Poetry After RGB at PBS NewsHour

At PBS NewsHour, Joshua Barajas speaks with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer about her poem, "In the Steps of RGB," written in response to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. "Trommer said she hadn’t ever cried for a national figure before," Barajas reports, "but Ginsburg’s death was different." Further: 

The poet called the late justice a “bridge-builder” who had a profound impact on the country. Trommer thinks not only of Ginburg’s legal expertise with the Supreme Court and the American Civil Liberties Union, but also her “commitment to finding equality” in the Constitution.

She said she feels profound gratitude when she thinks “about the difference between my daughter’s life and my life and my mother’s life and just how very different opportunities are, for the three of us.” Trommer noted, for example, how Ginsburg hid her pregnancy while teaching at Rutgers School of Law in the 1960s, a once-common career-ender for women that has improved over time. [...]

“I know that the only person who I really have any control over is me,” Trommer said, adding that it was important for her poem, “In the Steps of RBG,” to be about each person making this decision for themselves that “that we are willing to take steps as individuals and then together.”

Learn more at PBS NewsHour.