How are you preparing yourself to stand up and read in front of the tens of millions of people who will inevitably be watching? I’m almost like, is there a preparation for that? For me, it’s getting familiar enough with the poem, but I don’t want to bang it over the head to the point that, when I get on stage, I’m a robot. I still want it to be from the heart, so it’s practicing, rehearsing, but also making sure that inside me, it lives there. I try to approach reading in front of millions of people as I would reading in somebody’s living room. I’m trying to make this as special as I can for the American people, given that it’s a virtual reading. I want to challenge myself to imagine that closeness.
I imagine you will want to deliver something that resonates with everyone, although the nation feels so divided right now. How are you negotiating that? The difficult thing about writing a poem like this is that you want to write it for a country, but you also want it to be accessible. You want it to be representative of all the colors and characters of people who might be watching it. Preparing for that [involved] reading the previous inaugural poems and trying to focus on what they do well. I’ve also looked to Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass, who I love as a writer, or Martin Luther King, and the ways in which they used words to communicate the ideals of the nation in elegant rhetoric that [never] felt as if it was locked away in an ivory tower.
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