In This Place (An American Lyric)

“In This Place (An American Lyric)” is a 2017 lyric poem by American poet and human rights activist Amanda Gorman. She wrote and presented the poem at the Library of Congress to commemorate the inauguration of Tracy K. Smith as the poet laureate of the United States. The themes that spring from this poem include the potential of the US to be an inclusive nation, the value of poetry in that potential, and how Americans can unite for positive change. Its poetic elements show influences from various styles and mentors, including spoken-word poetry and the work of Maya Angelou.

Poet Biography

Amanda Gorman was born on March 7, 1998, in Los Angeles, California, to a single mother who was a middle-school English teacher. She grew up with two siblings, including a twin sister. Gorman had an auditory processing disorder and speech impediment as a child, so she focused on reading and writing, with her reading including influential works from Toni Morrison. She attended private school in Santa Monica before accepting a scholarship to study sociology at Harvard University, where she graduated cum laude in 2020.

At 15, Gorman became a youth delegate to the United Nations after drawing inspiration from activist Malala Yousafzai. In 2015, at age 17, she published her first collection of poetry, titled The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough; soon after, she became Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. In 2016, she founded the youth writing and leadership nonprofit One Pen, One Page. A year later, Gorman became the first young poet to initiate the literary season for the Library Congress, where she presented “In This Place (An American Lyric)” and became the first young person to receive the honor of National Youth Poet Laureate.

Over the years, Gorman has received numerous honors and accolades, such as being named one of The Root magazine’s Young Futurists and being featured in Time magazine’s 100 Next list.

In 2021, Gorman was the presidential inaugural poet for President Joe Biden. At Biden’s inauguration, Gorman read her poem “The Hill We Climb,” becoming the youngest poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration. Afterward, she published a best-selling picture book for children titled Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem and The Hill We Climb and Other Poems (later re-titled Call Us What We Carry: Poems). One month after the inauguration, Gorman became the first poet to present at the Super Bowl with an original poem titled “Chorus of the Captains” in honor of the three captains facilitating the coin toss before the game.

In 2023, the conservative Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes, Florida, banned Gorman’s inaugural poem, which Gorman updated after the January 6, 2023, attempted insurrection in the US Capitol.

Gorman continues to write poetry about social issues, including gun violence in schools and the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

Poem Text

Gorman, Amanda. “In This Place (An American Lyric).” 2017. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

In this 13-stanza poem, Gorman establishes a sense of place and its importance to the creation of poetry. Because Gorman uses many of the conventions and techniques of spoken-word poetry, her speaker can be thought of as the poet herself. The speaker-poet uses the repeated phrase “There’s a poem in…” (Line 1) at the beginning of the first half of the poem to highlight various locations and related events throughout the United States that could inspire a poem or lyrics.

First, the poem acknowledges the Library of Congress, where the poem’s presentation took place—even in this seemingly quiet place of “heavy grace” (Line 8), a poem could honor the resilience of “collections burned and reborn twice” (Line 10). Then, it takes readers to the many places poems could be written about: Copley Square, Boston, where progressive “protest chants / tear through the air” (Lines 12-13); Charlottesville, Virginia, where a lyric could forever memorialize Heather Heyer, killed by a terrorist attacking protesters with a car in August of 2017; the “sleeping giant / of Lake Michigan” (Lines 26-27) that the poem would cast as a geographical Indigenous protest to human-made cities; East Texas, where Jesus Contreras, a heroic young man and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy) recipient, “rescues people from floodwaters” (Line 35); Los Angeles, where the speaker-poet’s mother is “swelter[ing] / in a windowless classroom” (Lines 38-39); and California, where an undocumented protester named Rosa so deeply belongs that “her spirit [is] the bedrock of her community” (Line 48).

Starting in Stanza 9, the speaker-poet focuses on the power of poetry, which supports all people of marginalized identities—depicted as protestors and upstanders in the previous stanzas—in declaring that this is “our country / our America, / our American lyric to write” (Lines 55-57). The poem uplifts the role of creators in the face of the “tyrants [who] fear the poet” (Line 67), hoping to inspire “a nation composed but not yet completed” (Line 85).

In the final two stanzas, the speaker-poet brings back the repetitive phrase from earlier to state that all of America is ripe for a poem and that all Americans are ripe to be poets: “[W]e are just beginning to tell” America’s story (Line 98).