Her reply speaks to a deep understanding of the marvellous power of words, and their corrupting power as well: The wild ring of a caged bird on her right hand? A gift from Oprah as a tribute to another African-American poet, Maya Angelou.Ĭooper first asked her about her love not so much of images, but of the rhythm of the text. That yellow jacket and red headband? Prada. And strong men like Anderson Cooper nearly wept.Ĭooper also dug into Gorman’s suddenly public life and found something the media had treated the way they described her attire on Wednesday. Masha Gessen called it “a stunning vision of democracy” in the New Yorker. Amanda Gorman, at 22, is just the National Youth Poet Laureate.Īs for her performance at Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, a friend e-mailed me rapturously afterwards to say: “Her words, her delivery, her sentiment, her face.”īut suddenly, Amanda Gorman’s five-minute poem, The Hill We Climb, is being analysed like a major policy paper for our dreams of tomorrow. You know you’re not doing that for the money when the highest-paid poet in America, the Poet Laureate of the United States, is paid $35,000 a year. Her career of choice leaving Harvard was to be a poet. Yet today, they’re Number 1 and 2 on the Amazon Best-Seller list. Her two books of poetry, The Hill We Climb, and Change Sings, won’t be published until September. Then yesterday, she added a million new followers to it. First of all, she has a Twitter fanbase she can tweet to. Her star is rising faster than Trump’s is falling.
She got into Harvard honestly and graduated the same way. She was raised by her mother, a middle school teacher, in Los Angeles. She’s young and Black and smart and funny and self-effacing and beautiful. Amanda Gorman is as different from Donald Trump as any American can be.
0 kommentar(er)
