The poet told the LA Times that she has struggled with since she was a child with a speech impediment that makes it hard for her to say certain sounds correctly.
We owe it / to show it / not slow it / although it / hurts to sew it / when the world / skirts below it.” She has also performed for luminaries including Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Now that we know it / we can’t blow it. The poem condemns the events in Charlottesville (“tiki torches string a ring of flame / tight round the wrist of night”), going on to speak of the importance of poetry as a form of resistance. In 2017, she read her poem In This Place (An American Lyric) at the inauguration of the 22nd US poet laureate, Tracy K Smith. Gorman might be the youngest writer to grace a presidential inauguration, but she is not a stranger to grand ceremonies. The theme of Biden’s inauguration is America United, and Gorman told the Associated Press that while she hadn’t been told what to write by organisers, she’d been encouraged to emphasise unity as opposed to “denigrating anyone” or declaring “ding, dong, the witch is dead” over the departure of Donald Trump. Hopefully, it will move us toward healing them.” And so, I crafted an inaugural poem that recognises these scars and these wounds. And I have to recognise that in the poem. It’s still in its early development of all that we can become. “I wasn’t trying to write something in which those events were painted as an irregularity or different from an America that I know,” she told the Los Angeles Times. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, / It can never be permanently defeated,” she has written. She shared a short extract with the New York Times: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, / Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. Gorman’s poem, The Hill We Climb, will touch on, although not reference directly, last week’s riots in the US Capitol. Gorman will be performing on Wednesday alongside Lady Gaga, who will be singing the American national anthem, and Jennifer Lopez. According to US reports, it was president-elect Joe Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, who recommended her as his inaugural poet. Gorman, who was born and raised in Los Angeles and studied sociology at Harvard, became America’s first-ever national youth poet laureate in 2017. At just 22, following in the footsteps of names including Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, she will also be the youngest. Amanda Gorman is set to become the sixth poet to perform at a presidential inauguration.
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