Michael T. 方法资深撰稿人

那件黄色外套. 蓬松的红色发带. Those gold hoop earrings and a caged-bird ring. As Amanda Gordman took the podium at Joe Biden's inauguration on Wednesday, she became an immediate fashion icon, vibrant in color and striking in her sleek, 年轻的优雅.

但后来她开口了. 她的雷声隆隆. Gorman, chosen at age 18 to be the nation’s first National Youth Poet Laureate 2017年，朗诵“我们爬的山,” the poem she composed for the event. 整个国家都惊呆了, listening to the powerful words of a young Black woman who stood on stage to give a country scarred by domestic terrorism, stricken by a deadly pandemic and sundered by political division the words it needed for this day.

It was a message of hope and determined purpose, made all the more meaningful when you realize that Gorman composed portions of it on the very night that the Capitol was stormed and seized by a violent mob of American terrorists.

And yes we are far from polished

远离原始

但这并不意味着我们是

striving to form a union that is perfect

We are striving to forge a union with purpose

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and

人的条件

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us

但摆在我们面前的是...

Scripture tells us to envision

that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree

And no one shall make them afraid

If we’re to live up to our own time

Then victory won’t lie in the blade

But in all the bridges we’ve made

That is the promise to glade

我们爬过的山

只要我们敢

And then that passage that caught this moment in history:

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation

而不是分享

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy

And this effort very nearly succeeded

But while democracy can be periodically delayed

it can never be permanently defeated

Just 22, Gorman is the youngest poet ever to speak at a presidential inauguration, joining a 杰出的组织 that includes Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco. A native of Los Angeles, she attended Harvard where she studied sociology. Already a published author, Gorman has two more books expected to be published soon. It was Jill Biden who discovered her work and invited her to speak at the inaugural.

比如拜登总统, she has struggled since childhood with a speech impediment that in her case makes it difficult to pronounce certain sounds correctly. “I don’t look at my disability as a weakness,” 她告诉他 洛杉矶时报. “It’s made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be. When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds, when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, 听觉体验.”

Gorman’s stirring performance on Wednesday illustrated the power of words, the magic of language to capture the triumphs and the tragedies of our human condition. To explore our common history and grapple with our shared challenges.

And it put the humanities in a wonderful spotlight. After years of hearing about the “demise” of the humanities as a field of study, of despairing about their supposed “irrelevance” to the education today’s college students want, and of watching the steady elimination of humanities and arts majors across the country, Amanda Gorman’s five minutes of poetry reminded us why the serious study and evocation of the human interior is so edifying.

We’ve heard a lot about the Fauci effect, the recent increase in students applying to medical school because of admiration for Anthony Fauci. There’s also been a surge in law school applicants - a Ginsberg effect perhaps, as the nation focused like seldom before on the composition of the Supreme Court.

But Wednesday was a day for writers. 诗人得到了他们的推动. 戈尔曼效应即将到来.