Dinah Berland (Poetry ’95) discusses her mentee Amanda Gorman
Poetry alum Dinah Berland was recently featured in Forward. Hear her discuss her mentee Amanda Gorman, who recently read at President Biden’s inauguration, below:
Amanda Gorman’s former mentor knows what drives her
A lot of us shed tears when Amanda Gorman recited her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the inauguration of President Joe Biden.
Dinah Berland didn’t just cry, she screamed.
“Oh my goodness, I was just thrilled,” Berland, a Jewish poet and author who has been a mentor to the young poet laureate. “I knew she would rise to the occasion, because of who she is.”
Berland started working with Gorman, who is now 22, six years ago. She has seen an already-gifted girl grow, through hard work and focused ambition, into the young woman who commanded the national spotlight — and will be in it once again on Sunday when she is scheduled to recite a poem at the Superbowl pre-game show.
They met in the spring of 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, where Gorman was reciting a poem as part of WriteGirl, a nonprofit that empowers girls through self-expression. Berland, an accomplished poet and author, had come because she wanted to serve as one of the group’s mentors.
“Amanda got up there and she was so far superior to the other kids,” Berland recalled in an interview last week. “I wanted her to know she was special.”
So Berland followed her out of the museum and found Amanda sitting alone on a bench.
“I introduced myself, and I said hoped she would take her work seriously,” Berland said.
A few weeks later, someone from WriteGirl called Berland to say the group had “the perfect young girl” for her—Amanda Gorman. She was already well on her way, having been selected as Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate in 2014, and publishing a book of poetry, “The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough” in 2015.
Gorman’s passion was clear. In a poem published in a WriteGirl anthology when she was 14 years-old, she wrote, “Poetry is your voice when you don’t have one/It is who you are when you don’t know.”
Berland, who has an MFA from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, has published prize-winning poetry, and also wrote “Hours of Devotion: Fanny Neuda’s Book of Prayers for Jewish Women” (Schocken, 2007), a verse adaptation of the first Jewish prayer book by a woman. Her poetic translations channel Neuda’s 19th-century voice through a modern sensibility.
The two women, 60 years apart, began working together at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in West Los Angeles.
“She was primarily a spoken-word poet,” Berland recalled. “Maya Angelou was her favorite. So we studied poetry on the page, how poems live on as literature.
“She’s really a genius, totally brilliant,” she added. “She wanted professional guidance from a writer.”
Sitting in the noisy café, Berland and Gorman read poets like Terrance Hayes and Yusef Komunyakaa. They read Rita Dove, the first African-American to hold the title of U.S. Poet Laureate, and Natasha Trethewey, a more recent U.S. Poet Laureate.
Berland gave Gorman assignments she herself had in graduate school, which she said Gorman aced, though she was just 16. Berland gave Gorman prompts to write from, and Gorman, to Berland’s astonishment, would be able to concentrate and write amidst the din. On her own, Gorman devoured biographies of poets.
“She wanted to understand how poets became poets,” Berland said.
Read the article in its entirety here: https://forward.com/news/463367/amanda-gormans-former-mentor-knows-what-drives-her/
