Amanda Gorman, who shot to fame when she recited her poem “The Hill We Climb” for Biden’s inauguration in 2021, just dropped a new poem that riffs heavily on the movie Wicked, and I think it’s pretty amazing.
I try not to open every (or even any) comment with a demographic confession — speaking as a healthy fully abled educated middle-class cis-het white man in a WEIRD nation — but in this context I kinda gotta. It’s not just that Gorman is a young African-American woman (b. 1998, LA), it’s that her poem is just one part of a complex, mediated conversation involving Ariana Grande (b. 1993, FL) and Cynthia Erivo (b. 1987, UK), among many others. All three are committed, clear-sighted women who’ve cultivated their respective crafts and built careers in worlds that would’ve profited just as much by crushing them. What I think about them and their work, in the sense of judgmental opinions, isn’t unique or interesting. And even if it is, so what? The idea that anyone has some obligation to opine on things that don’t really concern them needs to go away.
Traditionally, when privileged people (educated white guys like me, for example) have said I think, it was often a way to assert authority: the emphasis fell on I, and think was a sort of a steamroller that flattened everything in its path — nature, facts, others’ efforts, and so on. But I think can just as easily signal humility, with an I as in who am I to? and a think said tentatively, almost like a question.
That kind of signaling — less what we say than how we say it — often relies on intonation and mannerisms to convey how we relate to what we say: whether it’s a hill we’re willing to die on or some lame excuse we’re mocking, say, or whether we’re reciting Official Policy or something overheard on the street. The ways people modulate what they say vary widely across dialects and accents, so these signals face all kinds of new challenges in an increasingly internetworked world. If you want to see the glass as half-empty, you could note that the net is still very text-oriented, and brevity is rewarded, so all kinds of subtleties get lost. Or you could say the glass is half-full by pointing to new techniques — memes, emojis, internet slang, ever-faster trend cycles, the growing attention to genres / styles / patterns, even demographic confessions — as adaptive ways to convey subtleties in a world where technical mediation is becoming the rule.
And that brings us back to Gorman’s poem, which isn’t just a poem. It’s a video of her reciting a poem, complete with all kinds of sophisticated trappings: a stage with projections, theatrical lighting, a dramatic soundtrack, off-camera mics, slick cinematography, a half-dozen levels of styling, some special effects, and even a plug for the movie at the end, which suggests some formal intellectual-property agreement (if only to ward off a Youtube takedown). Kids today, right? Wrong.
Compare Gorman’s video to this recording of James Joyce reading from his Ulysses (via Public Domain Review, via the Internet Archive), made exactly a century ago. The contrast between the two couldn’t be more striking, but it’s worth focusing on what they share in common. Better yet, we could assume from the start that these two authors, poems, recitals, and genres form a continuity — say, in their embrace of the new, in their love of the spoken, in their dreams of liberation, and not least in being recorded.
Proposals like that aren’t very popular these days. They’re often reduced to some hidden or unwitting agenda, like trying to dignify Gorman by suggesting she’s “really” as great as Joyce or, to trying to make Joyce relatable by “appropriating” Gorman’s identity. Those criticisms are valid, if only because what I think doesn’t define what others think; or, more generously, because there’s lots to learn from taking criticisms seriously. But both of those interpretations assume that the relationship(s) between Gorman and Joyce are necessarily and only hierarchical. Those hierarchies are very real, but they aren’t exhaustive.
Now, if you you haven’t seen it yet, listen to, and watch, Gorman’s poem.