Poet’s Corner

Hello, esteemed readers of The Norwell Navigator! Welcome to Poet’s Corner, where the poetry lovers, writers, and the just plain confused can come together to share some verified verse in this metaphoric corner (BYO tea is highly recommended).

For this inaugural edition, I’d like to take a look at the Poet of the Hour, Wordsmith Extraordinaire, Amanda Gorman. The first-ever US National Youth Poet Laureate earned the title in 2017, and since then, her poetry has become known around the country. While I am not a professional poetry critic by any stretch of the imagination, there are a few buckets that today’s poetry falls into in my mind. I call them Realistic Poetry, Stylized Poetry, Romantic Poetry, and Modern Poetry.

Realistic Poetry is the category of poems that feel like they could be lines of a sentence that you would hear in your daily life. Stylized Poetry uses rhythm and pacing to generate a certain feeling, like a song. For Romantic Poetry, think heaps of praise on the natural world, and for Modern Poetry, think abstract poems whose meanings require some serious contemplation before they reveal themselves (I picture turtleneck/beret-clad poets in a smoky cafe).

I see Gorman’s poetry as falling into category #2: Stylized Poems. While you might be weirded out if someone came up to you on the street and began a conversation the way Gorman performs her poetry, her words are able to draw up a feeling from your belly and pin it in your heart through metaphors and figurative language -- pretty cool, if you ask me.

Case in point: “The Hill We Climb”, the poem Gorman recited for the inauguration of President Joe Biden. Gorman’s facial features danced a well-choreographed ballet with her graceful hands, pirouetting to the music of her voice. She crafted rich symphonies with the timbres of her vocal chords, her audience rising and falling with her emotional portrayal.

Personally, my favorite parts were the times right after she got to the crescendo of a particular phrase. There was a split second of stillness as your mind tried desperately to catch up to your ears -- before it did, Gorman was off, swelling into the next wave of emotion. Your brain had no choice but to let go as your heart surfed along.

Other than Gorman’s complex use of rhyme throughout this poem, my favorite part was her use of epistrophe, the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of a sentence. The opposite of anaphora (repetition at the beginning of a sentence), this particular rhetorical device feels like a punch in the gut in the best way.

This epistrophe can be seen in the final lines of Gorman’s poem (which definitely did not make me cry...twice):

“the new dawn blooms as we free it,

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

if only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Check out Earthrise and In This Place (a poem about MA and America!) and if you liked “The Hill We Climb”.

Until next time, may your month be filled with peace and poetry snaps!

Poet’s Corner is metaphorically written by Rose Hansen