Presidential Poetry
This week: conversations about presidents and poetry with Marianne Williamson, Eileen Myles, Stephanie Burt, Clint Smith, and Christian Lorentzen. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime at our site.
The poet Amanda Gorman seized the nation’s attention at Joe Biden’s inauguration, and she’ll continue to do so at the Super Bowl. It’s a new day for televisual literature, a convergence of performance poetry, celebrity, mass media, and presidential politics. This week, we talk about it all with writers, including two who have themselves run for president.
Eileen Myles is one of those presidential writers (she ran in 1992); she’s a poet who knows the form’s popular and political resonance in the US:
I was a kid when Kennedy was inaugurated and Robert Frost was trotted out. And for me, it was the first time I saw a poet in public. I was like, whoa, who is that old guy? And the wind was blowing and his creaky pages and “my little horse,” and it just invented the poet for me. So I think that spot is the biggest poetry gig in the world. And it even institutionalizes poetry is a fact in America, which is interestingly cultured, to say the least. I mean, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco had their moments. But I just think that nobody has really knocked it out of the park since Robert Frost as much as Amanda Gorman did.
The poet and scholar Clint Smith has known Amanda Gorman for some time. He tells us that she’s part of a specific tradition that draws from one essential fact about poetry, which is that it’s long existed to be performed, spoken, recited:
You can see in her performance that she comes from the performance poetry tradition, that she is someone who who takes seriously the cadence and the tone and full-body embodiment, if you will, of what the poem can do. It is not just the language. It is also the way your hands move. It is also the way your voice rises and falls. It’s also the speed with which you you speak.
So much of our history in the way that we teach poetry is that it puts performance poetry or spoken word or slam poetry or whatever you want to call it, lower on the literary hierarchy than other forms of poetry. And you know one that is something that is imbued with a lot of racism, something that’s imbued with a lot of classism. And then secondly, it’s also deeply ahistorical. Part of what we know is that, for the most part, poetry and literature generally didn’t exist on the page until the mid-15th century and the advent of the printing press. For most of human civilization, poetry has always been an oral expression, an audible art form.
The poet and critic Stephanie Burt closely read Gorman’s inaugural poem for us, and compared it to the work of Kipling:
It is in dialogue with with American proverbs and even cliches — “while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.” That rhymes conceptually with the saying that justice delayed is justice denied, and it suggests that democracy, like justice, cannot forever be denied.
Now, there are a lot of things the poem doesn’t do that other kinds of poems with other goals will do. It is a poem that does not ask for extremely deep and subtle semantic scrutiny. It is not a difficult poem. It is not a poem that has especially elaborate or even original images. It is the kind of poem that the occasion demands, and Marianne Moore could not have written a poem like this
The historical analogue Burt finds for Gorman’s poem might be surprising:
This [poem] is Kipling-esque in a way. It’s odd to say that because people who know Kipling right now and haven’t read a lot of Kipling think of him as a supporter of the British Empire, which was not a good thing. And he was that. But he was so many other things. He was someone who was able to make poetry almost automatically memorable. He was someone whose work helped a lot of people who didn’t read lots and lots of poetry (and who didn’t read modernist poetry) carry it around in their hearts.
Similar directness and clarity have a central place, too, in today’s American fiction. The critic Christian Lorentzen tells us about the political contexts for that tendency:
Trump has debased the concept of public speech. You know, never before have we had a leader who so brazenly uttered statements that were clearly lies or simply had no value in terms of truth or falsehood. What does that mean for writers? I think most writers continue to resist that debasement of language.We’re in a literary era, when it comes to fiction, where our writers are not particularly difficult if we compare them to the writers of the postmodern period of the late ’60s and early ’70s or the writers who were working a hundred years ago at the first bloom of modernism.
Marianne Williamson is a bestselling author who ran for president in the most recent Democratic primary. She spoke to us about Gorman, but also about a different, ultra-democratic, maximally participatory kind of inaugural artistry: the Bernie Sanders inaugural memes.
Both Gorman’s poem and the Sanders memes, as Williamson describes them, spoke to some almost mythic, reality-expanding capacity of the American imagination (Gorman, Williamson says, was like a new Emma Lazarus). On the Bernie memes, Williamson tells us:
That day, it’s almost as though there was an alternate reality, a possibility that was not allowed to be manifest, but which so many of us wanted. I did feel it was a spontaneous eruption of our collective unconscious, because to us he was the man of the hour and there was such a love in all that. In those memes there was so much love. It was just a beautiful: “We love you, Bernie. We love you, Bernie.”
Together, through the power of our imaginations, Americans used that inaugural moment to open a portal into other worlds.
Read: Stephanie Burt’s Don’t Read Poetry
Poetry, even when spotlit, still often mystifies. Stephanie Burt excels at walking with us through the complexity, or the multiplicity, of poetry. See, for instance, her book Don’t Read Poetry:
I am here to say that anyone who tells you that they know how to read poetry, or what poetry really is, or what it is good for, or why you should read it, in general, is already getting it wrong. Poetry, the word, has many overlapping meanings, most of them about composition in verse; there are many such compositions, and many ways to write them, and many reasons to read them, and if you want to find or like or love or write more of them, the first thing to do is to start to tell them apart. Many people read poems for many reasons, and yours may not be your uncle’s, or your best friend’s, or your daughter’s, or your professor’s.
Watch: Clint Smith’s “Aristotle”
In our conversations about Amanda Gorman’s poem, we talk about the genre to which it partly belongs: performance poetry. Clint Smith spoke on this week’s show of his own experiences in performance poetry, and in the video below, you can see a filmed version of Smith reciting one of his poems:
This week’s ephemeral library
John Cassidy on the lessons of the coronavirus economy. Amanda Mull: the pandemic has erased entire categories of friendship. The NY Times ponders a strange year in cinema. For more Kiplingesque poetry, here’s “The Bell-Buoy,” by Kipling himself. Revisit our earlier show about Marianne Williamson. Listen to our 2016 Eileen Myles conversation, too!
That’s all for this week, folks. Stay warm and stay tuned.
Your OS poet laureates.
