What Poetry Reveals To Us
After the trauma of 9/11, I had the chance to interview then-U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. He told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said, “At a time like this, no one asks what short story should I read or what film should I go see. They ask, ‘Do you have a poem?’”
Poetry’s capacity to reveal our yearnings, draw meaning from our struggles and hold a mirror to ourselves is among the reasons it endures. With regal bearing and firmness of purpose, poet Amanda Gorman reminded us of that at the Biden inauguration, touching millions of hearts with her anthem to 21st century America, “The Hill We Climb.”
The depth of Ms. Gorman’s insights, the keenness of her observations, the musicality of her words shows just what a worthy descendant she is of poets throughout our history who have guided our understanding of who we are as people and a nation.
Speaking to Politico, Andrew Anabi of the New York poetry collective Pool House noted how the out-pouring of affection for Ms. Gorman’s reading illustrates the crucial role poetry can play in a time of widespread isolation. Poetry becomes a “direct way to talk about difficult conversations.”
Poets, indeed all artists, are able to spin out — even dance with — ideas that can prove elusive to hold through other means.
Writing more than 150 years ago, when our nation was still expanding, Walt Whitman was able to distill the essence of the American undertaking. His poem “Song of Myself” more aptly might have been titled “Ode to Everyone,” because in it this son of Brooklyn captures the energy, diversity and expansive possibilities of a flowering nation:
Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same …
A century later, Allen Ginsberg, a son of New Jersey who considered himself one of Whitman’s poetic heirs, let loose the equivalent of a poetic wail. His poem “Howl” forced us to confront how, within a few generations, we had become alienated to one an other by a mass marketing, money-making, war-making apparatus of our own creation:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for an angry fix,
angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night …
Like Ms. Gorman, poets who read at inaugurations attempt to turn us toward our better angels, though in far gentler terms than Ginsberg used. America’s first inaugural poet, Robert Frost, celebrated our land — “the gift outright” we fought for, cultivated, claimed and stole, even as we gave ourselves to the land.
You might say each inaugural poem ever since has improvised on the themes of resilience and hope.
Bill Clinton chose Arkansas Poet Laureate Miller Williams to commemorate his second inauguration in 1997. Williams wasn’t as renowned as Maya Angelou, who read at Clinton’s first inauguration. Nor did Williams’ poem “Of History and Hope” receive as widespread distribution as Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning.”
Yet Williams, whose poetry was once described as “taught at Princeton and Harvard, and read and understood by squirrel hunters and taxi drivers,” was perhaps just the person the country needed to hear as it leaned toward a new millennium during a weary and cynical time.
His poem “Of History and Hope” seemed to channel what we, as a people, were yearning to re-discover about ourselves:
We know what we have done and what we have said,
And how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
Believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become —
Just and compassionate, equal, able, and free …
When Barack Obama took the oath of office for the first time, the country was confronting the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In “Praise Song for the Day,” Elizabeth Alexander reflected on the ability of ordinary people to do what needs to be done, even in the face of catastrophe:
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
A hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
Repairing the things in need of repair …
President Obama tapped the son of Cuban refugees to read at his 2013 inauguration. It took place just weeks after a shooter killed 20 children, eight adults and wounded two others at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It is a tragedy Richard Blanco laments in “One Today,” even as he seeks to weave a tapestry of what unites us:
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always — home,
always under one sky, our sky …
For the Biden inauguration, Ms. Gorman, the nation’s first Youth Poet Laureate, deftly built on each of the themes of her predecessors. Doing so, she washed from memory — at least for a moment — the bitterness, anger, chaos and grief of the past several months.
My favorite lines came at the end of her poem which promised:
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light if only
We’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Broadway composer Lin-Manuel Miranda commented afterward that “the right words in the right order can change the world.” I like to think that’s true. I pray that Ms. Gorman’s words shifted something in the American soul.
May we reflect this week on each of these poems, and on other poems we love. If we become better because of it, poetry will have shown itself once again to be America’s truest “gift outright.”
