boston childrens museum big blue blocks libraries

We both signed her notebook to mark the moment she had cut out the pages and presented them to me. She made the choice to cut the fair copy manuscript out of her notebook so there would forever be a physical link between the Morgan manuscript, which she had removed, and the record of her composition process, which she retained. But then I learned what Amanda had in mind. As a manuscripts curator, I felt some trepidation when I saw those scissors. She then extracted a huge pair of scissors from her bag. In it were drafts of poems, notes to herself about her revision strategy, and the fair copy of “In This Place” that she had made for donation to the Morgan. She removed a notebook (with the words “You Can Do This!” on the cover) from her bag. On November 11, 2017, I met Amanda at the Art Museums at Harvard University, where she is currently a sophomore. To our delight, she promised us a fair copy manuscript of the very poem she had composed for the Library of Congress event. We were so bold as to ask if she would donate a manuscript of one her own works to the Morgan’s collection.

I invited Amanda to visit us at the Morgan, and within days she was seated at my desk with my colleagues Carolyn Vega and Michael Reid looking at letters and manuscripts of Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, and Emily Dickinson. What an extraordinary trio, together on one important national stage! Both Amanda and Smith were introduced that day by Carla Hayden, the country’s 14th Librarian of Congress and the first woman and first African American to hold the position. Amanda herself had recently been named the first Youth Poet Laureate of the United States by Urban Word, a literary arts organization that supports powerful young poets with a commitment to artistic excellence and civic engagement. Smith, the nation’s 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. In September 2017 I learned that Amanda, then age nineteen, had performed “In This Place (An American Lyric)” at the Library of Congress on the occasion of the inaugural reading of Tracy K. Echoing Walt Whitman, who told Emerson that “America is not finished, perhaps never will be,” Amanda reminds us that we live in “a nation composed but not yet completed.” Who will write a new American lyric? Who will be, in Whitman’s words, the new “architects of These States”? Going forward, whose work, ideas, power, and very existence will be memorialized in hallowed museums and libraries and in our collective memory? It is a challenge to all of us (including those of us who build and care for collections) not only to consider whose work belongs inside but also to look outside our noble buildings to witness a new American poetry-expressed in chants of protest and in everyday acts of courage, anger, and hope.

The manuscript includes these words: “There’s a poem in this place- / in the heavy grace, / the lined face of this noble building.” Amanda wrote those lines about the Library of Congress but they apply equally to the Morgan, with its venerable 1906 Tennessee pink marble building holding thousands of books that comprise, as Amanda puts it, “a palimpsest of time.”īut her poem, which remains on view at the Morgan until July 8, is not just a celebration of venerable libraries. It is her gift to the Morgan and to all of us. On March 12, 2018, Amanda Gorman, the twenty-year-old Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, visited the Morgan to place a manuscript of her poem “In This Place (An American Lyric)” in a vitrine in the Morgan’s majestic East Room alongside the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Carson McCullers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Peter Paul Rubens.

Boston childrens museum big blue blocks libraries