Poet/President

In a CNN opinion piece last week, Ashley M. Jones’s quotation from the 1977 essay by Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” could have been written about “The Hill We Climb,” the poem Amanda Gorman wrote for President Biden’s inauguration:

               Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

“The Hill We Climb” begins with one of the images of light that appears frequently in Gorman’s poems:

When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

It continues with a call to action:

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.

Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.

… We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.

And when it ends light is action:

For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

After Gorman’s brilliant and inspirational performance (a word I use deliberately because it was so much more than a reading) at the inauguration, I have been telling everyone I intend to vote for her as president. She plans to run in 2036, the first year she will be eligible. However, then I began to think that perhaps what this country needs more than another presidential candidate is a poet. Can we have both, I wonder?

Timothy Egan, in his New York Times opinion piece, “A President Can Govern in Poetry,”  writes that Biden has turned to “the healing power of Irish poetry” during times of personal tragedy and disappointment. He says that Biden is known for his empathy and for a quality he shares with Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln, “the belief in the power of why not?” According to Egan, “that’s the province of poets, not policy wonks.”

It remains to be seen if Biden, or anyone between now and 2036, can govern in poetry. Nor do I know what Amanda Gorman would need to do between now and then to sustain her poetry – and her soul - while engaging with the world of politics. I can only hope she doesn’t have to choose.