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A site for exploration and discussion about verse, poetics, the aesthetic, and creative writing in general.

Because there is a profound difference between writing something to be read and writing something worth reading; and in that difference might beauty be found.



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Monday, April 11, 2022

Amanda Gorman, "The Hill We Climb"

bad verse is bad verse

 

Addendum before the text:

So, Google must have been playing tricks on me because previously, no matter the search, all it would show me of Gorman was page after page about "The Hill We Climb." Except for the poets.org page. Now, of a sudden, it is offering me other fare, and I get a look at what Gorman is capable of besides "Hill." Which is nice to see, considering how bad "Hill" is. For example, there are the five poems from her then upcoming book posted on The New Yorker site [link]. And, as said, I am pleased to see that she does write other things better than "Hill." Which is not to say I change my opinion on "The Hill We Climb." That mess is among the worst pieces of published verse I have ever seen. (Well, I include there things published in online mags.) There is a large difference between "Hill" and the bits on the New Yorker page. And that should be recognized.

Not that I see in those bits any sign of excellence. They are of the average fare for what is published today. Which is to say, rather mediocre. Unlike what the article writer says, they are neither "bold" nor "oracular." (But, then, forbid a poetry book reviewer to pass up the chance for grotesque hyperbole, their own "poetry.") They have their weaknesses, through and through. I would not have minded doing a post on them alone to show those weaknesses. In truth, were I to pick up this book blind in a store I would never buy it. Though, they are still head and shoulders better that "Hill," which is an absolute trainwreck, and makes me wonder if she wrote that calamity on a three day bender two days before it was due.

Do I now regret my post about "The Hill We Climb"? Absolutely not. It needs to be pointed out just how very bad that bit of verse is. The single greatest comeback to the people who defend "The Hill We Climb" is that it is so bad it is indefensible. Even if you want to say Gorman is a decent poet (and I would not say that from the New Yorker bits, I would say only she is an average versifier), even if you wanted to defend her, you have to start by accepting that "Hill" is miserably bad. It may be an outlier in her work, but it is, as I show below, a amateurish failure at verse.

To say, after a brief exchange I had with an FB friend, it is to be noted that I agree with such as Yeats and Auden: politics and poetry are oil and water. The more a writer wants to politics, the worse the poetry will be, the less it will be poetry. The best "political" verse may have a political subject, but they are not themselves political. The more political a verse is, the more it tends to, as I say below, "dead father" poetry. If I may risk aphorism, True poetry is about the human soul, and when you bring in politics, you no longer tread on those grounds.

 
 

Recently an essay on the Chained Muse site [link] was brought to my attention, wherein its author, Adam Sedia, brought to task Amanda Gorman and her inauguration poem, "The Hill We Climb."

Now, I watched the inauguration and, granted, inauguration poems have a tendency to be not very good. Such is the recent history of them. But even as she was reading it I was yet struck by just how really, really not very good Gorman's verse was. It was terrible. Remarkably so. Laugh out loud so. And I thought, in the days after, when transcripts became available online, to do a post here about just how not at all good "The Hill We Climb" is. But, to be honest, it seemed to me a little too easy a target. Fish in a barrel, and that. And when something is that bad, it is hard not to come off as vicious. It would not, after all, be merely pointing out a flaw here, a weakness there. To speak about "The Hill We Climb" would be to say, quite bluntly, "This is wholly awful stuff and the lot of it should be tossed in the bin," and without kindly amelioration (for such would be mostly impossible). So I let it pass.

So why take it up now? Well, three reasons. First, there are some things in Sedia's post that I would like to give word to on their own, even if briefly. Second, perhaps he does not do so well a job at showing just how bad "The Hill We Climb" is, and for that it opens the door to many of the comments defending "Hill." So, third, perhaps it is worth, after all, giving a line-by-line demonstration of just how bad the verse is. Of course, one need only look at the inanity of those comments that follow Sedia's post to know however the proof, some people will still blindly defend the verse. Yet, by looking that those comments, you get a decent showing of just how ridiculous and grossly fallacious those defenses can be. But maybe a line-by-line would end most of those.

And, if may add a fourth, perhaps a show of solidarity is merited.

Now, Gorman's verse is readily available. I chose the Town and Country page [link] simply because the verse is quickly found on the page and easy to read. Note that line breaks change from site to site as they are transcripts of the reading. On Amazon, with the official print release of the verse, in the preview you can see a few pages of text, and see how Gorman divides the lines. So if you want, you can look there to get a flavor: they are mostly broken by the rhymes. At least, for a while they are. Then the rhymes – and the structure – goes away. But, since the location of line breaks is mostly irrelevant to my presentation, the Town and Country page will serve.

Setting aside "Hill" for the moment, I want to begin with Sedia's post.

First, right off the top, I disagree with the very nature of Sedia's titular idea: "Why Amanda Gorman Is Not a Poet." It is a poor statement. As should be obvious, you cannot demonstrate it from one bad bit of verse. Even a world-class golfer can find themselves staring down the barrel of a quintuple bogey. Who knows, maybe she has a moment of brilliance elsewhere. For how bad "The Hill We Climb" is, I doubt it. But, still, I give her the chance. Indeed, T.S. Eliot makes the observation that if a writer creates but one brilliant verse in their life, then it was worth all the effort. (I wish I could source that for you. A couple of years ago I read/re-read through most of Eliot's essays. Unfortunately, I did not in the trek write down where the bon mots were found. So, I suffer for it.)

That said, as said, "The Hill We Climb" is really bad, so I would not expect to find much better by Gorman elsewhere. But, that is not to say I would not be pleased. I like good verse, whatever the source. (To say, there is one of her verses on the poets.org site; it is not as bad as "Hill," but it is not all that good either.)

While Sedia's opening statement is falsely offered, there is yet the turnaround, the opposite question: Simply because Amanda Gorman wrote "The Hill We Climb," ostensibly a piece of verse, does that not make her a poet, even if it is really bad?

Well, that depends on how much we want to water down the terms poetry and poet. This is a terminological issue that poets and critics sometimes confront (overtly or not) in their essays and books. How can you use the same term – an elevated term – to identify both The Waste Land and that endearing verse, "My Dog Bob Poops in my Shoes"? They sometimes solve the issue with the phrase true poetry, used to distinguish that which is truly poetry, those moments of transcendent brilliance, from the great mass of the poor and mediocre. (Indeed, the phrase is also used for art, by artists. And I have no problems calling Mozart's Requiem true poetry.) Myself, I have come to also use the terms "verse" and "versifier." That way we can still give categorical identity to those quatrains (to reuse an example of mine) that Aunt Edith writes in birthday cards. They rhyme, they have meter, there is no issue in calling them verse. But, we all know, if never say, Aunt Edith's quatrains are not very good. So let's not go and call them poetry. They are verse. Which is term enough. And most everybody who claims to write poetry really only writes verse. And I mean most everybody. Including almost all of the stuff you see published in poetry mags. (Which is mostly either bad or mediocre. And do not be surprised, a great portion of what gets published is bad verse, even in reputable mags. Indeed, bad verse wins awards.) So I try to distinguish poetry from verse. Though, to note, there is nothing wrong with writing verse. It is a worthwhile endeavor. Especially formal verse. (It takes neither brainpower nor creativity to spew out bad free verse.)

To note, Eliot also uses the phrases genuine poetry and sham poetry. I do not remember him ever saying genuine poet, but then, the point of the endeavor is not the writer but the verse. As said, a writer could pump out a thousand bland verses and then strike gold with one moment of brilliancy: a thousand sham poems and then one piece of genuine poetry. That makes for a poet, one might guess. At least, for that one moment of composition. But, really, again, the point lies in the verse. So while you might want to call Gorman a poet, I would comfortably say that "The Hill We Climb" is sham poetry, not the genuine article.

But what is the genuine article? What is true poetry? Well, that is something that takes more than a few sentences. And this blog, in no small way, is a constant engagement with that question. In brief, true poetry is something, in the material side, that demonstrates exceptional skill, care, and composition (composition is everything); and in its ideational side, that escapes the mundanity of the logical, the grammatical, and the literal, and rises to the mythical, the spiritual.

See? You need more than a sentence. Read Eliot's essays. Pound's essays (those on literature). Read H.D.'s Trilogy (without falling into the pop criticism of a feminist reading, which only limits its brilliance; it is about art, and thought, and spirituality). Read the opening of Robert Duncan's book on H.D. Read Stevens's The Necessary Angel. Go crazy: read some of the essays here.

Anyway. Continuing:

Sedia spends a few paragraphs on the question What is a poet? He uses three excerpts, from Shelley and Poe and Frost, which are immediately fallacious in that they do not speak to What is a poet? but to What is poetry?, which is, really, as implied above, two very different questions. So let's just drop the What is a poet? line, and stick with What is poetry? Sedia offers this definition:

First, it exists for the sheer aesthetic value of the words. But on another level, a poem expresses a thought, an analytical action of the human mind upon an object.

And perhaps some people would accept that. I do not. After all, is it possible for a verse not to express a thought? I mean, perhaps this wording is guarding the gate against New York School-type abstractions (which, to be honest, maybe needs to be addressed). But, again, "My Dog Bob Poops in my Shoes" definitely expresses a thought. Indeed, so does "The Hill We Climb," so I am not sure how his definition would work in his argument. And does it have to be "analytical"? – I am wholly opposed to that word. In fact, I would say for verse to be true poetry it has to function outside the analytical, it has to put the analytic to use to serve a greater, non-analytical, endeavor. All in all, it is in the end a soft definition; but, then, he goes on to say:

By any definition, Gorman's work fails even to qualify as poetry.

By any definition? As said, read the comments to Sedia's post and you will find plenty of quote-unquote "definitions" under which "The Hill We Climb" is poetry. They are not terribly valid or useful definitions, but they are definitions. And, to be honest, Sedia's definition is not terribly useful either, nor, to me, terribly valid.

That to say, though, really, his definition is greatly irrelevant even to his own dissection of "Hill." And he does then move on to some more specific and tangible ideas, which guide the rest of his presentation.

"The Hill We Climb" [. . .] embodies all major defects of contemporary mainstream poetry, from complete absence of structural rigor, an abundance of truisms and cliches, numbingly unpoetic language to – most fundamentally – lack of poetic metaphor.

And I agree in that those are major defects of contemporary mainstream verse – though it should be said there is no shortage of bad verse out there that has "structural rigor." Just because it is formal verse does not in anyway mean it is good verse. But to the point, I can think of other problems: a poor understanding of semantics or grammar, inattention to detail and logic and sense, the absence of evidence of a poetic ear, general lack of sophistication, and perhaps others if I really wanted to spend time on it. But his is a good list, four things worth talking about, and four criticisms that all apply to "Hill."

To give a quick moment to the "structural rigor" and "The Hill We Climb," looking at the preview on Amazon, Gorman's verse (and there you can see it divided into stanzas of sort, though, that is probably to stretch it out to book length), begins in a kind of formality: rhymed lines that are mostly iambic. That is, until the last available page, beginning with "We, the successors of a country and a time," at which point all sense of structure disappears. And, looking at the Town and Country text, I cannot find but here and there after that where it might reclaim any sense of a natural, imposed structure (sometimes through repetitive phrasing, but that does not exactly take genius; sometimes through rhyme, though often if you did break it there they might make for bad lines). But, then, the text seems entirely prose, and I expect that in the book version, once you get past the opening lines, and but for rhymes and repetitions here and there, "Hill" is presented as little more than prose with line breaks. And composition is incredibly important to poetry. Without it, you have but a string of words. (Composition is everything!)

As for cliches and unpoetic language, I will touch on that in my own analysis.

But I want to give time to that fourth one: the "lack of poetic metaphor." (And here we see Sedia contradict himself a touch, as metaphor is not analytical, and yet, it is metaphor that is held up as "fundamental" to poetry.) This is actually quite important, because it goes to the ideational side of what is true poetry. Most contemporary verse lacks any real sense of metaphor within their lines: they tend to the realist and literal. And the first step to true poetry is to break away from realism and the demand for verisimilitude. Why? Because true poetry is not about facts. It presents thinking that transcends brute factuality, whether directly or indirectly. Indeed, much of the art of true poetry is how to escape the realm of fact.

A good book to read on this point, as I have said many times, is Roland Barthes's Criticism and Truth, and while it is a short book, it is also, I will admit, a difficult book. But it speaks greatly to the opposition between true poetry (though I do not think he uses that phrase) and realist verisimilitude. Though, you can also, again, look to Eliot's writings, or Pound's, or H.D.'s Trilogy, or, if you are really brave, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, which is also difficult, but absolutely worth it. (Locally, one might try my essay on an H.D. poem [link] or, if you are into the harder stuff, my essay on a Cummings poem [link]). It is a topic greater than I am willing to address here, but it is a very important point. And Sedia does give a quick but worthwhile argument of how "Hill" is devoid of metaphor.

He is not entirely correct, though, as he says the text wholly lacks poetic metaphor: a "complete absense." It does not. Indeed, the second line, "where can we find light in this never-ending shade" is a go at metaphor, an attempt to signify "troubles, difficulties, dark times," even, as Sedia himself points out, the years of the Trump presidency. It is a metaphor. It is, for its delivery, a lame – as in both legs broken – and absolutely trite metaphor, yes, but it is a metaphor.

But, still, Sedia has a point, and it is worth recognizing. And I agree: metaphor is inherent to true poetry; if not requisite. And, continuing:

In the end, ["Hill"] is just prose, a series of declarative sentences stacked on top of each other – and not particularly brilliant or insightful prose, at that.

Which is true. "The Hill We Climb" is pretty much prose, neither brilliant nor insightful.

To another point: I do not entirely agree with Sedia's comments on poetic voice. He says,

If the ideas a poem conveys are to have any meaning to a different mind reading it, the poem must engage the reader in the experience described. Decoupling the experience from the poet experiencing it achieves this universality.

Which is true but also not true. The first part I agree with. I need only point to the many autobiographical "dead father" verses I have read that fall completely flat because they depend entirely on the reader believing the writer's emotions about their dead fathers (or mothers): they do not generate anything within themselves. They say "dead father" and expect the reader to react accordingly. And as is often said, should a puppy bite you on the ear you might experience something, but that does not make it poetry. But as for the second part, it is entirely legitimate for a poem to have a strong narrative voice, and a strongly identified narrator. So when he says

By describing herself explicitly in raw demographic terms, Gorman destroys any chance the poem has of appealing to a universal audience

one has to ask the question, is she describing herself, or is the text speaking out of a narrator? The problem is the poem is not very good, so the distinction blurs. And it is hard, even with a strictly autobiographical piece, to say that there is not yet a narrator that is separate from the author. Indeed, I would argue, the voice of a verse should be that of a narrator, whether one hard cut from clay, or one greatly abstract. Indeed, the best autobiography (verse or prose) speaks through a narrator, even when that narrator is to be identified with the author. The reason is, if a writer is writing too much out of their own voice, they will fall into the "dead father" poem trap: they will not be creating within the text, but will be expecting the reader to react to the subject simply because that is how you are supposed to react to that subject. "This terrible thing happened to me. Aren't you sad?" "Dead father" poems. (And, to say, when you are writing without a narrator, it tends to bad writing.)

To be honest, I am a little bit arguing against Sedia's specific attack just so I can make the abstract point. In truth, "Hill" is mostly a "dead father" poem, mostly a poem that expects the reader to identify the words with the author. It does not generate ideas or emotions on its own. It says "We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside," and the "we" includes she, and she expects you to react accordingly. In truth, there is nothing generative about that phrase. It is absolutely banal, and trite, and dead prose. You are supposed to respond in a certain way because that is how you are supposed to respond when someone says that. Puppy bites. Political propoganda, if not political pornography.

That aside, I will say that Sedia's presentation has its value, if, in the very least, in making points about poetry and verse that are worth the making even if it does not strictly and precisely apply to "Hill." They are worth the making if just to get you thinking about those ideas as they relate to poetry. In general, though, he is spot on: in "Hill" there is precious little metaphoric language; there is mostly the trite and the banal, "truisms and cliches"; and the voice of the verse is problematic. As a whole, it has little poetic value when it is put to the scale.

So while I do wish Sedia had been more careful with his arguments, I do not wish the arguments were never made.

 

Now, I want to approach the verse a different way. I do not want to ask "Is this poetry?" I will set that aside and rather say, "Whatever this is, it is not very good." For me it is in no way poetry. It is verse. And it is really bad verse at that. So, in rhet/comp terms, I want to hit it with my red pen, and show how little white remains on the page when I am done.

Now, before I start, it should be said that I recognize, and it should be recognized, that grammatical, syntactic, and, especially, semantic errors are not always easily seen. If you have taught a composition class you probably know the experience of pointing out an error in a sentence and having the audience stare at you with blank eyes. So you try one way to say it, you try another, and then suddenly the lights go on. (And if you have been in a composition class you might have had the experience of that light turning on.) If your abilities with the English language are not very sophisticated, it is not always easy to see the problems, even when they are being pointed out. Nonetheless, what I do point out below are absolutely problems, errors, that would be corrected by a good editor or comp teacher. They are things that should never exist in verse (or writing of any form), especially published verse, especially especially an inauguration "poem." So even if you do not see it at first, keep looking. It's there. And it is worth seeing. It's worth the learning. The posts on this blog are meant to be educational, not mere bloviations.

(To note, there are a couple places where I say "she meant X," where I can also see a lesser probability she actually meant Y. If I am wrong it does not mean the error does not exist, it just means the fixing is different.)

So, starting right at the top:

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

And stop right there. "Where can we find light"? But, was there not just . . . .

When day comes

Did not the verse just lead off with a quite blatant statement of coming out of the dark of night and into the light of day? And yet, "never-ending shade"? It took two lines and already the verse is sloppy enough to contradict itself. Of course, the reason it contradicts itself is most likely because the second line is a trite image. It is a line no self-respecting, college poetry teacher would ever let stand. And trite phrases tend to be things that are just flung about the page: they are not thought about, not seriously. Indeed, they are not meant to be thought about seriously. So it is not a surprise that the contradiction exists. Most likely, Gorman simply was not thinking that deeply about or paying that much attention to the text. She was within the trite, and she was happy there. And when you are within the trite, contradictions are not an issue.

So, tallying: in the first two lines a major error (and a trite phrase) and she did not catch it. That does not bode well.

Next:

The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade.

More trite ideas. But notice that second line: "the sea we must wade." Do people normally wade across a sea? No. Of course not. In fact, "wade" is not that difficult a thing to do at all, though "sea" is obviously meant to imply difficulty. It is another contradiction in the text.

So why "wade"? Because it rhymes with "shade." The word was chosen for the rhyme, not for its meaning. This is a problem often seen with beginner – and poor – writers: they force their phrasing to fit the rhyme or the meter and sacrifice the meaning for the match. Indeed, this is a perfect example of that issue, one to keep for when you teach this problem in your poetry class.

Continuing:

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 justice.

I changed the lines from the Town and Country transcription so it keeps the intended rhymes. (This is how it is on the Amazon preview.) Now, "belly of the beast" is a little questionable. The truest meaning of belly of the beast refers to the hero's journey, wherein the hero must go through the trials of the "belly of the beast" in order to come out the other side the greater person. (Think Jonah in the whate: when he comes out, he is greater than he was going in.) But that last element is not present in Gorman's text. So "belly of the beast" is just another trite phrase. The line also suffers for the word "brave." Keeping to the possible theme, did we "brave" Trump's presidency? Even more broadly, did we "brave" our current social issues? Did we stand before and say "bring it on!"? No. It is a poorly chosen word. (I admit this might be a quibble, but I think there are better words, and "brave" was probably chosen for the consonance.)

And as for the next line, "We've learned that quiet isn't always peace," even if it is supposed to be taken topically, I have no idea what it might be referring to. She is making an affirmative statement as though we know what she means. Which is to say, like a "dead father" poem, like all platitudes, we are simply supposed to take the line at face value and respond as the writer means for us to respond. Indeed, "peace" – if not the line as a whole – probably only exists, again, because it slant rhymes with "beast."

It should also be pointed out that the semantic problems created by there not being a that before "the norms" almost demands that that that should be present. (Yes. three thats in a row.) Notice the difference.

we've learned that quiet isn't always peace,
and the norms and notions of what just is
 
we've learned that quiet isn't always peace,
and that the norms and notions of what just is

Without the "that" the subject of the sentence changes from "we" to "norms and notions," which I do not think is what she intended. More sloppy writing.

Then comes the next two lines. To be blunt, the rhyme of "just is" with "justice" is so trite and ridiculously offered that it should have been outlawed from verse after the first time it appeared in a poetry slam. And even then it is so strained a rhyme, it should have been edited out before it was ever delivered. In fact, anybody who has an ear for verse, who studies it, will tell you this is a bad rhyme because of the accents:

and the NORMS and NOtions of WHAT just IS
ISn't ALways JUSTice.

"Just is" and "justice" do not correctly rhyme because the accents are wrong. (Ask your poetry prof.) And, if you notice in the video, when Gorman reads the lines of text, she has to twist the emphasis to make it rhyme. Not to mention, this is astoundingly bad writing. No skilled poet with a developed ear would have ever permitted that rhyme to exist in their work, never mind because it does not rhyme. And, on top of it, the two lines are another empty platitude: there is no poetic creation going on here, just appeals to moral righteousness.

Let us quickly move on, because that not-rhyme causes me pain. (I cringed – and laughed – when she read it.) Rewriting again to put the rhymes at the end:

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished.

What does that mean, "the dawn is ours before we knew it"? First of all, you hopefully all see the grammatical error: "Before we knew it, the dawn was ours." (Or, "The dawn will be ours before we know it.") So there is that. (The tally on out and out errors in this verse it rising quickly.) But, still, what does it mean that "the dawn was ours before we knew it"? Does she mean that in the sense of the phrase "the day is ours," spoken when an army or such wins a battle and she got the word wrong? In context, that cannot be what it means, as there is not a closing victory, particularly not one "before we knew it." But beyond that, I have no strong idea.

Except what follows is "Somehow we do it." It could not possibly be that she wrote two more bad lines simply because she wanted the rhyme of "knew it" and "do it"? And "Somehow we do it" is an awful line. A howler. Not only for the question of "do what?", but also for that the rhyme of "knew it" and "do it" is a prime example of a rhyme that might match but should still be avoided and with prejudice, generally because the reader is going to laugh whether you want them to or not. Then, "We've weathered" a nation that "isn't broken"? Wouldn't normally "weathered" be used with a situation that was broken? We "weathered the storm," not "we weathered the calm." We weathered a broken nation, not one that was not broken. Dumb lines. Silly lines. Lines that pay more attention to the rhymes than to the meanings of the words. They are amateurish lines.

Next:

We the successors of a country and a time
where a Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one.

These lines, this sentence, is a mess. It is very sloppy writing. Let's rewrite it as prose – and it is prose broken into lines, not strong verse – to get a better read. As you read it, try to attend to how the phrases work together. (They do not, not cleanly, but try.)

We the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.

There are two errors. "We the successors of a country ]. . .] where a black girl" – notice that the "where" phrase connects to "country," and "country" occurs in the past. It is not the country of now, it is the country of which we are the successors. So "we are successors of a country [. . .] where a black girl [. . .] can dream of becoming president" means that in the past a black girl could dream of becoming president. I think rather she would have it we are the successors of a country where a black girl could not dream of becoming president. It does not make sense the way she writes it, and I am sure the meaning she intends the reader to get is that of the version as I write it. That is error one. Error two is in the second half of the sentence: "can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting." That means that she dreams of one thing, but instead ends up with the lesser position of the second thing. She can "dream" of becoming president, but instead she is "only" reciting verse. She just put herself down.

What she meant to write was probably something like:

We are the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother could never dream of becoming president, and yet today she finds herself reciting for one.

Even then the sentence still does not work, because it cannot avoid that it makes reciting for a president so much less than being one. But as Gorman wrote it it is a mess of a sentence. Both of the errors would get red marks in any college composition class. (And what school did she attend?) This is terrible writing. And worse verse. To note, there is no verb. (Hopefully you caught that.) Nor is there one in the Amazon preview. That might be part of the problem.

Beyond all the out-and-out errors, notice that we are this far in and Gorman has yet to offer a single original image or poetic phrase. And, you know, generally a reader of poetry wants the poetry to start at line 1. What we have had here are all bland, hackneyed prose sentences – even with the rhymes – and mostly empty platitudes. Bumper stickers on parade. There has been nothing new or of value, particularly not of poetic value. It is not even that she is offering poetic fare but rather bland poetic fare; this is empty nothings. A series of "dead father" phrases – rather quotidian ones at that – that you are supposed to respond to as she intends for you to respond them. (Generally, as said, through moral righteousness.) Again, nothing is being generated. And, a good reader who would not get suckered into the bells and whistles would be responding by saying "except for the humor of how bad the writing is, this is rather boring, no?"

More:

And yes we are far from polished.
Far from pristine.
But that doesn't mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge a union with purpose,
to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors,
     characters and conditions of man.

We are beyond Amazon's preview now, so the line breaks are how Town and Country put them. Though, as I said, they are guessing, following how she read it.

That said, what do we have with these lines? First, we have a mis-use of the word pristine. Pristine means uncorrupted, as in yet to be removed from the original, pure state. You cannot obtain the state of being pristine, as is meant in "far from pristine." Indeed, the phrases "far from polished" and "far from pristine," when taken on their own, mean two opposing things, one going toward the state of betterness, one going away. And gluing them together does not cure it, because polished and pristine are not remotely synonymous. Another contradiction. Or bad parallelism, as it is said. Either way, bad writing.

"But that doesn't mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect." Shouldn't she say "that doesn't mean we are not striving"? I mean, even if perfection is impossible, you still strive for it. More sloppy writing. And because of that error, "We are striving to forge a union with purpose," falls wrong. The text makes it as though "with purpose" is some lesser goal.

But that doesn't mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.

Nah, that would be too hard! Let's go for something easier. Some less taxing, even if less valuable.

We are striving to forge a union with purpose

See how the sentence structure is working? Not how she wants. "With purpose" is not held high here. It is undercut by the previous bad phrase. And as for the "c"s in "to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man," that's as poetic as this verse is ever going to get. Revel in it while you can. Though, note that "compose" is falsely used – you don't "compose" a country (unless you mean "calm it down") – and it is found in the line, probably, because it starts with "c", not because it is the best word for the phrase. Bad writing; amateurish writing.

Onward. Perhaps the next lines can be settled into rhymes, so I will rewrite. (I have no idea if this is how it is in the book, but I expect it to be so.)

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us,
but what stands before us.
We close the divide
because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside.

Well, maybe that accentuates the rhymes, but they are pretty bad lines. "We lift our gazes?" Would we normally lift our gaze to the negative of "what stands between us"? Besides that error, "What stands between us"/"what stands before us" is high-school-class-president-speech quality stuff. An adult poet would never use this. Nor would they say something as trite as "to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside." Again, can you not see how these are crap platitudes? These are the emptiest, tritest lines, and "The Hill We Climb" is one long string of this stuff. By now you should be screaming, "By all that's holy! Say something that is not a bumper sticker, something that is at all interesting, at all creative!"

Even for all I have written, I am not sure if I am fully demonstrating how bad this stuff is, how unforgivably trite these lines are. Perhaps I need to say look in any collected works of an established versifier, even the mediocre ones like Billy Collins and Richard Wilbur, and you will not find a one of these phrases in the many, many lines. That is for a reason. They are inherently unpoetic, entirely uncreative, and wholly boring.

Now, I know I am setting myself up for failure, because what Gorman wrote here is not an isolated case. It is really, really bad, but you can find similar being published elsewhere in the U.S. Except, this is really, really bad. So maybe you would be hard pressed to find something quite like this beyond an high school lit mag. But in the general sense, it is out there. Nonetheless, no versifier of any caliber would ever write any of these lines.

And, they could catch the grammatical and semantic errors.

The flow of the above lines continues into the next few:

We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another.

There's two things to see, to recognize. First, as with what preceded it, this is childish. No respecting versifier, etc. Second, though, is its rhetorical stance (and this issue is not isolated to these lines): it insists that this is actually happening. That "we do lay down our arms." But do we? I don't particularly see that happening in the U.S. right now. Who exactly is she talking about? Because rhetorically she is speaking for everybody, saying that everybody is laying down their arms. But they are not, are they. Even were we to limit it to the inauguration, even to the Democrats alone, can she legitimately affirm "We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another"? I do not think so. This is another variation on the theme of writing something that does not work because you sacrificed quality or coherence for the rhyme, or, here, for the cutesy phrase. This is one of the more subtle errors, but it is an important error nonetheless. (It is frequent through "Hill.")

And, have you noticed, as Sedia pointed out, since the so very trite "belly of the beast" there has not been a single metaphor?

Next comes another massive error:

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

That just makes me want to go out in the street and hug people, I tell you. (And shouldn't it be "harm to no one"?) But:

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true,
that even as we grieved, we grew,
that even as we hurt, we hoped,
that even as we tired, we tried,
that we'll forever be tied together, victorious.

There is a little sloppiness in that "this" could refer to what follows or what precedes. It would have been cured with a little correct grammar, which would put a colon rather than a comma after "true." BUT, that could entirely be the error of Town and Country. Perhaps in the book it is a colon. (I would be surprised if it was.) Nonetheless, I wanted to point it out because the necessary use of the colon there is worth noting. But, really, mostly this is just continuing the bumper sticker silliness, here decorated with a little consonance.

There is, though, another, far more important error in the lines centered on "say." "Let the globe say this is true." But not only that, "Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true." Which actually means, the globe (which is an awful choice of word, by the by, world would have worked just fine) may not actually act, many not actually perform what is listed below, but at least, "if nothing else," they will pretend and "say" it happened. "Let the globe, if nothing else, say [. . .] we'll forever be tied together, victorious." Because we obviously are not, but we'll smile to each other and say it. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Gorman has such little control over her language the text completely goes against her intent – again, probably because she is set on merely stringing together hackneyed, if not straight out inane, phrases, one after the other, in some lightly honeyed manner, and she is not at all paying attention to what it means. Either that, or she is so poor a writer she does not even see the problems in her text. I will give her the benefit of the doubt that that is not true. (Though, I have seen some really bad verse written by well educated and one would think intelligent people.)

I want to stop, because really, even only this far in I think I have proved my point that this is not only banal, trite, cutesy prose but flat bad writing. (Every sentence garnered a red mark.) The lines that follow the last few above fall into the same purview – the same rhetorical problem – as the above. So I'll skip those, because I do so want to get to:

If we're to live up to our own time,
then victory won't lie in the blade.
But in all the bridges we've made,
that is the promise to glade,
the hill we climb.

Oooh, "victory won't lie in the blade." Now that's a daring statement. And it should be noticed that Town and Country's punctuation does not work, but I am not at all sure how the grammar should go. (Probably because it is bad sentence construction.) But really, in the fourth line down.

that is the promise to glade,

Glade means a clearing in a forest. And that's the only definition. It is not a verb. You can't even poetically twist it into being a verb. And yet, there it is. But goddammitall, she got that rhyme! (I listened to the video. That is what she says. If she spoke in error I can't think of what she meant. Perhaps in the book it is corrected.)

(Well, on deeper pondering, I guess you could metaphorize glade as a verb and say it means "to make a bald spot," as in: "Medieval monks used to glade their heads to show their religious devotion." But, I don't think that is what Gorman was shooting for, if she in fact was shooting for anything.)

 

Enough. Even though bad writing can be really funny – especially when the author thinks they are being profound – there is a point where one need go no further. And mostly all that follows is the ongoing string of bumper sticker phrases and bad prose written poorly.

So let's go back to Sedia's accusation:

"The Hill We Climb" [. . .] embodies all major defects of contemporary mainstream poetry, from complete absence of structural rigor, an abundance of truisms and cliches, numbingly unpoetic language to – most fundamentally – lack of poetic metaphor.

Again, "absence of structural rigor" is problematic because there is a lot of bad formal verse out there (and that includes some of that by the well known versifiers who collect under the name of neo-formalists). And "The Hill We Climb" does in the Amazon preview show some structure in the sense of rhymes and rhythm, until it doesn't, and to note loose iambic rhythm is as easy as can be to have if you are not measuring meter. But those other accusations? "Abundance of truisms and cliches": pretty much the whole of it. "Numbingly unpoetic language": absolutely, except for that it is so bad it is funny. And "lack of poetic metaphor": undeniably. This is almost entirely straight forward, literal-as-you-can-get language. And when there is metaphor, it is cliche. There is nothing truly poetic to be found.

And then it is also replete with grammatical and semantic errors, poor construction, and bad word choices. And yet, it might be the greatest condemnation of "The Hill We Climb" to say, with great cause, that it is amateurish, and pins that label upon its author. If you write verse you should be looking at “Hill” not with admiration, but as something that can bettered. And believe me, such as “Hill” would not be well accepted in a collegiate poetry writing class.

In short, I would never call this poetry. And it may be verse, but it is really bad verse.

Really, really bad verse.

2 comments:

  1. I find "a sea we must wade" to be a perfectly fine poetic sentiment (though I might have said "loss we bear" to describe the ironic burden of a loss). The omission of a "that" happens occasionally in speech (and for me, in writing, when I can't jam one into the meter): it may be a fault, and a greater one the more formal the context, but not very important. Other things pointed out here (like remaining in the shade after the sunrise) are more problematic: "a poor understanding of semantics or grammar" and so forth.

    I wish Sedia had addressed more plainly the affronts of contemporary poetry. If only metered verse (especially in iambics) counts as poetry in his view, then he should say so. Bringing Shelley, Poe, Arnold and Frost successively, to bolster his argument, only tends to reinforce the view (asserted in comments) that his argument is driven by racism.

    Claude McKay's biographer Wayne Cooper remarked on Max Eastman's "unconscious condescension" in praising the poet; whether Sedia's supposed racism is unconscious or surreptitious, I don't doubt that his high dudgeon was driven at least in part by the perceived inferiority of Gorman's poem as a poem. She burst into the public sphere in a big way at Biden's inauguration — if she's written a bad poem, why should we make excuses for it?

    I once had a similar reaction to Maya Angelou's poem for Clinton (how much motivated by racism I can't guess). I thought it was garbage. I haven't reread it in a long while, but my appreciation for her poems has become more nuanced; and now — even without the benefit of rereading — I would hazard I like it better than the inaugural poems by Miller Williams, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco which followed. Gorman writes from a modern tradition of "slam" poetry — which I can't assess — but simply as writing it has flaws enough of its own, and for which excuse has been made.

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  2. Still, for all that, her words seemed more fitted to the moment than those of her predecessors in the role (Frost excluded, because I understand he recited something other than what he had written, and in either case the poem left me with no impression). However incoherently, Gorman strove to address the historical moment directly, and that alone raises her above them. Would that the execution had been better.

    While I never wrote an essay akin to Sedia's, when the time came, as a mental gymnastic I decided to write a poem for Clinton's second inaugural — to "put my money where my mouth was" so to speak and see if I could do better than Angelou. I sent it to my congressman Sidney Yates and asked him to forward it, but Miller Williams won the day. (It was an addictive exercise, as I tried again with Obama, which explains my perhaps excessive interest in inaugural poetry.)

    Sedia writes that "[t]he line between art and propaganda is a fine one, to be delicately tread whenever art assumes a public character." I'm not sure this all-knowing statement is true. We class Fritz Lang differently from Leni Riefenstahl, but is a fine line all that divides their work? Both are propagandistic, but with different aims.

    What kind of poetry did the Nazi regime countenance in Germany? Today's Republican party — which by all accounts is tending fascist — seems to prefer none at all, as their "team" has not had an inaugural poem. I take Sedia to be self-identified with the far right, possibly a party adherant; Gorman's garbled cry for "justice" — despite the contentious rhyme — may be what offends him. But judging by what I've scanned online, he's written better essays than this one. I'd like to see him tackle just what constitutes "classical" poetry, or even poetry as distinct from other genres, and leave Gorman out of it.

    She may be lost to the thralldom of celebrity culture, which Sedia's parting reference to her Estée Lauder gig gives nod to. There is no reason a fashion model or starlet cannot write good poetry — Marilyn Monroe is said to have done — but it is early yet to foresee where Gorman's path will lead her.

    Early fame has seldom been a boon.

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