Poetry, Advertising, and What Moves Us
Amanda Gorman, Facebook, and The Poems of the 2020s
I am one of those people that likes to color code their bookshelf. Except for one genre—my poetry books get their own shelf. They’re thin volumes that I’ve amassed over the years; some are known poets like Adrienne Rich, some I discovered in the quiet poetry aisle of a book store like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and some I found on social media, like Fariha Roisin, whose Instagram presence and newsletter are as fire as her books.
I keep the poetry books together because sometimes I need them badly. These moments usually happen with an emotion so big that I need someone else to string it into words. I’ll reach for a bunch of books at once so I can find a poem that hits. When I was younger, the emotion was usually a crisis—a break up or loss, or a bout of depression that could reach existential proportions before I learned how to manage better. Recently, those crises that only poetry can answer are not personal, but public.
And I’m not alone.
Poetry & the Collective Experience
After 9/11, writer John Lundberg noted that people in NY were posting poems in windows and on lamp posts. After the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Miami, this poem went viral. When Trump won office in 2016, he did not choose an inaugural poet (a tradition that Kennedy started and that only Democrats have upheld). Instead, my social feeds filled with poems as people tried to process an open racist and misogynist as the highest leader of the land. To help, the Atlantic posted a 2017 list of “Poems for Coping with Inauguration Day.”
And 2020 served us a walloping of collective traumas that begged for poetry.
A handful of pandemic poems made the rounds, like this one. There was an attribution scandal on a modern poem about social distancing that was said to be written in the 1860s or 1918, during another quarantine. The journalists in the New York Times newsroom resorted to poetry for their morning briefings. With the ongoing killings of Black people by police, people rediscovered Audre Lorde and other Black activist poets. NPR compiled a community poem from its listeners.
But yesterday, poetry was in the news for a different reason. A celebration, a determination, a recognition of what we’ve gone through and what we have yet to accomplish. A huge, well-worded sigh of relief from Amanda Gorman, a young poet who’s said she wants to be president in 2036, and chose the route of poetry to get there.
Poetry & Commerce
Individuals are not the only ones who tap into the power of poetry when times are tough.
Facebook dropped an ad shortly after the quarantine with a poem by Kae Tempest. The ad was roundly praised, but I was skeptical. As poet Robert Graves has said, "There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either." Facebook, whose pursuit of money at the expense of democracy is well-documented, was not a brand that I wanted to hear from.
Other companies also found poets’ voices to speak for them. Walmart also highlighted a poet--Terrell ‘Trizz’ Myles, one of their own workers--in an ad that spoke of hope. Secret hired Jasmine Mans to write a poem highlighting the extra burden that the pandemic has on women. Rapper Tobe Nwigwe wrote a poem for Beats by Dre’s gutting ‘You Love Me’ ad. And even our new inaugural poet penned a verse for an ad for United Way.
Nick Tocek, who wrote a poem for a Prudential ad in the UK in 2014, said:
"Shakespeare would have thought commercialism was worth it. Populism is good. The more language matters to people the better…My Prudential poem is still the most recognised of all my poems. It took me 20 minutes to write, was broadcast 5,000 times and earned me £5,500."
So as uncomfortable as the juxtaposition of poetry and commerce can be, I do love that it takes some of the elitist fuzz off of poetry. If it gives a poet a paycheck, or convinces someone with little love for the humanities that words are worth preserving, that’s good.
Even if you don’t have a little part of your bookcase dedicated to poetry, Amanda Gorman’s inaugural moment (and maybe even Facebook’s ad) invites us all to experience poetry—poems that remind ourselves that history is long, and poems to comfort around loss, and poems to wail at the future. Ideally it will also remind us to value poetry when we need it most, and to support it when it needs us most.
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If you like this newsletter, I write every other week or so on advertising, culture, and doing a bit of good in the world.
Some links I like:
While Amanda’s poem brought a nation up, Bernie sitting brought us together. Someone built a site so you can put sitting Bernie anywhere.
If you want to support poetry financially, the Poetry Foundation is just an endless well of poems, poets, and knowledge. And 826 is a great org that teaches kids to be creative, mostly through writing.
Amanda Gorman’s full poem is worth reading and rereading. The full inaugural poem here, and below:
When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are 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 conditions of man.
So we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: that even as we grieved, we grew, even as we hurt, we hoped, that even as we tired, we tried, that we’ll forever be tied together victorious, not because we will never again know defeat but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one should make them afraid. If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in in all of the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare it because being American is more than a pride we inherit, it’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. That would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy, and this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can periodically be delayed, but it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith, we trust, for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us, this is the era of just redemption we feared in its inception we did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour but within it we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves, so while once we asked how can we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us.
We will not march back to what was but move to what shall be, a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free, we will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation, our blunders become their burden. But one thing is certain: if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left, with every breath from my bronze, pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one, we will rise from the golden hills of the West, we will rise from the windswept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution, we will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states, we will rise from the sunbaked South, we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.