I thought she was excellent
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/us/politics/amanda-gorman-poet.htmlWhen Amanda Gorman, 22, recited her poem at President Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, she became the youngest inaugural poet ever in the United States and joined a small group of poets who have been recruited to help mark a presidential inauguration, among them Robert Frost, Maya Angelou and Miller Williams.
About two weeks ago, Ms. Gorman was struggling to finish a new work titled “The Hill We Climb.” She was feeling exhausted, and she worried she wasn’t up to the monumental task she faced: composing a poem about national unity to recite at a ceremony that would be watched by millions.
“I had this huge thing, probably one of the most important things I’ll ever do in my career,” she said in an interview. “It was like, if I try to climb this mountain all at once, I’m just going to pass out.”
Ms. Gorman managed to write a few lines a day and was about halfway through the poem on Jan. 6, when pro-Trump rioters stormed into the halls of Congress, some bearing weapons and Confederate flags. She stayed awake late into the night and finished the poem, adding verses about the apocalyptic scene that unfolded at the Capitol that day:
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
It can never be permanently defeated.
Ms. Gorman fell in love with poetry at a young age and distinguished herself quickly as a rising talent. Raised in Los Angeles, where her mother teaches middle school, she would write in journals at the playground. At 16, she was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. A few years later, when she was studying sociology at Harvard, she became the National Youth Poet Laureate, the first person to hold the position.
Still, while she has been in the spotlight before, she had never performed her work for a televised audience that will likely number in the tens of millions.
Plus, none of Ms. Gorman’s inaugural poet predecessors faced the challenge that she did. She set out to write a poem that would inspire hope and foster a sense of collective purpose, at a moment when Americans are reeling from a deadly pandemic, political violence and partisan division.
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