Emily Post-Avant: On Amanda Gorman and Poetry’s Sudden Emergence as the Favorite Art Form of the Ruling Class
Dear Emily Post-Avant,
I did my MFA at Columbia five years ago, and I’m here on lunch break at Safeway Foods (me, my girlfriend, and my surviving coworkers have mostly already had COVID but are doing fine, because we’re in our twenties to early thirties, still sexually active and doing CrossFit training and stuff), and I was wondering what you thought of the poet Amanda Gorman, who is even younger than most of us, and who read the Inaugural Poem a few days ago. The commentators on MSNBC and CNN sure liked it! They were well-nigh climbing all over each other to see who could come closest to crowning her the greatest bard America has birthed, bar none. They all seemed to know exactly what it takes to make a poem a truly immortal poem. Even the regular FBI, CIA, and Pentagon contributors there were about ready, it seemed, to just throw it all to the Western Wind and pull a Rudy Giuliani on camera (see Borat). Good thing Jeffrey Toobin wasn’t on the panel.
Anyway, just thought I’d ask. I don’t get to talk to many other poets anymore, ever since school. I wonder, actually, if I will ever write again.
Have a nice day!
—Current Chairperson of the Mikhail Bakunin Poetry Cell,
Portland, OR, branch
Rudy Giuliani in Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm (2020). Indiwire.
Dear Current Chairperson of the Mikhail Bakunin Poetry Cell,
You will write again, my love. Believe me. Unlike some of us, you are young and sexually active. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. All shall be well.
Maybe you haven’t seen this yet, but Amanda G., I read today in the NYT, is scheduled to perform her verse at Super Bowl Sunday, on February 7th. After which poem, giant, dark triangular machines of mass-death will roar overhead, signifying approval, I suppose.
I hope she does the cool Thai hand-dance stuff again. Between that and her awesome red millinery object, which beats anything ever appearing, even, on Jackie K’s head, I was mesmerized. I mean the kid’s so poised and winsomely gorgeous, not a single panelist in the recap even mentioned Lady Gaga’s Schiaparelli atom-bomb gown! (Your fashion choices royally suck, Gaga. The occasion wasn’t about you, you garishly narcissistic bitch.)
Yes, Amanda’s hand mimes hypnotized me to the point where I quickly just stopped trying to follow the words of the supposedly epical poem. Maybe that was partly her strategy? I don’t know. I had to go on the web the following day to read the text and see what all the gushing was about.
And as you suggest, either Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper never sampled any poetry beyond Susan Polis Schultz, or they were spellbound, like me, by the Sri-Nuan hand-dance poach and just knew it had to be the most transcendent thing put to paper since the Gettysburg Address.
I’m sorry, and I know it won’t make me any more popular than I already am, but this Inaugural Poem by youngster Gorman was really more like a litany of “soft-progressive porn”: Op-ed-style clichés, mostly, with some third-tier sonic correspondences laced together here and there, likely with help from RhymeZone.com. (Did she really end the poem in front of untold millions by pairing “see it,” with “be it”? Half the third graders in Kenneth Koch’s Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? could have beaten that one.)
All in all, it was, in the end (stunning appearances excepted, as I’ve said), the second-worst poem ever read at a Presidential Inauguration. Robert Frost’s mortifying dud, “The Gift Outright,” was only a little worse.
But Gorman is very young, just a recent Harvard grad, and it is potentially mean to call attention to her poetic limitations. Indeed, criticizing her “verse” is, again, probably missing the point. She is clearly, and like so many Gen Z poets today — Slam, MFA, POC, White, Queer, Straight, Mainline, or Avant — more understandably tuned into prospects on the media/online red carpet than into slow-motion self-immolation through poetry. And who can blame an obviously canny kid for not wanting to ruin her life just being a poet? Amanda knows you have to be more ambitious.
Lady Gaga singing the national anthem. The Independent.
For instance, did you see this, the very day after?
I mean, you really can’t make this shit up.
And the Poet is just getting going. Her poetry collection is now the #1 bestseller on Amazon. I don’t mean #1 poetry bestseller, I mean total bestseller. She sent out excited tweets the next day to make sure her fans knew. Now the publishers of her three books have announced that each of her next three titles will get a first-printing run of one million copies. . . . Say what you want about Donald Trump, but when you think about it, the huge turd-eating succubus ended up being the pivotal, secret muse for the most sudden, massive surge of poetry sales in the history of the art, going back to the time of Sappho. Not even Q-Anon could have come up with a fantasy so wacked.
Can you imagine what Amanda’s cultural first-cousin, the Court Poet Kenneth G. (her fellow opportunist sycophant to Dem Party ruling-class and corporate/State interests, that is) must be doing right now? I can imagine him in bed with his remote, unbathed for a week, in the same clown outfit he wore to the White House, binging on Cheetos, screaming at reruns of Amanda’s feel-good platitudes, and scheming how to plagiarize them. When he finds out about her IMG Models contract and the Super Bowl reading, he’ll probably have a stroke.
I suppose I’m getting a bit carried away, but such are the sad, everyday realities of Poetry, generally speaking, in the age of Really Late Capitalism and Planetary Heat Death. Thank God we have radical visionaries like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to save us all, now. Let us give thanks and good vibes with some Thai-dance hand movements.
Seriously, though, let’s not be too hard on this uber-ambitious young person, for there are many like her in America today, for sure. Let’s cut her some slack, even as we might lament that we don’t have the great Wanda Coleman around anymore to write the Amanda Gorman coda to her singular, withering, ass-whooping sendup of Maya Angelou: the 2002 classic, “Coulda Shoulda Woulda.”
Something like it might bring the Gorman kid — who’s already talking smugly about being President in maybe twenty years or less — a bit back down to earth.
Now to watch the Super Bowl. Go Chiefs. Let’s not be surprised if Amanda tweets after the game that Patrick Mahomes has dumped his fiancée and proposed to her. And that she has said, Yes, I’ll be it!
—Emily Post-Avant
