Amanda Gorman's “The Hill We Climb” (Full Text)
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
It's verbose:
> 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 doesn't make sense. (You can't be the successor of a country, you even more can't be the successor of the present instant happening right now.)
It's content-free, like a bad political speech. "We are striving to forge our union with purpose." As opposed to striving to forge it accidentally?
It's clichéd: "We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.... while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us." Honestly, this reads like something GPT-3 might come up with.
It uses rhyme for cheap effect: "We seek harm to none and harmony for all."
I expected something as bad as Maya Angelou (brutally reviewed by Paul Beatty at https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/black-humor....). This is worse. It is a shame, when there are black poets like Derek Walcott out there. People get exposed to this kind of "uplifting" stuff and will think that's all there is.
Ex:
- "vim sucks! why don't people use emacs instead?"
- "katy perry's music sucks!"
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Many liked it. Many did not - yourself included. That's okay. Art does not evoke the same response from everyone and we should not expect it to.
But consider your example, software. People have strong emotions about, say, Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux as a platform. This isn't just about the feels. Real issues are at stake. The Unix-hater's handbook points out how "root" was a terrible security model. Similar comments might apply to Windows.
Well, I think art matters too. There's no bright line between "art" and the other ways people have of expressing ideas (political speeches, say). If our art is clichéd, it means our ideas are clichéd. At worst, it means we are hiding from reality in a bubble of uplift and togetherness. At present (in my view as an outsider) Americans really need to come together as a nation - but that will require more than repeating the clichés of one's own political tribe. So in that sense, I think this poem is a bad omen.
The comment gives sound reasons for not liking the poem, it does not resort to the kind of cheap shots you describe. (Which by the way don’t really qualify as criticism)
Without critical perspective there would be no such thing as great art. We need more critical thinking, not less.
Update: heh, my fastest-downvoted comment. Yup, I'm definitely right.
That's really not how that works, kinda like how pirates don't prevent global warming [1]
[1] https://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/hilarious-...
That's just, like, your opinion dash2.
Seriously, sure, this isn't like a maths problem. But we can have reasoned opinions about art, just as we can have reasoned opinions about whether, say, a piece of software is well or badly written, given that it does what it's technically supposed to. I'm not just saying it's bad because it gave me a nasty feeling in my tummy.
In particular, poetry and art contain ideas. They express ideas powerfully and viscerally. It matters whether we have good or bad ideas, thinking or hot air, new understanding or stale clichés. In this sense, art isn't just like a bag of cheetos. It has consequences. That's why dictatorships have often censored good art, and supported bad art. Good art can express new thoughts. I think the US will need a lot of new thoughts in the next four years.
" ... it was then that you
saw him in his own exile and you
paid for him and kept him until he
could fly again and you let him go
but then where could he go in the world
of your time with its wars everywhere
and the soldiers hungry the fires lit
the knives out twelve hundred years ago.""My journey to black literary insobriety isn't so different from how I came to appreciate free jazz after growing up in a house that contained two records, the soundtrack to "Enter the Dragon" and "Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan." It turns out that I enjoy never fully understanding what's in front of me, and I masochistically relish being offended while thinking about why I feel offended and if I should feel offended. I also live in Manhattan's East Village."
“I made it through the first couple of pages or so before a strong sense of doom overwhelmed me and I began to get very suspicious. I ventured another paragraph, growing ever-more oppressed with each maudlin passage. My lips thickened … For a black child like myself who was impoverished every other week while waiting for his mother’s bimonthly paydays, giving me a copy of that book was the educational equivalent of giving the prairie Indians blankets laced with smallpox or putting saltpeter in a sailor’s soup.”
Speech can change things. I once heard a brilliant reading of someone's translations of Mickiewicz (Poland's national poet). I bought the book and it was disappointing how the stuff didn't stand up on the page. Really good work - at least in poetry - should be able to cope with being read as well as being listened to.
The union being forged with purpose seems more about there being a purpose instilled in the union and also ‘purpose’ as the raw material being forged.
The part you call cliché is perhaps not that deep, but fits within the expected patriotic idealism the poem invokes. It’s also good sonically.
The ‘cheap effect’ is just more concentrated youthful idealism, of the sort encoded in our founding documents and pledges.
> You can't be the successor of a country,
The we to whom it is addressed constitute a country, and can certainly be collectively successors to the past state of that country
> you even more can't be the successor of the present instant happening right now
But the time it referenced began in the (close, but still) past from the time it was recited, and the emphasis on that as already a past that we are already successors to when we contemplate it fits quite well with the theme of continuous progress of the poem.
> It's content-free, like a bad political speech. "We are striving to forge our union with purpose." As opposed to striving to forge it accidentally?
No, striving for common direction instead of perfection (though putting it that way in a poem would be inexcusable); you need to stop reading sentences alone out of context: “...that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose.”
> It's clichéd: "We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.... while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us."
That’s a fairly specific reference, not cliché.
> It uses rhyme for cheap effect: "We seek harm to none and harmony for all."
That's...not using rhyme for cheap effect.
> It is a shame, when there are black poets like Derek Walcott out there
Kind of an odd alternative to hold out to a US inaugural poet, as Walcott is, while certainly Black (as now an absolute majority of such poets have been) both not-American and dead.
> I expected something as bad as Maya Angelou
Pretty much all the negative criticism of “On the Pulse of Morning" is of it as a decontextualized text, rather than in its actual role. And it take someone taking the same approach to Gorman’s work and blindly expecting everyone else to do the same to even begin to think the sentence the phrase “as bad as Maya Angelou” is something that could even sensibly be used, non-ironically, in this context.
> brutally reviewed by Paul Beatty
That isn't a review, of a throw away statement of distaste for a work. Which isn't the same thing.
> People get exposed to this kind of "uplifting" stuff and will think that's all there is.
While it is certainly not a requirement for poetry to be either targeted at a broad audience or uplifting, any art has a context and intended audience, and inaugural poetry is a pretty specialized niche where both breadth of appeal and uplifting character are, usually, things that makes sense. Having more depth than just that is, of courses, to be hoped for, but Gorman’s piece did.
Agreed that Walcott, as a non-US corpse, would not make a great choice for an inaugural. How about Ocean Vuong? (I am looking, in an admittedly very superficial way, for a poet who ticks some appropriate diversity boxes - I take no position on whether that is the right thing to do - is AFAIK American, and is alive. He just comes to mind as someone who is also, you know, a rather good poet.)
Um,...?
Second, it's a much weaker statement. Compare "we are [imperfect], but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect." with "we are [imperfect], but that doesn’t mean we aren't striving to form a union that is perfect." The former can be reshaped to we are imperfect, therefore we are trying to form a union that is imperfect---it leaves open the possibility that you wish to make the union worse. The latter becomes we are imperfect but we are trying to form a union that is perfect.
It's probably a typo.
"More perfect" in this context is effectively "better."
Perfectionism, ironically, stunts improvements.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-55739805 - at about 1:12