This piece is hilarious. As the white author contorts herself to discredit a young Black poet's style, she also repeatedly reveals she has no knowledge of poetry, basic grammatical rules, or even the meanings of words. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/amanda-gorman-was-let-down-by-a-bad-poem

"I'm confused. How can one talk about struggling after darkness and trauma? Impossible to understand."

The author gets +1 from a poetry professor for knowing the term "alliteration" and -1,000 from the same professor as well as all speakers of the English language for failing to comprehend how someone can both "weather" and "witness" an experience.

It is stylistically common to start a sentence that builds on the previous one with an infinitive. This isn't even that transgressive. &, no, even if you were to combine the two sentences per prescriptivist grammar, you *wouldn't* use a comma. You would use the word "and"

No. "Change" is a noun. The structure "Noun Phrase + verb + Noun Phrase" followed by "Noun phrase + [elided/implied verb] + Noun Phrase" is common throughout English poetry & prose, but I suppose Emily Dickinson & Shakespeare were both white so no one was bothered by it before

And, while I'm on the subject, why, I wonder, does the author keep bringing up Martin Luther King? He was, as she admits, not a professional poet. So what is the point of comparison here, exactly? Why not compare Gorman's stylistics to Keats' or Whitman's?

Very curious. . . .

. @spectator didn't even farm their racism through a literary critic. They didn't try to disguise the racism through academic jargons. They literally just found a random white person whose basic language comprehension seems to be blown out by a successful Black woman.

And, to be clear, it would have been equally atrocious if they had found one of the many racist literary critics out there & tasked them w/ this piece. It probably would have been *more* pernicious. But the fact that they didn't do this is also revealing.

They just didn't think a Black poet's work was worth looking at by a trained critic--or even someone who has basic knowledge of English grammar. They also believed their audience would be so prone to racist stereotyping that they wouldn't notice the terrible stylistic analysis.

Considering it's the "Spectator," they were probably right about their audience's racism.

That doesn't change the fact that this publication is a gigantic self-own. It's basically "I've never read a poem but I won't let that stop me from criticizing Black poets" on repeat

https://twitter.com/EllisWeiner/status/1353404911325597698

But how can you "sing America?" America is a country. Can a country be sung?

--poetic analysis per the @spectator https://twitter.com/IPoppit/status/1353404109500477441