The Power of Poetry

 
(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

 

Raise your hand if, on January 1, you suspected that the most universally celebrated American figure of the first part of 2021 would be a 22 year-old poet. In the early days of this year, we’ve had an Inauguration and a Super Bowl—and Amanda Gorman reciting her verse at each. Occasionally, a poet becomes a celebrated figure in American public life, but it’s not a frequent occurrence, and it seldom happens as quickly as it has with Gorman.  

Many listeners hear poetry in the lyrics and forms of different musical traditions, from folk to hip-hop to country. Yet there is a difference, I think, between The Weeknd performing for the Super Bowl halftime show and Amanda Gorman reciting an original poem praising pandemic heroes in advance of the big game. What’s going on here?

Part of it has to do with Gorman’s transcendent skill with language and meter and rhythm, and her preternatural capacity for finding truths in what she has lived and observed. It’s not difficult to see Gorman as a generational talent whose voice is going to describe an American experience for the next half-century. But beyond her gifts, I imagine that there is something about our present moment that may be calling us collectively to poetry.

Employing language to investigate, discover, or express what we think, feel, and believe is decidedly, and even instinctually, human, but there may be periods where such efforts—and specific forms of such efforts—feel especially necessary. We are in a time of deep anxiety, anger, or fear about our world, with its interminable pandemic, its political polarization, its social and economic dislocation, and so on. In such circumstances, poetry gives voice to our deepest longings for hope, for release, for solidity. These lines speak to us:

So while once we asked
how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

That they are uttered by an author whose identity groups (women, Black folks, the young) have often had to whisper at the margins of a national conversation, is a monument to our redemptive potential, a needed prompt of the persistent demands and possibilities of our common humanity. A new, rare voice sharing an ancient form can provide signal amidst the cacophonous noise of our times.

Gorman’s example also reminds us that there’s never a bad time for poetry, either, and we need not wait for either crisis or once-in-a-lifetime talents to bring us to the power of verse. Poets have attached themselves to big themes of deep and abiding concern; indeed, our thinking on democracy, race, gender, sexuality, immigation, and public health would be the poorer without the likes of Walt Whitman, Langton Hughes, Audre Lorde, Alberto Rios, and William Carlos Williams, among others.  

If we hope for something quieter from poetry—the “blessed mood,” as William Wordsworth called it—it’s available to us in private spaces, too. My first son didn’t sleep well as a baby, and I would thus come to my classroom tired and cranky, only to find that one of my fellow teachers had left a poem on my desk. My need for hope, for release, for solidity was personal, not public, but it was very real—and my colleague helped me find it in verses whose rhythm, meter and the symbolism slowed me down, engaged me with nuance, and urged me to find meaning.  It wasn’t until I felt the words that I knew how much I needed them. As William Carolos Williams put it:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Head of School BlogJeremy Katz