poetry by Amanda Gorman
Monday, January 31
Moderator: Marcy Gamzon
The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller
The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman
Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
At first blush, Amanda Gorman's work as a hole didn't seem exceptional in any grand way. However, as I reflected, as I recalled, as I kept hearing lines and remembering phrases, I began to think there was more to this author than my initial judgements.
ReplyDeleteI think there are poems that my students would enjoy, especially those formatted like text messages. I like her concrete poetry and the way she explores that form. The poems "School's Out" and "There's No Power Like Home" definitely speak to the experience many students had during the pandemic. Gorman's use of repetition, imagery, simile/metaphor and personification would be literary devices I could use in class.
The poems "Earth Eyes" and "Captive" would speak to many of my green-thinking scholars and the former is one of the concrete poems I like in the collection.
Because of the abstract interpretations required for much of the collection, i would most likely only use single poems from this collection and not the entire collection in class.