In This Place (An American Lyric)

In this first-person, free-verse poem, Gorman uses imagery, repetition, figurative language, and diction, among other poetic devices, to convey her message of the potential for poetry in all Americans resisting the encroachment of white supremacy and marginalization.

The first stanza establishes the poem’s recurring motif, “There’s a poem in this place” (Line 1), which she repeats in some variation at the beginning of many stanzas. It also establishes the location in which Gorman presented the poem, the Library of Congress, using internal rhyme to describe echoing large space, which resounds with “footfalls in the halls” (Line 2) and the “beat of the seats” (Line 3). Finally, the stanza establishes the time of her recitation: It is the “curtain of the day” (Line 4), a metafictional variant of the phrase “end of the day” that highlights the fact of her performance on stage. The last line of the stanza introduces a “you” that suggests that the speaker’s comrades are all the people of the US—except those standing in the way of the ideals of inclusion and forward progress that this poem promotes. Right now, the “you” are multitudes, but they are stymied by their circumstances: Although “America writes a lyric” (Line 5), it cannot be proclaimed aloud; instead, “you must whisper” it (Line 6).

The second stanza is another encomium (an expression of enthusiastic praise) to the Library of Congress, a “noble building” (Line 9) with dignity and solidity that belie the fact that it has withstood tremendous strife. The stately mansion has a “heavy grace” (Line 8) and a “lined face” (Line 9)—external markers of survival explained by the last line of the stanza, “collections burned and reborn twice” (Line 10). This alludes to the 1851 fire that burned a significant portion of the collection and left the Library inactive for several decades. This is the first of many times Gorman references historical and contemporary events and places in the poem.

Stanza 3 begins the poem’s litany of recent events throughout the country, primarily focusing on the protest movement that arose in the wake of the election of President Donald Trump in 2016 and his subsequent controversial policy decisions. The poem insists that each of its examples of resistance is worthy of being honored via poetry: In this case, “There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square” (Line 11). In Boston in January 2017, protesters sponsored by the Council on American Islamic Relations gathered to oppose President Trump’s executive order on immigration, which specifically excluded people from majority-Muslim countries from being able to enter the US. Gorman uses a simile to describe the force of their voices: “[P]rotest chants / tear through the air / like sheets of rain” (Lines 12-14). These people are no longer whispering their American lyric; instead, they represent the best of what this country could be, as their multitudinous love “swallows hatred of the few” (Line 16).

Stanza 4 moves to Charlottesville, Virginia, juxtaposing the imagery of the righteous protesters in Boston with the racist and fascist Unite the Right rally, which took place in August 2017 at the University of Virginia. Synecdoche, or using a part of something to stand in for the whole, allows Gorman to represent the white nationalists simply as “tiki torches” (Line 18). Unlike the diverse voices of the Boston protest, here are gathered only “men so white they gleam blue” (Line 20). The description is purposeful—the fact that no women join this group highlights its misogyny, while the men’s glowing white skin and its blue tinge evoke the undead and the police. Line 21 compares the men to “statues” (Line 21), referring to the culture war about removing statues honoring Confederate traitors to the US. In contrast to these men—stone-faced, barely human—the poem elevates Heather Heyer, a counter-protester killed by James Alex Fields, Jr., who drove his car into counter-protesters that night. The stanza’s final line honors Heyer’s passionate, activist spirit: She is the soul of the poem, who “blooms forever in a meadow of resistance” (Line 25).

In the fifth stanza, Gorman refers to an environmental feature of the Great Lake region that has “long ago” origins in Native American legend (Line 29): A rock formation in Lake Michigan resembles a “great sleeping giant” (Line 26). Ojibwe tradition refers to a great spirit that resides in the lake waters. The stanza uses this image to remind the audience that the American lyric predates the word “America”—the peoples who inhabited this continent before European colonization have been “defiantly raising” (Line 27) poetry “blazed into frozen soil, / strutting upward and aglow” (Lines 29-30). The phrase “frozen soil” also alludes to the damage that human-caused climate change has inflicted on this sleeping giant.

In the sixth stanza, the theme of environmentalism transitions into the weather patterns of 2017, specifically Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma, which particularly affected Texas and Florida. She uses vivid metaphors and similes to suggest the devastating effects on the communities: “[T]he streets swell into a nexus” (Line 32), while “cows afloat like mottled buoys” (Line 33). In the last line, she mentions paramedic and undocumented Mexican immigrant Jesus Contreras, who rescued victims in Houston for six days straight.

Stanza 7 is autobiographical, as Gorman considers her hometown of Los Angeles, California. She describes the tireless efforts of her single mother, a teacher whose efforts to empower “black and brown students in Watts / to spell out their thoughts” (Lines 40-41) never flagged, despite the “swelters” (Line 38) of her “windowless classroom” (Line 39). Gorman ends the stanza with a reference to herself in the present moment: Her mother’s efforts allowed her to “write / this poem for you” (Lines 42-43). The unexpected rhyme of “Watts” and “thoughts” plays up the fact of the “poem” as a piece of cultural production that could not have come without education—the rhyme links this poem to the long tradition of formally complex poetry in English.

The eighth stanza addresses another set of protests resulting from President Trump’s attempt to end the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows undocumented children, many from Mexico—like the heroic Jesus Contreras, a DACA recipient—to live safely in the United States without fear of deportation. Gorman mentions her friend Rosa, who becomes the embodiment of the many students who protested Trump’s policy. Rosa’s hope is like “a stubborn / ship gripping a dock” (Lines 49-50)—a simile that gestures at one of the many ways immigrants come to the US. The stanza ends on the complex, multivalent use of the word “dreamer” (Line 51). In the poem, the dreamer is both a young person with the dream of an inclusive, just, and welcoming United States and also a young person protected under the DACA program. However, this word also has a powerful history as a rhetorical feature of some of the most famous pieces of prose and poetry connected to the Civil Rights Movement in the US. By using it, Gorman evokes Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the 1963 March on Washington, as well as Langston Hughes’s famous poem “Harlem” (1951), which opens with the line, “What happens to a dream deferred?” (Hughes, Langston. “Harlem.” Poetry Foundation, 2002. Line 1).

Stanza 9 is one long question about why Los Angeles, or America itself, cannot belong to young people like Rosa, who by rights should own it as much as the white-faced, torch-carrying men marching to keep people like her out. Gorman uses English and Spanish to emphasize that Rosa is a stand-in for her entire audience: The US is “her city / su nación / our country / our America" (Lines 54-57). In this vision, the US Constitution becomes a “poem by the people” (Line 58), and the rightful owners of America comprise all religions and all genders, are both Indigenous and immigrants, and span every kind of other identity, as implied by the alliterative list of “the black, the brown, the blind, the brave” (Line 61).

In the 10th stanza, she focuses on the power of poets in the face of oppressive “tyrants” (Line 67). The reference to poets again comes with rhymes, just as in Stanza 7, except here, the rhymes are insistent and occur in almost every single line in the stanza, based on the jokey phrase used to call attention to an unintentional rhyme—“you’re a poet, and you don’t even know it.” Having declared all of the marginalized people and their allies poets, the poem here rallies them into action with urgency: “[W]e can’t blow it / we owe it / to show it” (Lines 69-71). The metaphor of sewing suggests the poets stitch words together—a challenging and important art form.

In the 11th stanza, hope is the focal point. Despite all of the challenges listed in this poem, we must instill optimism to light our way—hope is thus a candle, “like a wick in the poet” (Line 79). In the stanza’s first half, end rhymes carry over from the previous stanza, connecting the hope needed to stay in the fight with the importance of creating the kind of poetry that will resist tyranny. The second half of the stanza uses internal and end rhymes, as well as alliteration, to create parallel structures that emphasize an imperfect present with dreams of a better future: “a Texas city depleted but not defeated / a history written that need not be repeated / a nation composed but not yet completed” (Lines 83-85). The assonance of the paired words—“depleted” and “defeated,” “written” and “repeated,” and “composed” and “completed”—creates a building cadence that echoes the rising momentum of the Black sermon genre. From the smaller scale of one city, the scope broadens to the entire country, as she acknowledges that the nation is still young and has a long way to grow and learn.

In the 12th stanza, the repeating phrase “There’s a poem” (Line 86) affirms once more that all of America is capable of inspiring a poem, just as all people can be inspired to write one. Even though words on a page can seem like an end, words can change, find revision, and continue. Just as history is a multilayered stacking of events that take place in the same geographic locations, so too does the poetry all Americans create with their existence become a “palimpsest” (Line 91)—a term for a physical object that has been repeatedly marked in a way that makes the earlier words or images still visible.

The 13th stanza returns to the place where Gorman recited the poem, the Library of Congress. Addressing the present and the future, the speaker-poet becomes an oracle or midwife, ushering in the forthcoming American poem: “[I]t is here, it is now” (Line 96). The “dawn” (Line 96) is the harbinger of “an American lyric / we are just beginning to tell” (Lines 97-98).