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Poet Amanda Gorman On Activism And Art In Times Of Darkness
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Editor's Note: This segment was rebroadcast on Jan. 18, 2021. Listen to the audio here.
In the midst of the pandemic and calls for racial justice, many artists are using their energies to help advocate for transformative change.
Amanda Gorman, the nation's first Youth Poet Laureate, is among them. The 22-year-old graduated from Harvard earlier this year and is using her talent to offer words of hope and understanding.
Here & Now's Tonya Mosley speaks with Gorman about poetry as a tool for activism.
Notes on the State
An Erasure Poem of Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia"
By Amanda Gorman
Notes on the state
I find
uttered a
thought
the level of
Plain
; never
painting or sculpture.
Music gifted.
whites
have been found capable
of imagining.
Whether they will be
the composition
of a more extensive
or
complicated harmony,
is yet to be proved.
Misery is often.
poetry is misery enough
God knows poetry.
Love is peculiar
of the poet. ardent,
but it
kindles only
the imagination.
Religion indeed;
a Phyllis
could produce
published
under her name
the dignity of
What Words Begin
By Amanda Gorman
The word ‘race’ first arose
In the English language in 1508. Of course,
It appeared where all
words are born:
a poem. when
A Scottish writer
Spoke of a long line of kings,
And the dancing deadly sin of envy.
So what is a poem, if not a beginning?
An announcement that heralds itself?
Moments of air molded like melted wax.
I always thought language was
Akin to the body,
Padlocked oh so delicately to a pulse.
It tells you in the beginning was the word.
This was before 1619, before Trayvon, before Till,
Before Malcolm and Martin and Michael went still.
Before the echo that is breath’s
Pilgrimage to the start of the sound.
Before the inception of a new poem,
When I am bent and gasping,
Stripped skinny, thatched thin,
A wild note waiting to be sung.
I am braced against beginnings
I cannot name, my breath wheezing
So hard as to stain the haze of night.
My teeth are bared,
My tongue a rare thing, flared and forked.
I’m the damsel. The dragon. The dork.
A furious flower--
I dare you: bury me, wilting, under your feet.
For what is stepped on cannot be stepped over.
So I’m still not sure if words
Are something the page pulls from me,
Or the page pulls me from.
All the same, I am parcel to a we
That is enviously gibbous, glamorous.
Letters clamorous in the damp dip of the tongue.
Think: if sorrow made slaves sing,
Bronze faces polished with light,
Might we write a hymn
That fills the mouth tight with wind.
Maybe we can dream of lettering a lyric
Loud enough to crack the lung.
I want to speak a blackness that
Is something to celebrate
And something to shovel;
The soil from which all of us start.
Buried deep down within me,
Under the skin, like a secret skeleton.
The shell that keeps us standing.
Let our verses grab the globe by the ear,
Like a black grandma tugging a toddler straight.
Let us arrive on the backs of words
That give air its meanings,
So that the next time historians speak of race,
A long line of kings,
They’ll see us,
our crescent smiles naked and nascent,
Shining so bright they make others black with envy.
We tell the kingdom we are deadly,
And dancing, too. The heralds announce that
Our race has just arisen
From the flowerbeds
where our seeds have always been.
We grin,
Recognizing our reign isn’t words,
But the world words begin.
This segment aired on October 15, 2020.