Why is everyone talking about Amanda Gorman? The young poet who became a worldwide phenomenon in 5 minutes

It was only seconds after concluding his presentation at the US Library of Congress that the audience, gaping, rose to dedicate a standing ovation to Amanda Gorman, winner of the 2017 National Young Poetry Prize.

Among the participants there was a language teacher named Jill Biden.

A few years later, as Biden prepared for her husband’s presidential inauguration ceremony, she immediately knew who wanted to close the act.

On January 20, the first day of Joe Biden’s presidency, a new page in the history of the United States, the entire country was speechless and applauded his election.

Chronicle of a committee

Gorman, social justice activist since age 16, now Harvard student, was commissioned to compose a poem for the occasion in December.

To prepare, read previous inaugural poems, went back to Abraham Lincoln’s texts to understand how to speak to a divided country. He was in the middle of his job when the Capitol robbery occurred.

“I won’t say he ruined the poem because I wasn’t surprised I had seen the signs and symptoms a long time ago. But it motivated me even more to firmly believe in a message of hope, unity and healing. It was the kind of poem I needed to write and the kind the country and the world needed to hear, ”Gorman explained.

His verses were the perfect echo of Biden’s speech, a powerful lyrical version of the message of unity the new president sent to the country without closing his eyes.

“In a way, we have resisted and witnessed a nation that is not broken, but incomplete. We, the successors of a country and a time when a skinny black girl descended from slaves and was raised by a single mother can dream of being president and one day find out that she is reciting for you, ”proclaimed Gorman (yes, he has long said he plans to run for president in 2036, when he will be of legal minimum age).

The Capitol auditorium was speechless during the five minutes that the recitation of his poem lasted, The hill that we climb (The hill we climbed).

Some could not contain their exclamations of admiration when, punctuating every word with his hands and a broad smile, Gorman recalled how Americans saw the forces that can destroy the country and they were about to get there.

But while democracy can sometimes be delayed, proclaimed Gorman, “it can never be defeated.” “Democracy prevailed,” Biden had said a few minutes earlier.

Like the day the first lady met her Gorman dressed in yellow. Her hair, as political as her poetry, was tied up in dreadlocks in a strong bun.

Hearing it recite with such skill and confidence, it was hard to guess that the poet and the president had anything in common beyond their verse and prose. Both had to overcome big obstacles be able to speak in public.

Biden was a stutterer child and overcame his condition reciting Irish poets facing the mirror. Gorman also found in poetry a platform to overcome his limitations.

The poet, who has a twin sister and they were born prematurely, drags difficulty pronouncing certain letters, like wandering or sh sound.

Until a few years ago, she still had a hard time saying her own last name or the name of the school where she studied in Los Angeles, where, as she put it to the country, she was raised by a single mother, a teacher.

“Poetry found me,” he told public broadcaster PBS after receiving his first major award. he the crush happened when I was 7 or 8 years old. He wrote verses in the schoolyard. Then he started to recite.

Gorman’s poetry is a cry for social justice. At 16, he created an NGO to help other children read and write better. Literacy and democracy go hand in hand, defends.

Shocked by Donald Trump’s victory, she wrote in 2016 We the people (We the people, first words of the American Constitution), a reflection on who counts and who doesn’t in American democracy.

The poem she recited when she received the National Award and heard by Jill Biden is titled In this place (an American lyric) (In this place, an American letter) and discusses what some places in the United States tell us, scenarios to celebrate and others to reflect on and look at head on, such as Charlottesville where a bloody white supremacist demonstration has took place this summer.

Trump’s response to these events led Joe Biden to run for office. And Jill led him to Gorman.

The author is Washington correspondent of La Vanguardia

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