Young Kansas City poets stirred by inaugural poem, discover a tool for activism
Sanaa Best had decided to step back from competing on the champion slam poetry team at Lincoln College Preparatory Academy.
And then on Wednesday, 22-year-old Amanda Gorman stepped onto the national stage and delivered a poem of courage, hope, responsibility and national unity during the inauguration of the country’s 46th president.
Best was changed.
“I felt like that’s home up there,” said Best, a 16-year-old junior at Lincoln Prep. “Seeing a young Black woman like me up there speaking so eloquently, doing what I do, was empowering.”
Gorman, the first ever national youth poet laureate, and the youngest poet to recite at a presidential inauguration, overnight became wildly famous.
“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded,” Gorman read from her poem “The Hill We Climb.”
“But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.”
Gorman, a California native and Harvard University graduate, will have her first poetry collection published by Viking Books for Young Readers in September. The book is also titled “The Hill We Climb” and includes the inaugural poem. Her picture book, “Change Sings,” will come out the same day. On Wednesday afternoon, the books leaped to the No. 1 and No. 2 spots on Amazon.
“All my friends, everybody, is talking about her. Students of all races are inspired,” Best said. “She talked about wanting to be president some day. Like her, we have big dreams, and she made us feel we can also achieve big dreams.”
Jackson Boyd, a Lincoln Prep senior and member of the poetry team, was also moved by Gorman. “I think what she did shined a light for young people to see there is another form of art. It’s not just music and painting. Poetry is an important art. And she really represented poets well. It was powerful, the kind of poem you listen to years later, and it signifies what the country is going through today.”
Best joined Lincoln’s team after watching the school’s 2017 regional championship team compete. “It was so crazy seeing high school students be able to articulate their words like that with so much power. I thought, that is something I want to do.”
Last year Best joined her team — Beautiful Minds — in a Louder Than a Bomb slam poetry competition against The Barstow School, a private prep school in Kansas City.
“Lincoln won that preliminary competition and was heading to the semi-finals before COVID stopped competition,” said Joyce Nguyen Hernandez, who last year as a Kansas City Public Schools English teacher was the sponsor for the Lincoln team. Now she is the KCPS college access coordinator.
The break in competition got Best thinking that maybe she would give up on writing. But watching Gorman reminded her what she’d loved about poetry in the first place.
“Writing poems with the team, laughing and crying with them and then hearing the words we wrote manifest when we spoke them was the most beautiful experience I’ve ever had on this planet,” she said. “Poetry is beautiful.”
Hernandez said she felt it too.
“Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem stirred my heart because powerful poets are healers. Her words are artistry, advocacy, history and a healing balm for us all.”
She expects that Gorman will inspire more young people to join school writing clubs, like Lincoln’s poetry team.
When Gorman spoke, Hernandez said, the nation, and particularly students of color, “realized that both poets and presidents can be intimate with pain and tragedy. … Amanda Gorman teaches us all that we should have bountiful hope in young people.”
And now, she said, “those parents who are saying, I want my child to grow up and become president are seeing there is another way. Be a poet. Use words to bring light to injustice.”
