Since JFK, every Democratic president has invited a poet to read at the inauguration. Poetry has also been absent from every Republican inauguration since then. These are just the facts, ma’am.
At Biden’s inauguration, Amanda Gorman, the youngest person invited to present a reading at a presidential inauguration (22) and who bears the title of U.S.’s first youth poet laureate, transfixed us with her verse. In her reading of “The Hill We Climb,” she references herself:
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
As a mom who is working for a better world for my son and his generation to grow up in, her reading touched me to the core of my being. As a lover of poetry, I was proud that a poem could help punctuate the political moment. Those who might not normally be receptive to poetry, let alone attend a poetry reading, were a captive audience as she read aloud her call for unity and justice and a reckoning with America’s past.
You can read the transcript of her poetic performance, which was just under six minutes, but don’t skip the performance. This was a poem heard around the world signaling better days as we emerge from the crouch of the Trump years, daring us not to let something in our souls be rendered loose.
Élan Young 