Amanda Gorman Sees Us Learning to Love Through Loss | Glamour 2021 Woman of The Year.

Glamour chose Jumel Terrace Books to showcase the poetess reading as well as their photo feature. A couple of nights later I watched Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s attempt to act out Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis’s relation in Woman of the Year, mildly amused by the tragedy celebrity can be for writers. The film is period sexist, with Ms. Hepburn’s character failing as a wife and mother while achieving world wide acclaim as a journalist. The culpability of Thompson/Lewis divorce was wholly relieved for Tracy, who plays it, unlike homeboy Lewis, sober.

All the same I would recommend the books on Dorothy and Red, particularly the book by that title by their friend Vincent Sheehan, as a cautionary tale to the poet. In the week before the fashion shoot the news of the idealistic poetess, who’d been lauded partially for not letting herself be bought, was purchased by Estee Lauder to represent their brand and at the shoot I watched all that meant and when I saw the Glamour cover of her in the bright turquoise blue minstralsy costume out of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Showboat I thought, Oh, no.

But this video’s quite good. I’m not much for inspirational verse, Fernando Pessoa – an exemplary anti-poet – being my flavor for poetry lately. Which doesn’t mean anything. Poetry comes in all flavors and everyone’s their own taste buds. It’s all very nice being a salesperson for beauty products but there is a crying need for the kind of poetry Ms. Gorman’s writing and I want nothing more than for her to succeed as a poet. She doesn’t need to do anything to be pretty though, likely, it pays better. I know it does for me, who can’t sell books to the post-literate but seems to be doing fine selling their appearance to those who wish they weren’t.