Here’s a good interview with English professor and Utah poet laureate Paisley Rekdal, who answers some questions about why she thinks it is a great poem, including some specifics about what makes it a poem.
I’m not a poetry critic, but I find her analysis persuasive.
Most artists would kill to be compared favorably to the Pulitzer Prize winning Hamilton so I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
I have to ask. Are you one of those “all poetry must have a rigid meter and rhyme in all the right spots” people? What she read was absolutely a poem and I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a real poetry critic who will say it’s not.
And from the Wikipedia article that you so blithely dismissed:
“The Guardian’s critic considered the poem a tour-de-force for Gorman”
“BBC News critic Will Gompertz described the poem as ‘a beautifully paced, well-judged poem for a special occasion’”
“A critic for NPR praised Gorman’s reading, her poem, and its message.”
“Dwight Garner of The New York Times Critic’s Notebook: ‘…you could sense the beginning of a remade connection in America between cultural and political life.’”
These are critics - professional critics who are paid for their opinion. I eagerly await the no-doubt substantive list of poor reviews you will produce from similarly pedigreed critics.
My heart tells me this is poetry, and that it is beautiful.
Nvrmnd
I’ll try again!
(Still didn’t work!)
The guy at JFK’s inauguration? I think most poetry critics tend to take Robert Frost pretty seriously.
But we can neither confirm nor deny that. 
Thanks for linking that.
For me, whether a spoken work is a poem or not is quibbling. Amanda Gorman’s performance was powerful and effective. Period. Anyone who argues against that is too disconnected from our culture to be worthy of discourse with.
It has many poetic elements. If someone wants to call it a poem, I won’t argue. If someone says it’s not, that’s their opinion. As I said before it’s comparable to The Gettysburg Address. That’s another powerful work that’s on the border of being a poem or not. Or I Have A Dream, which begins as a sermon and turns into poetry.
There’s a human need to categorize things, but sometimes it’s better to not.
I liked the poem very much; her striking appearance and elegant movements made it almost as much a piece of performance art as a poetry recitation.
Nice interview of Gorman by total fanboy Anderson Cooper here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHhut5nhI8g
Inasmuch as the President of the United States is himself Catholic, yeah… I think she’ll be OK.
Modnote: This seems to be getting uncomfortably close to insulting another poster. Please refrain.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
The poem was beautiful and it was powerful. I was thoroughly impressed by the young lady.
Change “Democrats” to “politicians”, and this was exactly what i was expecting. I groaned a little when they introduced her. Then she started to speak, and i changed my mind. She was really good. The poem was good. It was excellently delivered. Frankly, she hit it out of the park.
I’m not at all surprised that poetry critics are saying nice things about it.
The Hamilton Show is not good poetry in the same way an emergency poncho is not good architecture, it just isn’t an example of that thing.
Those people who loved her poem as words are just journalists who write about culture in general so they are going to say the loved it as they either write what their audience wants or they are true believers. They wouldn’t be in that job otherwise. Major newspapers don’t have cultural critics who actually criticise popular middlebrow culture, do they? I don’t mean those people, I mean actually poetry people, the ones knee deep in the metaphor trenches.
Most journalists these days are philistines as they have glommed politics and art together and can’t enjoy anything without it stroking their political vibe.
Anyway, that’s a side point the whole thing about what critics think I was also talking about the words being shit which brings us to:
To my rescue, yes!
She talks about how rushed Amanda Gorman was and how she memorised it and how her gestures and intonation and who she was being really important. That’s my point! The words aren’t great but well done for whipping up something fast and learning it and delivering it in the way of slam. But not good words.
At my school someone wrote:
realise
real eyes
real lies
On the desk in my science class so I found her word play derivative of that. Maybe it is new to American I haven’t been there.
She talked about metaphors being good but no they were bad metaphors really and confused and clumsy.
Then she says oh its all about the content, poetry can be didactic and good. Well maybe but this was not didactic and good, this was the words of someone trying to please their new boss and brush over the truth of the past.
Even Stan Grant got it.
Like the Carl Marx said, this poem was opiate for the masses and I get it, everyone needs a good shot of opium right now but it doesn’t stop it being opium. Makes you sad and sleepy and maybe not able to poo.
I have a dream comparison isn’t very fair, MLK was trying to do good and improve things, not say America is already great.
But yeah thanks, that’s what I am getting at. It’s propaganda, not art.
Propaganda can be lovely and stirring and art like but it isn’t art.
Ahh, No True Poet, I see. Some people don’t appreciate Bob Dylan’s writing, either. The Nobel folks liked it enough to award him The Nobel in Literature.
Is English not your first language?
There are some situations where the line is blurry between prose and poetry. But those usually do not refer to works with so many end rhymes. Here are the ones I noticed:
shade/wade, beast/peace, knew it/do it, witnessed/unfinished,
true/grew division/envision, afraid/blade/made/glade, inherit/repair it, succeeded/defeated, redemption/inception, hour/power, intimidation/generation, burdens/certain, chest/west, shade/unafraid, free it/see it/be it.
And that’s without pointing out all the wordplay within the lines.
Did you actually read and comprehend the article? So this is one of the “actually poetry people” “knee deep in the metaphor trenches” who you asked for. She disagrees with you and she’s wrong. Okaaaaay… Fine we all took our shot, now it’s time for you to pony up. Find a review that backs you up from an “actually poetry people” “knee deep in the metaphor trenches”. Or admit that you’re alone in your views about:
You know, when most of the rest of world disagrees with you, it’s MUCH more likely that you’re wrong, than that the rest of the world is.
