Amanda Gorman recites her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” during the 59th Presidential Inauguration ceremony in Washington, Jan. 20, 2021. (DOD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Carlos M. Vazquez II)
Eight years ago, I wrote a post about Richard Blanco’s poem, “One Today,” presented by the poet at Barack Obama’s second inaugural. I was so moved by Amanda Gorman’s poem for Joe Biden’s inaugural this week, I wanted to read her poem for myself, by myself. I thought you might want to do that too. Gorman, the Youth Poet Laureate, delivered her poem vividly and dramatically. She was a sophisticated and stylish slam poet.
You can find the transcript here and you also might want to check out this site, where you can find all the inaugural poems. You might be surprised to find out that all the presidents who have invited inaugural poets have been Democrats. (Explain that to me, please.) The first was in 1961, by Robert Frost for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
In Gorman’s poem, I have added stanza breaks for easier reading, since the transcript is a single long text. If I find Gorman’s original text, I will replace this version.
The Hill We Climb
When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn’t always just-ice
Apple store, Michigan Avenue, Chicago. Photo by NSB.
To the glitzy, glassy Apple store
For iPhone repair…
Nothing serious, just a battery upgrade.
But—an hour a half, says Matt,
My Apple red-shirt guy.
(Beat.) An hour a half?
Without my phone? I don’t have my iPad … my laptop is at home.
It’s a strange feeling …
No electronic tether.
No one knows where I am
Sitting in a café on Michigan Avenue.
No one can call me or text me.
I don’t know who has answered my emails
Or sent out a plaintive call for help.
The question: Does anyone need me?
Do my sons think I’m on a cart in the ER?
Or—most likely—no one has noticed.
NOTE: If your old iPhone needs a new battery, Apple says it’s replacing them for $29 through 12/31/18. But prepare for the anxiety. Bring a book. Or write a poem.
The Printer’s Devil explained. The symbol of the printer’s devil reflects my love for the printed word. A printer’s devil in history was thought to be a pesky demon that, when the printer was not watching, would iuvert letters, mizspell a word or perhaps remove an entire word or even a complete line. This was in the era when type was set one character at a time. In more recent eras, the printer’s devil was an apprentice who ran errands and did menial tasks around the print shop. That was me in high school, when I worked at my dad’s print shop in the West Loop.
The Printer’s Devil is an occasional column I write for Third Coast Review. This post is adapted from my first Printer’s Devil column. More on the little red devil below.
Poetry has always been part of my life, from Mother Goose rhymes to poetry and poetry-writing classes in high school and college. Mostly it was just on the sidelines of my life, except for a few brief flurries of serious writing. But recently I’ve decided that I need to help jump-start the poetry renaissance.
You may not think a poetry renaissance is necessary in Chicago. After all, Adam Morgan writesthat Chicago may be the poetry capital of America, partly because of the founding of Poetry Magazine here in 1912. He also credits other publications, venues and poets for Chicago’s dynamic poetry scene.
The poetry slam got its start in Chicago in 1984, and the Louder Than a Bomb poetry competition was founded here by Kevin Coval, Anna West and Young Chicago Authors. LTAB competitions are now held in cities across the U.S. (I recently wrote about a night of Coval’s readings from his latest book of poetry, A People’s History of Chicago, at the Driehaus Museum.)
The national Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry Magazine, is headquartered here and we also have the Poetry Center of Chicago.
Most any night of the week you can find a live poetry reading somewhere in Chicago.
Poetry lives a full and vibrant life in Chicago.
Nationally, the Academy of American Poets offers you a Poem a Day by email. Some of them are quite good. Many are by contemporary poets and some by traditional poets (i.e. dead white people). The Poetry Foundation has an app for your smartphone that enables you to search and read a favorite poet or “spin” and choose poems that match a mood or situation, like “Nostalgia and Family” or “Frustration and Love.”
The renaissance in poetry isn’t new but it’s exciting. It may have started with the genesis of poetry slams 30-some years ago but hip-hop’s expansion to a wider audience through the work of Chicago artists like Common and Chance the Rapper helped its revival.
I was not much of a hip-hop fan until a few years ago, when I saw the megamusical Hamilton for the first time. It opened my eyes to the wonder of hip-hop in storytelling. Hip-hop artists can smash together a profusion of words—like Dylan and early Springsteen—and make their stories rich and compelling.
My own love for poetry began in college. We read Shakespearean sonnets in my Shakespeare summer school class at UIC (sitting on the grass outside our own “Harvard on the Rocks” at Navy Pier). Listening to Professor Kogan read the sonnets aloud and reading them ourselves was a joy. Then later at Mizzou, I always found time away from my journalism courses for poetry. My favorites were:
A modern lit course taught by Donald Justice in which I learned to love T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Justice was one of the few professors I remember by name from my undergrad years. He was a quietly inspiring teacher and later considered an influential poet and writer. It was exciting to learn recently that a good friend also studied with Justice at another school. We enjoyed sharing our memories of his classes.
A marvelous poetry-writing seminar with the great poet, John Neihardt. I still have my folder of poems, written on a typewriter and edited by hand, from that class. Some of them are not bad; some are embarrassing.
Image courtesy John Neihardt State Historical Site.
As a J-School reporter, I interviewed Professor Neihardt at his farm home and wrote a feature on him for the Columbia Missourian, the J-School’s daily newspaper.
I’ve continued to read poetry, listen to it at every chance, and occasionally write it over the years. My poetry library includes works by my favorite poets—Auden, Eliot and W.B. Yeats, Chicago’s own Stuart Dybek, Kevin Coval and Carl Sandburg, plus Ron Padgett, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and Federico Garcia Lorca. I’m expanding my poetry interests by reading a more diverse group of poets. I like the work of Richard Blanco, who read “One Today” at the second Obama inauguration. I also like Natalie Diaz; her first book is When My Brother Was an Aztec, and Chicago poets Sandra Marchetti, Eileen Favorite and Laura Passin.
The 2016 film, Paterson, was thrilling because it was about a busdriver poet. As I said in my review, “It’s a beautiful film about nothing much.” It’s the story of a busdriver named Paterson who drives a bus around Paterson, NJ, and writes poetry every day. He also reads William Carlos Williams, a Paterson native.
As I said, my passion for poetry makes me want to jump-start the poetry renaissance. I guess I want everyone to appreciate poetry. So I ask, why do so many people say they don’t like poetry?
I belong to a book group that meets every month or two to read and discuss a notable book of fiction or nonfiction. It’s a group of a dozen or more highly literate and well-read people. One night I suggested we read the Kevin Coval book I mentioned above and I got groans. “I could see reading a few poems,” one person said, “but a whole book?”
My attempt to sell poetry that way didn’t work but the host for the next meeting asked me to spend a few minutes talking about poetry and reading a few poems. So I did that and I think most people said they enjoyed it. But several insisted they still hated poetry. Why, I wondered?
Matthew Zapruder tries to answer that question in his 2017 book, Why Poetry? It’s “an impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for its accessibility to all readers.” Zapruder thinks the aversion to poetry results from the way it is taught in most schools—as something to analyze, parse and understand. Really, he says, the way to read poetry is just to read the words of the poem and forget everything we were taught in school about it. Just read the words.
Plaque on house where Auden lived in Brooklyn Heights. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Zapruder tells about how he was assigned to read a poet in high school and he picked W.H. Auden because the name was listed first. He knew nothing about Auden, whether the name indicated a he or she. But he still remembers the first lines he read, from “Musee des Beaux Arts.”
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
Something just clicked, he says. He didn’t quite understand all of it but he knew it said something important about being human.
Auden is perhaps my favorite poet of all; I have half a dozen books of his work. In his great poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” he writes, “For poetry makes nothing happen: It survives in the valley of its saying … / It survives / A way of happening, a mouth.”
The little red devil is a toy that operates under solar power, so it’s hard to make him hold still for a portrait. He’s standing on the letters that make up my first name, from fonts of various sizes from California job cases. Thanks to my son Steve and his wife Jan for finding them at an antique store.
My copy of The Waste Land from my modern lit class at Mizzou.
(An homage to the St. Louis poet who became a Brit and also to Lou Rawls)
January is the cruelest month.
Where did T.S. Eliot get that April business?
January is the cruelest month, breeding
Black ice boulders out of the dead streets, mixing
Memory and desire, the memory of light,
The longing for sun, at least more of it every day.
January is the cruelest month, building
Slippy slides on the sidewalks, lurking
In wait for me to land flat
On my butt, if I’m lucky.
January is cruel, refusing
To share its light with those who wake in the dark
And work through the rare hours of sunshine.
Assuming there is any anyway.
Sometimes winter keeps us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life for spring.
What branches grow
Out of this icy rubbish? We do know
There is life to come under this ugly blackness.
I will show you how winter can be beautiful
If only the ice would melt
And we could walk happily again
On dry sidewalks, even if the temp is single digits
With a wind chill below zero.
While the Hawk blows off the lake, sending
Me on to a dead end street
Where there is nothing to stop the wind.
So they put ropes on some of the buildings to help
Us get around the corners.
January is still the cruelest month.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold because she didn’t get a flu shot
Despite being the wisest woman in the Midwest.
Here, said she, is your card. The frozen Phoenician sailor
Who should have known better than to go out without
Boots, hat, earmuffs, mittens and down.
Those are shells that were his ears. Look!
Now frozen to pink marble.
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks.
I could have told her not to swim off the rocks
At Addison, when chunks of ice cover
What was once and will be again
Our beautiful blue lake.
January is the cruelest month, even if, as I,
You love winter.
Just not quite as much of it.
———————-
T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land And Other Poems, (1930, Harcourt Brace and Company, Inc.)
Lou Rawls, “Dead End Street Monolog” from Lou Rawls at the Century Plaza (Live) (1973)
And Mr. Justice (I think), my senior year English professor at the University of Missouri, who taught me to love modern poetry and especially, T.S. Eliot.
Stuart Dybek at the Art Institute. Photo by Nancy Bishop.
Last week I spent an hour wandering around the Art Institute’s Modern Wing with Chicago poet Stuart Dybek and a bunch of other poetry fans. As I described in my article on Third Coast Review, the Pop-Up Poetry event was designed for a poet to discuss works of art that influenced him—and how they related to the writing to be discussed.
Dybek talked about a period in his life when he was interviewing for jobs and used the Art Institute as a place to hang out between interviews. Its pluses were that it had phone booths and clean rest rooms, but it also had light—light streaming in from skylights, but also the light glowing from the paintings of the Impressionists. He read a section from his book of short stories, The Coast of Chicago, called “Killing Time” about that experience.
He talked about standing in front of those paintings and feeling that he could walk into them. He wrote, “I wanted to be somewhere else, to be a dark blur waiting to board the Normandy train in the smoke-smudged Saint-Lazare station; I wanted a ticket out of my life, to be riding a train whose windows slid past a landscape of grain stacks in winter fields.”
But he would always end up standing in front of Edward Hopper’s iconic “Nighthawks,” because he felt he needed the darkness to balance the light of the Impressionists.
While talking about Hopper, he mentioned a book I was not familiar with. It’s The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper, with poems collected and introduced by Gail Levin. He mentioned that the works of many well-known as well as obscure poets created word paintings that brought new meanings to Hopper’s imagery.
Hopper’s work is quiet, even when several people are in the space within the picture frame. Are they lonely? Not necessarily. Being alone doesn’t necessarily mean loneliness. Lovely solitude.
The book sounded fascinating and I looked it up when I got home. Nope, it was not in any bookstore I could find. Since it was published in 1995, I was afraid it would be out of print. But not so amazingly, I found it on amazon.com, for sale from one of the Amazon Marketplace vendors. I’ve had very good luck buying quirky, hard-to-find books that way, so I immediately ordered a copy that was described as being in very good condition. I was thrilled to find it in my mailbox yesterday and it is a treasure. It’s hard cover, a slim 80 pages, with a dust jacket. The size is 7.5 x 7.5 inches.
Levin’s introduction is a lovely essay on the themes of poetry and solitude and the public awareness and appreciation for Hopper’s work. (The Art Institute’s 2008 exhibition of his work was beautifully curated with thought-provoking legends about his life and his work.)
In The Poetry of Solitude, poet Larry Levis tells a story about the woman in the 1931 painting titled “Hotel Room.” He suggests she has just finished arranging her mother’s funeral and her small estate.
Her face, in shadow,
Is more silent than this painting, or any
Painting … .
You sell the house and auction off each thing
Inside the house, until
You have a satchel, a pair of black acceptable
Shoes and one good flowered dress. There is a check
Between your hands and your bare knees for all of it —
The land and the wheat that never cared who
Touched it , or why ….
Four poets reflect upon the 1942 painting, “Nighthawks,” and the stories of the four people in the painting. Joyce Carol Oates writes,
The three men are fully clothed, long sleeves,
even hats, though it’s indoors, and brightly lit,
and there’s a woman. The woman is wearing
a short-sleeved red dress cut to expose her arms,
a curve of her creamy chest, she’s contemplating
a cigarette in her right hand thinking
her companion has finally left his wife but
can she trust him?
Of the 1930 painting, “Early Sunday Morning,” showing a row of storefronts, John Stone writes,
Somewhere in the next block
someone may be practicing the flute
but not here
Where the entrances
to four stores are dark
the awnings rolled in
Nothing open for business
Across the second story
ten faceless windows
In the foreground
a barber pole, a fire hydrant,
as if there could ever again
Be hair to cut
fire to burn ….
As I described in my post about my hour spent with Stuart Dybek, he read his own poems and the work of other poets and reflected on the nature of words and images. The book gives even broader meaning to the relationship of words and images, narrative and abstraction.
A note on the paintings mentioned here. You can see “Nighthawks” at the Art Institute. “Early Sunday Morning” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. “Hotel Room” is at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid.
If you do a search for “Edward Hopper paintings” online, you can see and enlarge thumbnails of all of them.
The Printer’s Devil explained. The symbol of the printer’s devil reflects my love for the printed word. A printer’s devil in history was thought to be a pesky demon that, when the printer was not watching, would iuvert letters, mizspell a word or perhaps remove an entire word or even a complete line. This was in the era when type was set one character at a time. In more recent eras, the printer’s devil was an apprentice who ran errands and did menial tasks around the print shop. That was me in high school, when I worked at my dad’s print shop in the West Loop.
The poetry slam got its start in Chicago in 1984, and the Louder Than a Bomb poetry competition was founded here by Kevin Coval, Anna West and Young Chicago Authors. LTAB competitions are now held in cities across the U.S. (I recently wrote about a night of Coval’s readings from his latest book of poetry, A People’s History of Chicago, at the Driehaus Museum.)
nancy bishop's journal 