Free Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman Page A

sentence in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which reads “You must change your life.”
WHAT A PIECE OF WRECK IS MAN
    “What a piece of wreck is man” is a phrase inspired by a monologue by Prince Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , which reads “What a piece of work is a man!”
ESSEX I
    The line “we become what we hunt” is inspired by this passage from Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex : “The sperm whales’ network of female-based family unit resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.”
ANOTHER NAUTICAL
    “Wine-dark” is an epithet frequently used by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey to describe the sea.
LIGHTHOUSE
    Terence was a formerly enslaved person who went on to become a famous playwright around 170 b . c . e . This line, “ Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto ,” is one of his most famous, and translates to “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” Maya Angelou mentioned this quotation in Oprah’s Masterclass series.
    The line “No human is a stranger to us” calls back to Terence’s sentiments.
HEPHAESTUS
    The line “This is not an allegory” speaks to a quote from Plato’s Republic (translated by Paul Shorey) on Hephaestus being cast from heaven by Zeus: “But Hera’s fetterings by her son and the hurling out of heaven of Hephaistos by his father [Zeus] when he was trying to save his mother from a beating, and the battles of the gods in Homer’s verse are things that we must not admit into our city either wrought in allegory or without allegory. For the young are not able to distinguish what is and what is not allegory.”
CORDAGE, or ATONEMENT
    For continuity of the book’s voice, for many quotations and original documents used in the erasure poems, I have inputted the ampersand in place of “and,” as well as the first-person plural “our/we/us” instead of other narrative pronouns. Punctuation and capitalization have also been modified occasionally where appropriate.
    Hensleigh Wedgwood, A Dictionary of English Etymology , vol. 1 (London: Trübner & Co., 1859), 72.
EARTH EYES
    The line “how we want our parents red” is inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem “Romance Sonámbulo,” which repeats the line “Verde que te quiero verde,” or “Green, how I want you green,” throughout.
PAN
    Mention of “the dead” in reference to what is stored in a pithos is influenced by Giorgos Vavouranakis, “Funerary Pithoi in Bronze Age Crete: Their Introduction and Significance at the Threshold of Minoan Palatial Society,” American Journal of Archaeology 118, no. 2 (2014): 197–222.
PRE-MEMORY
    “Postmemory han is a paradox”: Seo-Young Chu, “Science Fiction and Postmemory Han in Contemporary Korean American Literature,” MELUS 33, no. 4 (2008): 97–121.
WHO WE GONNA CALL
    The title “Who We Gonna Call” is a reference to the original “Ghostbusters” theme song, to the film of the same name, by Ray Parker Jr.
VALE OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH or EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!
    The line “a slur is a sound that beasts us” is inspired by lines in Lucille Clifton’s seven-part poem “far memory,” in part six, “karma,” which reads “the broken vows / hang against your breasts, / each bead a word / that beats you.”
CONDOLENCE
    Cecilia was a sixteen-year-old Yakama tribal member from Toppenish, Washington, who died of the flu at the Chemawa Indian School, a US government–run boarding institution in Salem, Oregon. This poem “erases” a letter of condolence from the superintendent of the Yakama Indian Agency to Cecilia’s mother, Grace Nye. Cecilia was one of thousands of Native Americans who perished from