No pains, no gains. This is especially true for Amanda Gorman. In 2021, she became the youngest poet to write and read her works at a presidential inauguration (就职典礼). The 22-year old impressed the audience with The Hill We Climb, which referred to both painful history and hope for the future.
You wouldn't know it from her delivery of her poem at the inauguration, but up until a few years ago, she struggled to overcome her speech problem. For much of her life, including when she was still an undergraduate at Harvard, Gorman had trouble pronouncing the letter "R".
Her situation presented difficulties, but also had benefits. "I think it made me all that much stronger of a writer when you have to teach yourself how to say words from zero. I think of my speech trouble not as a weakness or a disability, but as one of my greatest strengths. "
To practice saying the letter, she'd listen on repeat to one song packed with "R"s—Aaron Burr, Sir from Lin-Manuel Miranda's historical masterpiece, Hamilton. She would try to keep up with the singer as he was doing the rap (说唱). She believed if she could train herself to do this song, then she could train herself to say the letter "R" correctly. Sure enough, rapping along with Miranda's fast-paced rhymes worked, and: Gorman's performance of her piece, The Hill We Climb, ranked among the highlights of the inauguration.
Overcoming a speech problem is a milestone for her. Gorman said she owes a lot to the Pulitzer Prize winning musical. That was why she included a few references to Hamilton in her inspiring poem, some of which the author of Hamilton noticed: He praised her performance in a post. "You were perfect. Perfectly written, perfectly delivered. "
