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.

Review: Poetry Magazine (Oct. 2015) – Part VI: Randall Mann, Reginald Gibbons

The October 2015 issue of Poetry Magazine can be found here.

links to individual texts:
Randall Mann, "Florida"
Randall Mann, "Almost"
Reginald Gibbons, from "Dark Honey"
— headers to the sections are also links to the texts

 

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the other posts in this series

• Part 1: Introduction, Matthew Sweeney, Guillaume Apollinaire
• Part 2: Eleanor Hooker, Franz Wright
• Part 3: Corey Mesner, Katie Peterson, Rae Armantrout
• Part 4: Rae Armantrout, Cynthia Cruz
• Part 5: Matt Hart
• Part 7: Christine Gosnay, Claudia Emerson, James Longenbach
• Part 8: Quickly Now, Through the Rest
• Part 9, Finale: Head Shots: Crash Davis vs. the Zombies

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— some editing, Jan 29, 2016; particularly in exchanging the term "same-word rhyme" for "exact rhyme" in the section on "Almost." I have heard a handful of terms used for using the same word twice in making a rhyme, "exact rhyme" being one of them. But, since readers were thrown by the term, I switched to the new one.

— some editing and an added footnote, Apr. 4 2016

— footnote extended, Feb. 21, 2016

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fragments and amalgams, similes and metaphors, and a bit on confidence

 

As I left off on the last post, my plan was to look at Catherine Staples's "Vert" as a second example of list verse. I have now decided to return "Vert" to its original place in the Poetry volume's ordering and to pick up with that which comes next in the table of contents: Randall Mann's "Florida" and "Almost" and Reginald Gibbon's excerpt from "Dark Honey." (Cynthia Cruz's "Midnight Office" was already given time in Part 4.) As it happens, "Florida" is a list, so there is yet continuity from the previous post.

 

 

"Florida"

 

With the second work by Mann, "Almost," we come upon our first example of formal verse. Or, at least, what would normally be considered the first example of formal verse. Yet what of "Florida"? There are no rhyming lines in "Florida"; nor are the lines measured. To all appearances the text is free verse in the sense of a-formal verse. Except: it is written in stanzas. After every three lines there is a stanza break: the text, therefore, has form, and a measured form at that.

The habit of writing free verse in equal-length stanzas is common within contemporary pop poetry. In this volume of Poetry there are by my count thirteen such works by eight different authors (fourteen by nine if you include the opening of "Arcadia"). Recently, when I am confronted by such texts (in this series and elsewhere) I am finding myself more and more questioning of my current stance on the event. I am now continually asking myself: Is there indeed a problem with free verse that is broken up into measured stanzas? Can it be considered as little more than a typographical choice, no different than font size? Is it possible that breaking up a free verse text in such a way does create benefits? Or, am I correct in holding that it is an imposed form, and when the text of the verse fails to recognize and to engage that form it is a weakness in the work?

The issue, I believe, lies in the implied word in the third question: Is it possible that breaking up a free verse text arbitrarily in such a way does create benefits? If the stanzas are not written, then the text is not written to stanzas: as such, the stanzas are arbitrary. Once a prof of mine (an established writer) told of a verse of his that he could not get to work, until he broke the text up into evenly measured stanzas. The added space changed the pace of reading of the text. Perhaps example to the positive. Only, the text of the verse is essentially prose with line breaks.[FN] So, while it very well could be that the stanza breaks did improve the reading of the text, the cause is that it was alleviating the difficulty created by reading prose set in a narrow column. It could also be the line breaks made the text not look like prose in a narrow column, so the reader has a more positive ("I recognize that as verse") immediate reaction. Either way or both, maybe not a positive after all.

"Weight Gain" by Moira Egan -- Poetry Daily, 6/28/2013

from Hot Flash Sonnets (Passager Books)
poem found here
 

first lines:

Whose body is this, anyway? I glance in Mirror, Mirror at these fleshly parts

 

the play between the poetic line and its internal structure

This poem was put up on Poetry Daily a week ago, but it's been in my head since. Or, at least, the thoughts this put into my head has been in my head since.

Specifically, it has had me thinking about the play between the line as an aural unit and the breaking up of that unit with internal punctuation. Even more specifically, how that breaking up affects the oral readings of the line, especially when the lines in the poem are regular and rhymed, as with here. How does breaking up the lines of a rhymed poem effect the rhymed sounds?

And so, this post, whose point is mostly to point out the issue, to give some demonstration to the elements involved, to bring it to mind that it does in fact have an effect. Or, perhaps I should say, will have an effect if poorly executed.

Now, in part, this poem is feeding into thoughts that have been playing in my mind from reading through Mary Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry -- which, admittedly, I am doing very slowly, picking it up only every once in a while. Though, I will say, this may be the first book on poetics written for a classroom that I would actually use in the classroom. Most others I have looked at either are far too dependent on the examples and far too weak in their discussion of poetics (as with Frances Mayes's The Discovery of Poetry), or bad to the point of misleading, or far too expensive (as with Helen Vendler's Poems • Poets • Poetry and Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, which is still very worth the while but is absurdly priced).

In the opening chapters Kinzie talks about the identity of the poetic line, and the play between the "half-meaning" generated by a line and the whole meaning of the syntactic unit spanning beyone the line. But here, I'm looking primarily at rhyme and sound. I pulled out Millay's Collected Sonnets to look for examples of interrupted lines: if there is one thing Millay's sonnets are it is smooth in sound. I'll give you a couple moments -- but will have to give large-ish quotations so as to preserve the sound (and establish rhythms and rhymes in your head). These are from two different poems.

"Because There Is No Ending" by Pimone Triplett -- Poetry Daily, 5/23/2013

from Ploughshares (Spring 2013)
poem found here

 

First lines:
we are not asked to see, the ridged folds
of the black walnuts, fallen, come veined

 

accidental meter and rhyme

— edited, with a paragraph that was somehow lost in the writing put back at the end 5/28/13
— reformatted 9/30/15

I've commented on this before, I believe. And I always find it very funny when it happens. What I am usure of is how many other people hear it. I am sure the poet here doesn't hear it, or it wouldn't exist.^{*see note at end} (I know full well if I caught it in one of my own works and did not want to structure the poem around it, I would squelch it, so the words on the page were not working against my aims.)

What I'm talking about is accidental rhythm and rhyme. Let me give you the first seven lines:

we are not asked to see, the ridged folds of the black walnuts, fallen, come veined as any mind split from its skull, leaching what little parades as peace. Rot and wet. My right instep, sneaker's underneath, crushes a once greener skin gone brackish at the cap. Looking up,

Did you hear it?

Starting with line 4:

ROT and WET. My RIGHT inSTEP, SNEAKer's UNderNEATH, CRUSHes a ONCE GREENer SKIN gone BRACKish AT the CAP.

It's ballad measure, though only with an internal rhyme. Except not only, because it there is also a partial stanza above it. Let me redo, with slightly different stanza breaks, typing it as two partial stanzas:

what LITtle paRADES as PEACE ROT and WET. My RIGHT inSTEP, SNEAKer's UNderNEATH, CRUSHes a ONCE GREENer SKIN gone BRACKish AT the CAP.

So it's set up both by the wet/instep rhyme, and by the peace/-neath rhyme. And notice I'm not forcing the phrasing: the phrasing matches the lines quite naturally. And believe, the first time I read the poem, I fell right into the rhythms. (How could I not with the wet/step rhythms?)

But there's more! It actually keeps going, only this time with the XAXA rhyme:

LOOKing UP, the BRANCHes MEET in an ARCH you CAN walk UNder, PASS THROUGH. And DOWN the ROAD, when I HEAR the PAtient FAther

Now, I'm sure you are saying that kind of has to be a rather easy thing to have occur, especially if you are writing verse with a rhythm (as this poem is pretty much iambic). And I may -- may -- agree with you. But, as I said, if I was writing this and caught it, I would either change the lines so they fit with the meter and play with the meter, or rewrite to get rid of the meter. I don't want metered (and rhymed) stanzas existing within my free verse poem, if only because people like me are going to hear it and say, "Are you so tone and rhythm deaf you don't hear the ballad measure in the middle of your own poem?"

There are other problems with this poem, some grammar issues, but especially with wording (there, not so much error-type problems as problems with flow and rhythms). Those problems rather reinforce the idea that the poet wasn't listening to their own poem. But even without it: it's got to be a little embarrassing; for it is definitely very funny.

 

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Of course, there's another question: how did the editors of the vaunted Ploughshares not hear it?

 

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I see two possibilities as concerns the making of this poem worth mentioning. (1) That Triplett started the poem writing in rhymed rhythm, and abandoned the effort, and hoped those moments of meter that survived rewrite would not be found. And (2) that Triplett actually has a natural ear for rhythm/rhyme, and her writing wants to go there. If the latter was the guess, my only comment would be "Charge forth!"