The Poem

 

                  

You know the one I mean. The one Amanda Gorman read at Biden’s inauguration and has since parlayed into book deals, fashion shoots and lavish endorsements. This poem is now being translated into Dutch and Portuguese and probably a score languages I have never even heard of. As a son of the shrewd peasantry I object to none of this. Make hay while the sun shines is my motto. Nor do I object to anyone making a living. Is it a good poem though? Not to my ears unless hills are ‘golden limbed’ in a way I can’t quite picture. ‘We are striving to forge a union with purpose/To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man” is the kind clunky sentence I am continually crossing out of student essays. Nor is this use of ‘man’ as a generic pronoun now standard. “Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: That even as we grieved, we grew/ That even as we hurt, we hoped /That even as we tired, we tried”. This has a nice swing to it but does ‘the globe’ really sit around wondering if Americans have grown in grieving or hoped in their hurt? The globe, I assure all my American readers, does not speak or think this way and has its own problems to boot. Nor does it care if America, though tired, has really tried. Further, in the opening phrase, what is “if nothing else” supposed to exclude? The sun? Other globes in the solar system? “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?/ The loss we carry, a sea we must wade/We've braved the belly of the beast.” One needs long legs indeed to wade through a sea, though this is a minor fault I suppose. “Belly of the beast”, unfortunately, is a stock, clichéd phrase that evokes no belly of any beast one can picture vividly or shudder at the thought of. This beast is no Grendel or Polyphemus or any beast one has seen in a picture book as a child. It is, as we now say, an empty signifier.  

I realize, of course, that this criticism is neither here nor there for Amanda Gorman is an oral poet and her poem a performance whose language is not to be pressed in this way.  Plus, she is a popular poet and many poems not good at all technically can define or encapsulate a historic moment. One can discover this, say, by reading through abolitionist literature much of which is by popular, unpolished artists who rise to the great theme because it is human and pressing. “The Hill we Climb” is not waiting around anywhere for my judgment on it. Plus, and we all need to be honest about his, it is easier to find such flaws in the poems of others than to fix them in your own. What a poem is for and more importantly who is always a pertinent question. I am not the audience for this piece and cannot be as I shall explain presently. Further, ‘public poetry’ produced by laureates and court poets and those seeking to be laureates and court poets has a long history of being dire as anyone perusing the works of Dryden or Tennyson can quickly determine.  Finally, Ms. Gorman is 23 and may well grow as an artist. Indeed, she has a talent to build on though it is the sort of talent that can be suffocated by early fame.      

At bottom, though, the thing I find strange about this poem is the peculiar religiosity embodied in its words and images.[1] It is in a language as distant and alien to me as ancient Hittite. This is the language of inspiration and self-help. Its crisp homiletic cadences (which to some degree I admire) evoke aspiration, positivity, optimism and the triumph of the spirit. This is the language of the Church of America and it is a language I do not speak being employed by the poet in a liturgy I do not attend. No motivational speech has ever touched more than the rim of my consciousness nor have I ever been able to reach down into that well of positivity and affirmation, deep within, that would propel me to new heights of creative and personal endeavor (if, of course, I could just love and affirm myself enough).  Tragically, perhaps, I simply lack a brain that can process uplifting sentiments of this, or any other, kind. This ‘religion of America’ embodies itself in the dizzying optimism of Mormon mythology as much as in endless secular evocations of aspiration and hope. I have lived in the U.S. but this, its native language, is one I simply can’t grasp. Pelagian projections of endless self-improvement and patriotic cheerleading leave me puzzled and cold. I simply don’t know what it is like to feel such sentiments. 

All of this is secular religiosity is embodied in one particular verse of this poem: “So while once we asked/ how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert/ How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?” This is the kind of boast that once brought down the wrath of the Gods. Previous nations who succumbed to catastrophe, it would seem, simply lacked motivational speakers. What could this verse mean to any sane, thinking human being? Who asserts themselves above catastrophe and by what special virtue or fortune? Gorman seems to be dreaming of a new race of supermen which is maybe, as a well- intentioned and progressive poet, not a place she would really want to go. It is unfair to compare this verse with the Beowulf poet in terms of poetic quality (that would be comparing apples and oranges) but is it unfair to compare it in terms of maturity and wisdom? For the ancient bard no hero can brag that he transcends wyrd or the will of God whichever may be in control of events. Catastrophe comes to all in the order of time: “…but the raven winging/ darkly over the doomed will have news/tidings for the eagle of how he hoked and ate/ how the wolf and he made short work of the dead.”    

Further, all of this hope and optimism comes with an infallible guarantee. Democracy, we are told, is invincible and, in spite of what we have seen in the last four years, cannot fail: “But while democracy can be periodically delayed/it can never be permanently defeated/In this truth in this faith we trust/ For while we have our eyes on the future/history has its eyes on us.” Who is this ‘history’ who has eyes on ‘us’ specifically (by which I assume she means Americans)? Is he, she, it God? Well, God could indeed ensure the ultimate victory of democracy though he has not, for any other nation, hitherto done so. I fully realize, however, that the language of “The Hill We Climb” is not to be read closely. Like inspirational poetry everywhere it is for momentary uplift. There is one flaw I need to note about this kind of discourse, however, which it is possible to state quite exactly: Gorman is purveying religious sentiment in a secular context where such sentiment cannot actually mean anything. It presents the language and feeling of theological hope without the theology or the hope. God, the God who saves, is now the tame abstraction ‘history’ who looks approvingly on while America saves itself by summoning its own greatness and resolve, the greatness and resolve by which it wills itself impervious to catastrophe. I mentioned empty signifiers before but these are, for me, the emptiest. Obama invoked hope and gave us drones and Biden, though he is better than that other guy, will be more of the same.             

 

 

 

 

[1] After all, the sea which we will be wading is the Red Sea though the Hebrews actually crossed it dry shod. The belly of the beast is in Jonah’s whale though the image is now too shop-worn to evoke it effectively. Such imagery pervades the secular culture of America which is not really that secular and ‘scripture’ actually turns up at one point in the poem. Of course all of this is at a hundred removes from the ancient texts themselves which are too violent, shocking and alive for our anesthetized sensibilities.