| Out of the wreckage of the past and present, a poet forges a hopeful vision of a shared future. Amanda Gorman has had a busy year. In January, she became a household name overnight, after reciting her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s Inauguration. Since then, the twenty-three-year-old has signed a modelling contract, composed poetry for the Super Bowl, and co-hosted the Met Gala. She’s also written a new book, “Call Us What We Carry,” which will be released tomorrow. An exclusive excerpt was published in this week’s magazine, with additional poems published on our Web site today. Even in free verse, the subjects of Gorman’s poems are age-old: humanity and time, calamity and transcendence. The poet, in particular, has an important role to play in this vision of history. In “Ship’s Manifest,” Gorman establishes the role of the poet as a record-keeper: “the preserver / Of ghosts & gains, / Our demons & dreams, / Our haunts & hopes.” But the poet is an interpreter, too. “This book is awake. / This book is a wake,” she writes, signalling how history is dead and alive at once, something we are charged with writing, and also with reckoning. We are not me—
We are we.
Call us
What we carry. —from “Call Us” The word “inaugural” comes from the Latin verb inaugurāre, referring to ancient practices of interpreting signs and omens. For Gorman, the description feels apt. The speaker in her poems is both a historian and a soothsayer, casting a wary eye to the future while confronting the present and past. As our poetry editor, Kevin Young, writes of Gorman, “her invocation of the plural pronoun ‘we’ reminded us that, for good or literal ill, our lives are connected.” —Jessie Li, newsletter editor Read excerpts from Amanda Gorman’s “Call Us What We Carry.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment