Poet laureate can’t define a ‘ban’

Amanda Gorman, the young female poet who read at Joe Biden’s inauguration lamented on Tuesday night that her poem had been banned by a Florida school library.

“Just found out my inaugural poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County because it causes “confusion and indoctrination,” America’s first National Youth Poet Laureate tweeted. 

The poem, however, was never banned. Instead, according to the Miami-Dade school district, “The Hill We Climb” was moved from the elementary section of the library to the middle-school section. 

“It was determined at the school that ‘The Hill We Climb’ is better suited for middle-school students and, it was shelved in the middle-school section of the media center. The book remains available in the media center,” a statement from the school district said.

The school moved the book of poetry after a parent of two students complained that it was not “educational” and contained indirect “hate messages.” In the complaint, the parent mistook Oprah Winfrey as the poem’s author. 

Naturally, the media responded to Gorman’s “ban” claim by checking how true it was before regurgitating it… just kidding! The Miami Herald first reported Gorman’s post and it was quickly rewritten by other outlets who decried the ban as an assault on free speech. A selection of headlines includes the Guardian’s “Amanda Gorman ‘gutted’ after Florida school bans Biden inauguration poem”; MSNBC’s “Florida school bans Amanda Gorman poem over one parent’s CRT fears”; and USA Today’s “Florida school bans elementary students from reading Amanda Gorman’s ‘The Hill We Climb’ poem”

Like his comrades in the media, Cockburn is upset about the parent’s complaint. But the true threat from Gordon’s poetry isn’t that it will make our children hate America but that it will make them love bad poetry. Seriously, have you read “The Hill We Climb?” It’s like slam poetry without any of the excitement. As The Spectator’s Melanie McDonagh wrote upon its release, it’s tough to try “to make the whole thing cohere, structurally and grammatically — and in terms of sense.”

After criticism over calling the schools decision a ban, Gorman took to Twitter again to double-down on her claim. 

“A school book ban is any action taken against a book that leaves access to a book restricted or diminished,” she tweeted. “This decision of moving my book from its original place, taken after one parent complained, diminishes the access elementary schoolers would have previously had to my poem.”

Cockburn hopes that, in the future, America’s favorite wordsmith can find the proper words to express her victimization.