{"id":1229,"date":"2021-01-22T13:53:27","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T13:53:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/?p=1229"},"modified":"2021-01-22T13:53:31","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T13:53:31","slug":"with-every-breath-from-my-bronze-pounded-chest-we-will-raise-this-wounded-world-into-a-wondrous-one-amanda-gormans-inaugural-poem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/2021\/01\/22\/with-every-breath-from-my-bronze-pounded-chest-we-will-raise-this-wounded-world-into-a-wondrous-one-amanda-gormans-inaugural-poem\/","title":{"rendered":"“With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one”: Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rarely does a poet capture the interest of the world\u2019s press amid the inauguration of an American president\u2014as the Guardian<\/a><\/em> put it: Amanda Gorman \u201cstole the inauguration show\u201d.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gorman addresses the president, then\nthe first lady, Dr. Biden\u2014with a palpable emphasis on \u2018doctor\u2019: an\nacknowledging doff, woman to woman\u2014before her narrative leans seamlessly from formal\naddress to poetry.  In this swaying shift\nbetween narrative modes, Gorman presents a complex, hybrid, blended space of\nart and activism, politics and poetics, logos, ethos and pathos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The seemingly natural spontaneity in a poem written both for<\/em> the inaugural moment and in<\/em> the moment through Gorman\u2019s august performativity inaugurates a new power for poetry. Gorman reminds us what poetry is for; we are reminded of its rhetorical, oral roots as a form and any former schisms between worlds of high politics and of art, poetry and aesthetics seem now so slight in this new poetry for new politics\u2014we hope.

The lexical texture of the poem is astonishing in its intricacy, as though the meshing of political and poetic fibres is somehow reflected in the consonantal weaving of the following line:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. (Gorman, 2021)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The linguistic sonority of the line pivots both accentually and alliteratively around the plangent semi-vowel \u2018w\u2019 like a plainchant\u2014and \u2018w\u2019, being somewhat liminal in phonetic quality embodies the blended space Gorman creates in almost gospel gravitas.\u00a0 Her 2017 poem \u201cIn this Place: An American Lyric\u201d,<\/a> exhibits the same riffing in the key of \u2018w\u2019, and sibilant \u2018s\u2019 counter-weaves through the texture in a kind of bitonal remix of language:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a poem in Los<\/strong> Angeles<\/strong>
yaw<\/strong>ning w<\/strong>ide as the Pac<\/strong>ific tide
w<\/strong>here a s<\/strong>ingle mother sw<\/strong>elters
in a w<\/strong>indow<\/strong>less<\/strong> class<\/strong>room, teaching
black and brow<\/strong>n s<\/strong>tudents<\/strong> in W<\/strong>atts<\/strong>
to s<\/strong>pell out their thoughts
<\/strong>so her daughter might w<\/strong>rite
this poem for you.\u00a0\u00a0 (Gorman, 2017)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0

<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This molecular interweave of phonemic alliteration on the stressed and unstressed parts of the word\u2014on their beats and their off-beats\u2014create innovative rhymical sequences which are developed further by syncopated assonances of rhyme though the lines in unexpected distributions. The splicing of \u201cjust is\u201d from \u201cjustice\u201d and the morphological \u2018sampling\u2019 of \u201carms\u201d to \u201charm\u201d to \u201charmony\u201d in her inaugural poem also destabilise and challenge the fixedness of words as their meaning blends semantically from one to the next. Just like people\u2014society\u2014language comes apart and then coalesces back together again.

The power of anaphora has long been the domain of both poetry and political speeches: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We will rise from the golden hills of the west.
We will rise from the wind-swept north-east where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked south.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.\u00a0 (Gorman, 2021)\u00a0

<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

These are the \u2018power-chords\u2019 of a poem seeped multimodal sampling from phoneme to morpheme to phrase. The repetition of the anthemic phrase \u2018we will rise\u2019 vaults through the lines to evoke a message of solidarity and activism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\npoem comes to rest on a couplet which formally resembles the beginning of a\nblues stanza where the opening line is repeated by the second line with minor variation\nin an echo of itself:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

if only we\u2019re brave enough to see it.
If only we\u2019re brave enough to be it. (Gorman, 2021)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It is\nnow apparent that Gorman is accessing and gathering the whole tapestry of\nAmerican poetics and political discourse to create a new poem for a new age: from\nthe Whitmanesque listing of subjects, identities, cultures, to the blues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gorman has always combined the spaces\nbetween poetry and politics, art and activism, and has woven a new blended\ndiscourse of both. In 2013, inspired by the Pakistani poet laureate, Malala\nYousafzai, Gorman became a youth delegate for the United Nations.  In 2016, Gorman founded One Pen One Page<\/em>,\na non-profit programme of free creative writing workshops to foster the talent\nof disenfranchised young writers and future leaders. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2014 saw her own inauguration as the Youth\nPoet Laureate for Los Angeles, her home city, and again in 2017 as the first African-American\nNational Youth Poet Laureate. In the same year, she opened the Library of\nCongress\u2019 literary season with the poem, \u201cIn this Place: An American Lyric\u201d to\ncommemorate the inauguration of the United States Poet Laureate, Tracy K.\nSmith. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gorman graduated from Harvard with a\ndegree in Sociology in 2020 and is the author of two poetry collections: The\nOne for Whom Food Is Not Enough<\/em> (Penmanship Books, 2015) and the forthcoming\nThe Hill We Climb <\/em>(Viking, September 2021).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you enjoyed Amanda Gorman\u2019s poetry, discover other African-American women poets, like Harryette Mullen<\/a> and Sonia Sanchez<\/a>.


<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rarely does a poet capture the interest of the world\u2019s press amid the inauguration of an American president\u2014as the Guardian put it: Amanda Gorman \u201cstole the inauguration show\u201d. Gorman addresses the president, then the first lady, Dr. Biden\u2014with a palpable … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":313,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[173515,40433],"class_list":["post-1229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-inauguration","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/313"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1230,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229\/revisions\/1230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.staffs.ac.uk\/ecw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}