Another well-written and erudite essay. You are right that some of the online criticism of Gorman is suspect given the prosaic character of much contemporary poetry. Still, I largely agree with Julianne Werlin's comments, especially her conclusion about the "departure of the arts from public life in the US." But this departure has been going on for a long time. An interesting comparison would be with Robert Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1960. I also wonder how you would evaluate political memorial poetry like Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," also first recited in 1960. It is certainly hard to imagine poems of this caliber having the same kind of impact today. But I know relatively little about contemporary poetry and would be happy to be proved wrong.
Many thanks for the comment Louis and apologies for the slow reply. I thought Julianne's comment was very interesting, and I think she has probably identified what upset or provoked a lot of "literary" people -- that sense that a certain, specifically literary rhetoric (I use rhetoric here in its neutral sense) is increasingly divorced from and inaccessible to US "public life" (in a way that is obviously not true in France, for instance); while what interested me particularly about the speech was the extent to which it depended upon a religious rhetorical framework for its impact (in its shape and register, and also to a considerable extent in its diction). Clearly that set of conventions still *is* functional, as it were, in the US public sphere (as it absolutely would not be in France, for instance, and I don't think is in the UK either, though for somewhat different reasons).
"We face a race that tests if this country
We cherish shall perish from the earth,
And if our earth shall perish from this country."
That's a pretty ferocious line! Occasional poetry is so difficult - she's doing a lot better than Ted Hughes ever did as Laureate!
Thanks Gabriel. In an early draft of this essay I gave a few examples of notoriously terrible UK laureate poetry from the last few decades, but in the end I cut that bit as it seemed pretty mean. But on the whole I agree that Gorman is making a whole-hearted go of it in a way that I find quite interesting and unusual. Perhaps because she found herself cast in this way so young, so for better or worse it has shaped her authorial / poetic identity?
Very good piece.
I’ll have to confess I’ve been on a news break most of the summer and completely missed Gorman’s performance. But I’m not sure what the big deal is. It’s three minutes on the third day of a political convention.
Gorman’s poem reminded me a little of a cento, a compilation of some of the best bits of historical rhetoric into one place. And even the best cento generally has a slight dissonance to it, simply because the source fragments have been repurposed and may not fit together seamlessly.
I wonder what critics of this poem would be willing to accept, assuming that the reading of a poem at a political convention is something that even needs to be done. One thing Gorman perhaps understands is that non-poets may have trouble making sense of poetry read aloud, so by slowing it down, using a lot of end-stopped lines (like song lyrics) and familiar-sounding phrases, she made it more accessible to them.
Many thanks for this comment and sorry for the slow reply. A cento is a great comparison, or more broadly the sort of "quotation-allusion" which is very common in early modernity -- where the use of the reference is intended to be pretty straightforward and easily spotted, rather than to set up some sort of subtle conversation or even tension (as is often considered to be the case in scholarly studies of allusion or intertext). And I agree that as a piece tailored to its specific occasion and performance context, she knows what she is doing.
Thanks for this detailed reading of Gorman's poem. From here in Scotland, it reads to me as a perfect poem for the occasion, though not in itself a great poem.
Thank you Juliet. A very fair summary, and a lot pithier than mine!
Terrific essay! As I tell students, there are lots of different kinds of poetry and they do lots of different kinds of work. (And you might not like them all, and that is okay.) Imagine a convention like this with a different poet from a different poetic tradition and a radically varied sound for each night... say Amanda Gorman/A.E. Stallings/Caroline Bergvall/Victoria Chang. That's what I will do when I am running for office and have a bajillion-dollar budget.
What a great idea! Hoping we shall yet see the Pelizzon presidency . . .
This was a really interesting essay and it does make me look at Gorman's poems a little bit more charitably, but I still find it pedantic in a way that I don't find Fletcher and Horace. Perhaps because of their invocation of divine, the exaltation is already abstract enough to not come across as overbearing. In Gorman's (secular) poem, it just comes across as empty patriotism trying to be universal through platitudes. I'm just not really in awe of anything. I also say this as someone who (I think) likes "slam poetry" more than the average person, Gorman's cadence feels more speech-like than poetic.
I honestly think much of the vexation comes from the fact that she is neither the current adult or youth laureate, and she seemingly hasn't made much of an impact beyond just reading for the government (she does have a Goodreads choice award and a Grammy nomination), so her media-driven branding as the literary voice of Gen Z is fairly irritating. But of course, it doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things!
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment. I find the (implicit) religiousness of the piece very interesting -- it only really works (insofar as it does) if you are able to buy in to that framework. Personally I found it conventional rather than platitudinous but perhaps that's a rather nice distinction. I don't love it or think it was particularly good, but I did think it was quite well suited to the occasion and certainly have no problem calling it a poem (given the current scope of what is described as poetry). I can totally see that the way she's been promoted as "the" voice of her generation is irritating especially if you know much more than I do about the alternatives. I suppose "public poet" is a particular kind of role, one that most acclaimed poets wouldn't want to play and wouldn't be much good at.
Good insights and knowledge, as always. I take the point about the context - the occasion, form and purpose of the poem. I mostly didn't like it because I found it schmaltzy, glassy-eyed; and am not keen on the idea of poem as politically commissioned eulogy, or poet as evangeliser. That's marketing, public relations to me. Still - I think Katie Dozier's criticism missed the point: it wasn't a poem intended for unravelling, but for immediacy.
Thanks for commenting Neil and sorry for the slow reply. Yes I think you speak for many in saying honestly that you just don't think poetry is for this kind of thing. That's an unusual perspective, historically speaking, but it's also I think the consensus one today. I have always found panegyric rather fascinating, but even classicists tend to steer clear these days!
You’ve set me thinking, maybe slightly at a tangent, about good and bad examples, although I guess it’s a long trajectory way back to those old Greeks. Kavanagh wrote a powerful poem-eulogy to the Irish Labour leader James Larkin - it still works as a poem, for all its particularity to the times. Can’t resist revisiting Neruda’s odes to Stalin - surely contenders for the most brutally delusional poems ever committed to print by a famous poet. They’re so bad they unintentionally funny. Yevtushenko’s riposte at Stalin’s mausoleum is superb in its dissection and subtle demolition of reputations.