I've started a thread at Musing on Mastery so people who want to celebrate sports poetry don't have to do it in the Amanda Gorman thread.

Poet analyzes the GENIUS behind Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural poem ‘The Hill We Climb’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyjUG1zwjeo

Julie, people who want to celebrate sports poetry, is just so fucking funny. To me. Carry on.

Martin, thanks for the link. I was impressed with the analysis, so clicked on the YouTube channel (New Dream) to see what else they've done and am excited to explore it, too. Here it is.

Julie mentioned earlier an online event — Lift Every Voice: Why African American Poetry Matters — presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. I tuned into it last evening. It was excellent. It was hosted by Kevin Young, poetry editor at The New Yorker Magazine. Amanda Gorman is the last poet to read. Here it is.

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Amanda Gorman - “The Hill We Climb” & Activism Through Poetry | The Daily Social Distancing Show

Amanda Gorman discusses reading her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration, what poetry means to her and her upcoming Super Bowl performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRGO5g1rqTw

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Finally a reason to watch the Super Bowl halftime show (or maybe she follows the pre-game sit-down interview with Biden?)

It flies in the face of everything Super Bowl halftime shows have ever been. I don't know if I should see it as a harbinger of hope or a doomsday prayer.

Throw us a Hail Mary Amanda.
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William Logan Tears "The Hill We Climb" Apart

Duncan

Logan makes some good points. In fact, I can't attack his argument at the textual level, but he seems to miss the much larger point, in that the poem isn't really wanted as a poem, or even a piece of intelligent rhetoric, it is wanted (maybe needed by some) as a message of hope, a reassurance that the times previous will not be repeated by the times ahead. I don't really agree with its message (much too simplistic and vague), and its style (clichéd and at times boring), but context, if not everything, is something, and Logan should remember that.
I also think that his overall judgement of her as an extremely flawed poet from the evidence of just one, occasional poem, is suspect to say the least.

I was never one of those drawn in by the poet's reading, or the poem's sentiment. But I am trying to understand the reasons why so many others were.

Here's the bit of the poem I would have asked her to reconsider, had she workshopped it here:

That line (bolding mine) was delivered with a sense of triumph that I didn't understand. "Only" finding oneself reciting for a president, after having dreamed of becoming one, struck me as a deflatingly anticlimactic consolation prize.

But that's my only quibble. Feel-good clichés delivered by an intelligent, attractive, hopeful, young person are exactly what was required at the inauguration of an old white guy who acknowledges the difficulties of the next four years.

"...as a message of hope, a reassurance that the times previous will not be repeated by the times ahead"--in other words, shitlib propaganda.