The Rise And Rise Of Amanda Gorman

Gorman, good-naturedly, doesn’t want to make a big deal out of the experience, but years later, the notion that “a public figure’s life” could be mined without her consent still rankles, principally because this sort of heated adulation is now inextricable from her ascendant writing career. “I built up this narrative in my head that, you know, I had to be some type of,” she paused, raising her hands from her lap to air-quote, “ ‘role model.’ ”

It was the middle of a February day, and the weather, even for an L.A. winter, was shockingly warm, giving our meeting the conspiratorial feel of hooky. Midafternoon was the only time Gorman could steal away from her overstuffed schedule. Last week there had been a guest spot on the Hillary Clinton podcast, and next week there would be a panel with Oprah. It was Gorman who remembered to bring the blankets, and hers was embroidered with astrological signs. (“As a twin, I love being a Pisces, because it’s the two fish,” she said. She and her sister are best friends.) Her smallness is formidable. The next time we met, she brought her lunch—a veggie burger in Tupperware—and snacks for me: artisanal popcorn, gummi bears, a caramel. A meal gave me occasion to glimpse her unmasked, under a face shield. Her profile sends you back to the golden age of the supermodel. Her laughter is a great ringing noise. As we took in the sun on our patch of lawn, Gorman reflected on the long journey of her short life: “It took so much labor, not only on behalf of me, but also of my family and of my village, to get here.” A toddler in tie-dyed leggings waddled dangerously near to us. Gorman paused and leaned back faux-dramatically. The kid tittered. I had no way of knowing—apart from the telltale stretch of the two masks that covered most of Gorman’s face—but it looked like she was grinning.

“Are you going to start the story with  ‘One day, I met Amanda Gorman in Los Angeles’?” she teased. The acute enjoyment she takes in words is palpable. Her speech quickens whenever she realizes that a sentence she is constructing amounts to an interesting assonance—which is often—as when she described the oratorical styles of Revs. Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr: “The way they let their words roll and gain momentum is its own type of sound tradition.” She takes it upon herself to fill silences, sometimes with words and other times with sound effects. “Do do do do do doooo,” she bounced as her mind worked on a response to a question about her relationship to Clinton, whom she’s known personally for some years. “Such a grandma,” she said affectionately. Other figures of the Democratic Party, whom she chatted with after the January ceremony, were described in similarly familial terms: Barack Obama, dadlike; Michelle Obama, the cool auntie. In the weeks after we met, Gorman, or radiations of Gorman, were everywhere: on a February cover of Time, posed in her yellow, and inside the magazine, holding a caged bird, invoking Maya Angelou, interviewed by Michelle Obama; performing virtually at “Ham4Progress Presents: The Joy in Our Voices,” a Black History Month celebration from the people behind the Hamilton phenomenon; on an International Women’s Day panel with Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Chrissy Teigen; in media headlines, nearly every time she tweeted her opinion on a current event; memorialized on vibrant murals in D.C. and Palm Springs that reminded me of Shepard Fairey’s Obama posters.

After the inauguration, she completed a tour of the big talk shows, remotely, from her L.A. apartment. It was a scene. The Trump years and the pandemic had starved the circuit of joy, elegance, positivity, intelligence, hope. But when Gorman came onscreen it was as if DeGeneres, Corden, and Noah had sprung alive from a slumber. She matched the comedians’ wit, the embodiment of spring in her teal. On his nighttime news digest, Anderson Cooper 360, Cooper asked Gorman to repeat the rhyming mantra she recites before she steps onstage: “I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.” Cooper visibly reddened at her recitation, his composure utterly destroyed. “Wow,” he almost babbled. “You’re awesome.”

“I have yet to see her finish without a standing ovation,” observed Aaron Kisner, a stage director who has worked with Gorman on a few of her public performances. The friends, colleagues, and family of Gorman’s that I spoke to all unilaterally said that they weren’t surprised by her success. If you book Amanda Gorman, her mother, Joan Wicks, told me, “you don’t feel like you are taking a chance.” The audience, for Gorman, is not an abstraction but a collaborator in her mode of rousing, outward-facing, and civic-minded poetical speech. She is something of a caring instructor, translating critical race theory for the benefit of eager Americans. Gorman works in the affirmative mode of reaction and response; I spent hours absorbing her poems, which is to say, viewing her performances of them on YouTube. For the dying climate, she has written “Earthrise.” For the modern crisis of white-supremacist violence, in all its forms, she wrote “In This Place (An American Lyric),” her most ambitious work, a poem she delivered at the inauguration of Tracy K. Smith as the poet laureate of the United States. In 2017, Gorman herself was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate.

Yellow is Gorman’s color, and it had been before the iconic Prada coat. On Instagram, I find that some of her fans have knitted amigurumi, or Japanese crocheted dolls, in her likeness. When we first met, Gorman was wearing a coordinating sweatsuit by Clare V., white with big splashes of tie-dyed marigold. “I feel very Billie Eilish,” she said, almost singing.

Gorman could not stir a moral panic if she tried. “God, I’m just the most squeaky-clean person,” she told me. The importance of maintaining a wholesome image was impressed upon her by her mother, a middle-school English teacher in Watts. The Gorman family is united in their vision of literary and social success. And success means touching as many readers as possible. Gorman prefers not to curse, or at least not on the record, but when I did in her company, out of habit, she commiserated with very deep nods. If some stimulus disturbs her cool so profoundly that she must reach for a four-letter word, she spells it out loud, always censoring the vowel, as in “s-h-asterisk-t.” What Eilish and Gorman may have in common, I think, is immediately recognizable and conceptually enticing worldviews.

There is a want for cultural saints. A number of secular sects, overlapping around a shared value of multicultural liberalism, seek to draft Gorman to the mantle. And what does Gorman want? For the immediate future? The time and the quiet to finish two books—a picture book titled Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem and a highly anticipated collection, The Hill We Climb and Other Poems—both due in September, both already best-sellers. Asked if she might share from either, Gorman hedged. The work is not finished yet. She has readers, but she is protective of her writing. There’s pressure. She wondered aloud, “How do you meet the last thing you’ve done?”

The Biden Inaugural Committee informed Gorman that she had been chosen to be the ceremony’s poet in late December. First she was flattered. She flung herself into research, diagramming the verse of speakers before her, like Angelou, her self-professed “spiritual grandmother,” and Elizabeth Alexander, who read at the first inauguration of President Obama. And then she was concerned. Gorman hadn’t really left her apartment since March, when she traveled back to L.A. from the Harvard campus (where she would graduate cum laude that spring). As the virus surged in her city, the thought of getting on a plane terrified her. The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol only augmented her fear. Gorman knows what to expect from certain crowds. The inauguration would be different, unpredictably so and on an incomprehensible scale.

Gorman described all this with some dissociative distance, as if, that day, she’d been a member of the at-home throng and not on the platform at the West Front. “Not that no one else could have done it,” she told me. “But if they had taken another young poet and just been like, ‘A five-minute poem, please, and by the way the Capitol was just almost burned down. See you later.…’ ” She drifted off, her booming voice diminished to a whisper, and then returned. “That would have been traumatizing.”

The argument put forth was this: “But while democracy can be periodically delayed, / it can never be permanently defeated.” To many, depleted of optimism, that pair of lines was a purging of Trumpism. Her publisher, Viking, rushed to package the text of “The Hill We Climb” as a paperback keepsake. On the page, the verse reads differently, less urgently. The words require her crisp and enunciating powers to feel vivid. Wicks knows that Gorman’s chemical presence is the key. “You could have two poets,” she said, “and one can actually have more talent. But Amanda’s the one who is going to work the room.”

“It’s like they made her poetry,” said the poet Danez Smith of the ravenous media response to Gorman. Smith has seen Gorman perform and admired the “political heart and mind and attention to history and community” evident in all her work. The first true piece of poetry criticism Gorman ever published, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, was an exacting close reading of Smith’s “Homie,” in which Gorman identified the “fetishization of suffering and violence” rampant in the liberal imagination. Gorman has now been recruited into that cultural imagination. Does the nature of her introduction to a larger readership cast her as a satellite of the Biden administration? Does the poet who speaks from the corridors of power concede something? There is the classical idea of the poet as the gadfly, who lives outside society. Because Gorman is a public figure, all of these projections and strong feelings she engenders are a part of her work. “I wonder what the journey is for a political poet,” Smith said. “I hope we don’t limit her to that poem. I hope we don’t think that she’s always got to talk to everybody.”

Following the inauguration, Gorman’s phone, blowing up with notifications, was too hot to touch. Her follower counts on social media ballooned by hundreds of thousands. In one of our conversations, she cautiously brought up a Washington Post article that had been written on her phenomenon, aware that she might sound self-involved. “Skip over the parts about me,” she said. “The great part is where they’re talking about how, historically, poets have been pop stars.” She listed Longfellow and Wheatley. To Gorman, the concentration of attention, and resources, on the form she loves is a net gain, although she is aware of the inevitable drawbacks of a consumerist and capitalistic dynamic.

You know how it is. A young woman is clear about what she cares about, makes compelling work, and the power brokers don’t know how to act. They venerate her voice to oblivion. The celebrity of Gorman and other comparable young figures, who become vaunted for their erudition and moral clarity and their bright elucidation of global pain, is a new, and complicated, kind of fame. The writer and performer Tavi Gevinson, who knows something about popularity and fetish, met Gorman in Milan at a weekend-long Prada event two years ago. She told me she’d felt relieved to have someone with whom she could talk books. In that overwhelming press cycle after the inauguration, Gorman became a magnet for the “escapist fantasy,” Gevinson said, of the fragile-but-intimidating young woman who saves the world. Gorman is becoming increasingly careful of situations that would make her seem like a token. “I don’t want it to be something that becomes a cage,” she said, “where to be a successful Black girl, you have to be Amanda Gorman and go to Harvard. I want someone to eventually disrupt the model I have established.”

Gorman wanted to show me her quarantine world. She joked that its circumference couldn’t be more than a mile-and-a-half long. We were to walk a winding trail that would take us through some manicured brush and wetlands, only to deliver us to one of the best views of L.A. anyone could find. Gorman was running a little late. She texted me her apologies along with a funny duck-face selfie; her face was covered in the white film of crappy drugstore sunscreen. The day before, she’d gotten a minor case of the dreaded face-mask sunburn, which got us talking about how annoying it is to find protection tailored to our skin.

When she met me near the trail, I told her that the selfie made me think of that episode of Donald Glover’s surrealish FX comedy Atlanta, the one where Antoine Smalls deadpans, “I’m a 35-year-old white man.” Giggling as I explained the episode’s plot, on whiteness and Blackness as inherent farce, she revealed to me that she hadn’t seen Glover’s series. Or much television, actually. It “was The Munsters and The Honeymooners,” she said, when she was growing up in West L.A. If she wanted to watch something from the 21st century—Disney’s animated action comedy Kim Possible, say—she had to make an argument to her mom that the show had good politics.

The third time the television sizzled out in Gorman’s childhood home, Wicks decided not to fix it. The girls were livelier, more creative, when they found ways to entertain themselves. There were plays, homemade films, and botched science experiments. All the while Wicks was pursuing a doctorate in education at Loyola Marymount University. The family sometimes struggled financially. The twins were born prematurely; when she was a baby, Gorman’s head was too heavy for her body, and so she devised a way to push herself along, flat on her back, from the torso, like a belly-up flounder, which she demonstrated to me the day we hung out on the green. The twins both had difficulties with speech. Because Amanda also had an auditory-processing disorder, she could not pronounce the letter r. The family tried therapy, tongue depressors; Gorman exiled words that used the consonant. But there was always a surname, always the word poetry. Education, for Wicks, was paramount. The girls attended New Roads, a progressive learning institution in Southern California.

Growing up, Gabrielle, a talented filmmaker in her own right, was physically stronger than her sister. Amanda was the writer, compulsively, from about age five, stealing time from her sleep to draft short fiction, inspired by Anne of Green Gables. “My mom had to give me a quarter so I’d sleep past 5 a.m.,” she told me on our hike. She applied for L.A. Youth Poet Laureate when she was 16. “I was like, ‘Well, I guess, I’m a poet.’ ” Her early performances were for live shows like WriteGirl, The Moth, and Urban Word and conferences like TED Talk and Vital Voices—the leadership organization for young women that once gave her a fellowship and counts Clinton as a founder. “Roar,” at The Moth, is a charming retelling of the time she auditioned for Broadway’s The Lion King. The poem is riddled with r words, and Gorman takes joy in the effort of pronunciation. Her delivery is rather like a comedian’s; to better illustrate a point about hyenas, she abruptly flips and does a walking handstand.

Gorman spent her college years balancing classes in English, sociology, and the writing workshop she founded, Lit Lounge, with speaking gigs and poetry performances that took her everywhere from the White House to Slovenia. For Gorman, who is grounded by the principles of Black feminism, writing and activism were always linked. At 16, she founded One Pen One Page, a youth literacy program. Now, after years of commissions and prestigious fellowships, she can afford to rent her apartment situated its lush, middle-class environs. “I’m trying not to judge myself,” she said, chewing on the gummi bears she’d brought. “When you’re someone who’s lived a life where certain resources were scarce, you always feel like abundance is forbidden fruit.”