Written by Ana Sampson, author of Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood (Trapeze, £12.99)
Twenty-two year old Amanda Gorman had already been honoured as America’s Youth Poet Laureate in 2017, but when she read her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris, a star was born. Amanda has since read her work ‘Chorus of the Captains’ at no less a venue than the Super Bowl – the first poet ever to perform to its audience of more than a hundred million people. Her books rocketed to the top of the US Amazon charts and a four book deal with Penguin Random House UK followed.
As Amanda read at the inauguration, I watched social media light up with people all around the world who found that this young woman’s words struck a deep chord with them. She had created a powerful communal moment of hope. But if I had asked those same people an hour earlier whether they liked poetry, most would have demurred: too difficult, too fancy-pants, too niche, too much like school.
And yet.
Poets have an extraordinary ability to emotionally ambush us. This makes it sound a little like they lurk in bus stops, leaping out to declaim: “Hope is the thing with feathers!” at unsuspecting passers-by… and perhaps some of them do. What I mean is, that verse cuts to the heart of things, so it cuts to the heart. Some of the earliest things we learn are poems – just you dare trying to skip a page of The Gruffalo to hasten a toddler’s bedtime – so meter and rhyme can exert a deep nostalgic pull. Novels have moved me to huge, ugly, wracking sobs countless times, but there is a long slow process of immersing ourselves into their world first. By the time you’re weeping, you’ve often spent hours if not days or weeks in the company of the characters. Not so with poetry. Wham! Bang! Poets go straight in without any polite preamble and take your breath away. It’s the reason we turn to poetry at weddings and funerals and other times fraught with feeling. Poets are professionals. They can say the things we can’t, without a four chapter warm up.
One of poetry’s greatest pleasures and consolations is the feeling that we are not alone: in our grief, or elation, or infatuation, or depression. As Alan Bennett wrote in The History Boys: “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
When I edited a collection of poems about motherhood, I got this feeling a lot. In those sleepless, wild-eyed early days of parenthood, I felt peeled raw with exhaustion and shock and wonder. In those weeks and months, our skin is paper thin. There are so many chinks in our ordinary armour through which emotion can suddenly pierce us. (Yes, I’ve bawled at the swelling music in a terrible film. Yes, I’ve wept while reading a story to my children. The Ladybird Classics version of The Happy Prince is brutal. Yes, I sobbed for twenty minutes at a story in the local newspaper about an elderly man being reunited with his lost tortoise.) I felt the peculiar dislocation from the world that so many of us have felt this past year, and that homeschooling my children solo – now four and seven years old – brought flooding back. I was often lonely, but never alone. I had never needed someone to hold my hand more.
Deep in the bewildered newborn fug I had neither the time nor the mental agility to absorb a novel. I – a library-card-carrying bookworm both personally and professionally, to whom reading had always been vital – only read two books in the entire first year after my eldest daughter was born. (Needless to add that my optimistic visions of finishing my art history studies, growing my own vegetables and perhaps also learning Spanish did not materialise.) I did, however, have just enough time to gobble poems here and there. When I read poetry on my phone about other women feeding their babies in other quiet rooms, tonight and yesterday and a hundred years ago, I suddenly felt I was not alone but part of a great, eternal, generations-old community of raw, mad, knackered women, rocking and shh-ing and soothing in the dark.
The world is raw, mad and knackered at the moment. Amanda Gorman’s reading made such an impact on so many – including people who firmly believe they don’t like poetry – because we are all so thirsty to feel something hopeful and bright. Her poem wasn’t difficult to understand. It wasn’t pretentious. It didn’t require any background reading. It spoke to millions in that moment. That’s what poetry does.
Night Feeds and Morning Songs: Honest, Fierce and Beautiful Poems about Motherhood is published on 4th March 2001 and available to pre-order from your local bookshop.