An art project based on the works of Amanda Gorman from the collection Call Us What We Carry as a poetic performance of the Les Kurbas Theater
Today we offer a closer look at the collection "Call Us What We Carry" by contemporary American poet Amanda Gorman.
“When day comes, we ask ourselves:
Where can we find light
In this never-ending shade?”
Thus began her five-minute poem "The Hill We Climb", which she read during the swearing-in of the country's new president, Joe Biden. This poem became part of the collection "Call Us What We Carry", which was published on December 7, 2021 by the American publishing house Viking Press. The book took first place on the New York Times bestseller list.
“Gorman continues to explore the “we” further in her new collection, Call Us What We Carry, which she calls an “occasional book”—one framed by our many mutating yet seemingly immutable pandemics, from COVID-19 and racism to climate catastrophes and a general malaise. In “penning a letter to the world as a daughter of it,” Gorman doesn’t merely transcribe a diary of a plague year; her bold, oracular pronouncements bear witness to collective experience, with an uncanny confidence and a prescient tone that are all the poet’s own. By turns devotional and pushing the limits of the page, many poems in the book play with form—appearing as questionnaires and text-message conversations, or taking on the shapes of an urn, a whale, a flag—in ways reminiscent of George Herbert or the concrete poets of the nineteen-sixties, another tempestuous time in search of fixity. Gorman insists that “We are not me— / We are we,” and her poetry is unafraid to name all that we carry. “Our scars,” she writes, “are the brightest / Parts of us.”*
(Kevin Young), The New Yorker
By working on a production with these poetic works of exceptional depth, we aim to transform it into a conversation about both the diversity and the shared values of different cultures, exploring the inherent grace and energy of Amanda Gorman's artistic work. This project is designed to create a multicultural, educational and artistic alliance that will unite the American and Ukrainian worlds into one powerful artistic interaction.
This project is a recipient of the American Embassy in Ukraine’s grant "Strengthening Ukrainian Cultural Institutions through Ukrainian-American Collaboration in Performing Arts".
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