Ep. 518 — Amanda Gorman

The Axe Files with David Axelrod

CNN

News

4.6 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When poet Amanda Gorman was 5 years old, she was already in the habit of waking up before dawn to write; her mother paid her a quarter each morning she stayed in bed past 6 a.m. Poetry became Amanda’s outlet for exploring history and her own experiences. Her talents have taken her from serving as the first National Youth Poet Laureate to reciting her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Amanda joined David to talk about her mother’s influence, working through her childhood speech impediment, the importance of representation in poetry and literature, writing for the inauguration following the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol, poetry as the language of the people, and her presidential aspirations.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Music
0:06.0	And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.
0:19.0	I had the great pleasure this week to sit down with Amanda Gorman, a young poet whose electrifying poem at the 2021 inaugural ceremonies
0:27.0	lifted our spirits just weeks after the same capital had been overrun by an insurrectionist mob.
0:33.0	The poem she read was called The Hill We Climb, and two years almost to the day from that inauguration,
0:40.0	I sat down with Amanda to talk about the hills she's climbed. Here's that conversation.
0:45.0	Music
0:53.0	Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. M. Hough, Americans, and the world.
1:05.0	When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
1:13.0	The loss we carry, a sea we must wade, we've braved the belly of the beast.
1:19.0	We've learned that quiet isn't always peace, in the norms and notions of what just is, isn't always just is.
1:31.0	And yet, the dawn is ours before, we knew it somehow, we knew it somehow, we've weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken.
1:44.0	But simply unfinished, we, the successors of a country and a time were a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother,
1:56.0	can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
2:03.0	Amanda Gorman, I still get chills when I hear that, and I've been waiting for two years to talk to you about that day and that poem in your life.
2:14.0	Well, that's a huge honor to me. I'm so excited to talk to you. It's such a huge privilege. Thank you.
2:21.0	When people think about that day, January 20th, 2021, there are two things I think they remember.
2:28.0	One is a capital surrounded by fence and armed guards, two weeks after an insurrection, and you, and the uplift and the electricity of that poem.
2:43.0	I can only imagine, and I want to talk about what that moment was like for you in front of a billion people doing what you did.
2:53.0	And the poem that you read that day was called the Hill We Climb.
2:59.0	So I just want to start off by talking about the hills you've climbed to get there and the hills you're climbing still.
3:05.0	But you gave a little hint of your story at the beginning of the poem to send it from enslaved people and a daughter of a single mother.
	...

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