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This Week in Uses of American Poetry in Public
Last month, we wrote about Amanda Gorman’s poetry performance at the presidential inauguration. This month, earnest uses of American poetry in public continued to amaze.
On Sunday, February 7th, a month after the insurrection at the capitol and two days before the beginning of the impeachment trial, some of America watched the Superbowl. The 2021 Superbowl began with a blessing of sorts in the form of Amanda Gorman performing, via video, another original poem, “The Chorus of the Captains.”
We would have written this whole post about Gorman’s poem, its very 19th-century American (specifically Whitmanian) title and aspirations, its multi-media entanglements, its impressive cloud of feminine, internal, and slant rhymes, and maybe also its too-close resemblance to a specific genre of Superbowl commercial, but we have to interrupt that regularly scheduled programming because that same week also saw the use of ACTUAL NINETEENTH-CENT
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When Emily Dickinson died, nearly two thousand poems were found sewn in booklets called fascicles, written out as fair copies. These manuscripts were done; there were no mistakes or corrections. But also, many poems included a little plus-sign at the end of a word, or line, or whole stanza, and at the bottom of the page, she offered another word, or line, or stanza to read in its place.
Similarly, many of us have our own variations on Emily Dickinson. Just over one year ago (“Since then ‘tis Centuries and yet/Feels shorter than the Day”), the first season of Dickinson dropped. Dickinson’s creator and showrunner, Alena Smith, offered us her Emily Dickinson funny, sexy, angry, desperate, secure, beloved, loving and while it joined other recent adaptations of Dickinson on film, this variant also felt new.