Goeiemore, LA
There was many fixtures by yesterday inauguration events, from the President-elect and Vice-President elected to Lady Gaga, J. Lo and Garth Brooks.
But among them all is the 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman stood out. With her beautiful words and swan-like gestures, she told Americans to a moment of great division to look to a future based on power, survival and hope:
While we once asked, “How then can we overcome a disaster?”
Now we say, “How can disaster befall us?”
We will not go back to what was, but move on to what will be
A land that is bruised but whole
Benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
Although the world may have been introduced to Gorman only yesterday, she was known as a rising star years in LA.
A native of western LA, Gorman was raised by a single parent and lives the New Roads School in Santa Monica. Gorman het described her childhood like ‘this incredibly strange intersection in Los Angeles, where it felt like the black cap with black elegance and white gentrification with Latin culture and wetlands’. ‘
At 14, Gorman joined Writer, a local non-profit organization that provides writing mentorship to girls and young women. Michelle Chahtold Sinno, who mentored Gorman at WriteGirl for two years, told my colleague Caroline Champlin that the talent of the young poet was always evident.
“The way she sees the world is incredible,” she said, “from everyday to today, and talks about democracy.”
Gorman becomes the first Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate, and later the first National Youth Poet Laureate. And although many today heard her words for the first time, Gorman has always believed in the power of poetry, and young people, to achieve separation.
“We at least know that poetry is powerful,” she wrote in a 2014 essay for The Huffington Post. “Youth is powerful. Together we produce enough power to change ourselves and change the world. ”
Read on for more information on what’s happening in LA today, and stay safe out there.
What else do you need to know today
Before you go … What’s even a coat?
In its most basic terms, it is ‘an outer garment worn on the torso’ that varies in length and style according to fashion and usage. (Thank you, Merriam-Webster.) But between the natural warm weather here in Los Angeles and the increasingly hot winters caused by climate change, many of us who live here may have forgotten how to cover.
And yet, there they were, in a dazzling array of colors and styles during the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States yesterday.
What is this strange garment then, and who has the low key fight of the outerwear during the socially distant festivals of yesterday?
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