The name on everyone’s lips since the American presidential inauguration is Amanda Gorman. There’s a lot to say about this 22-year-old poet, and pundits are already having a field day. Yes, I am about to weigh in.
In the chatter I have seen online, one comment that keeps recurring is that she is a spoken word poet, and that spoken word doesn’t translate onto the page. I am not convinced. The words of the Anglo-Saxon scops have endured on the page and none other than Seamus Heaney has pointed out that the metrical patterning they used is the same as that employed by modern rappers and spoken word artists (see the introduction to his translation of Beowulf ).
The words of Xhosa oral poets and West African griots have survived translation and transcription, as have those of bards from multiple other oral traditions around the world. We don’t have to look beyond Linton Kwesi Johnson or Kae Tempest or Lebogang Mashile or Wayde Compton or Ian Keteku or Titilope Sonuga to find contemporary poets whose work has moved readily from mouth to page.
Problems arise because we are no longer practised in the skills that allow us to make these cultural and stylistic transitions readily, or that we are not ready to let go of our own (biased) assumptions of what poetry is or should be.
To those who give primacy to the page, the orality of spoken word feels strange, and as page poetry moves to more cerebral, theoretical frames, oral/aural moments can become even harder to comprehend. By contrast, those who dwell among the sounds of spoken word are trained in different literacies, where the page takes back stage.
Which brings me to Amanda Gorman and the way these two forms have met and clashed in the discussions. In online transcriptions I’ve seen, what worries me is not her skill as a poet, but the inability of those responsible for bringing her words to the page to treat her words with respect. Take these lines from Marie Claire’s version:
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.
It’s a block of text that reads like prose. No wonder pundits ask whether this is a speech or a poem. Marie Claire are not the only ones who have rendered Amanda’s words in this way. (There’s lots more to say about which media outlets have paid attention to form, and which haven’t, but I’m already distracted enough.)
Now listen to Amanda recite her words, and hear how the cadence of her voice creates units of meaning. I have marked these places with a slash:
We, the successors of a country / and a time / where a skinny Black girl / descended from slaves / and raised by a single mother/ can dream / of becoming president / only to find herself / reciting for one.
Let’s take these units of meaning and re-arrange them in more traditional poetic form:
We, the successors of a country
and a time
where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves
and raised by a single mother
can dream
of becoming president
only to find herself
reciting for one.
See how suddenly her words not only begin to look like “poetry”, but how, with the units clearly marked for the reader, their meaning becomes amplified. See how key words and phrases like “Black girl” and “single mother” and “slaves” rise from mass of words and how they form the heart of the passage, eclipsing words like “country” and “president” that bookend the excerpt. Notice how she pushes past the word “president” to say “find herself”.
When I wear my editor hat and try to render these words on the page, my role is not to comment on the “poetry” or to suggest the breaks I find are the only ones available.[1] My role is to listen to Amanda’s voice and to make her words reach easily across styles and media, to make them come alive on the page by paying respect to the cadences and rhythms she provides.
Perhaps, ultimately, the problem is not whether this is a speech or a poem, or whether spoken word can survive on the page. Perhaps the real failure is our failure to listen, or perhaps it is the ease with which we dismiss these words of a Black woman by deeming their context and their structure unimportant.
Perhaps it is not whether spoken word can survive on the page, but whether a Black woman can survive.
Note
[1] The LA Times offers a different structure:
We, the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny black girl descended from slaves
And raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president,
Only to find herself reciting for one. (LA Times, January 20, 2021)