—SAMUEL N. BROWN
When I received the call in September 2013 from Mayor Eric Garcetti that I’d been chosen as the new Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, I had to keep this information quiet until the official announcement the next month. However, I did mention it to a few people, most of whom looked at me with a smile and a confused expression.
“What’s a ‘poet laureate’?” more than one person asked.
My so-called best friend wisecracked, “Did you say ‘poet illiterate’?”
I knew then I was in trouble.
I was only the city’s second poet laureate, following the brief tenure of longtime poet extraordinaire Eloise Klein Healy, who had been appointed in December 2012. Regrettably, her health forced her to step down, leading to my appointment.
Confusion aside, I felt it was about time “poet laureate” became a household term. The United States now has more poet laureates than ever before. There are poet laureates for states, counties, cities, communities, small towns, and Native American reservations (Luci Tapahonso became the first poet laureate of the Diné Nation). Claudia Castro Luna, a Salvadoran American, served as Seattle’s poet laureate and later held the same post for Washington state. Two Xicanx poets, Laurie Ann Guerrero and Octavio Quintanilla, did the same for San Antonio. Sponsored by New York City–based Urban Word, there is also a Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate (I helped pick two of them) and the first ever National Youth Poet Laureate, eighteen-year-old Amanda Gorman.
California’s poet laureates have included my colleagues Al Young, Carol Muske-Dukes, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Dana Gioia. San Francisco has also had a mentor of mine, Jack Hirschman, as well as an old friend, Alejandro Murguía, as poet laureates. Award-winning African American poet Robin Coste Lewis took over after my tenure, a great choice for the post. And we can’t forget that Juan Felipe Herrera also served from 2015 to 2017 as US Poet Laureate, followed by African American wordsmith Tracy K. Smith, as well as the first Native American to hold this post, Joy Harjo.
The poet laureate tradition is long. Poet laureates were first recognized in Italy during the fourteenth century. Ben Jonson became England’s first poet laureate in 1616, although the first “official” poet laureate, John Dryden, received his appointment in 1668. The present title in the United States, however, wasn’t authorized until an act of Congress in 1985—prior to that they were known as “Consultants in Poetry.”
In ancient Greece, a laurel or crown was given to honor poets and heroes. Such honors were bestowed on the best poets of the time—and those who could best chronicle in verse their times. Yet for me the tradition goes farther back to oral storytellers from around the world who’ve been doing this for thousands of years.
On this land, these traditions harken back to the massive cities and temples of the Mexica, whose so-called rulers were known as Huey Tlatoani—Great Speaker—and whose expression for poetry was “flowery songs,” which became the basis for “flower and song” festivals (in xochitl in cuicatl). One major Huey Tlatoani, known to anthropologists as the “Poet-King,” was Nezahualcoyotl (“Hungry Coyote”) who lived from 1402 to 1472 AD. Knowing this, I once argued with someone at a writers’ conference who claimed the “Aztecs” were destroyed because they had no poetry. That false assertion is among the stream of lies offered to justify the terrible destruction of a remarkable people.
The first year after my appointment I was to do a minimum of six events—I ended up doing 110. I did more events the next year, and was additionally given a list of forty libraries from which to choose two to read at. I read at all forty. I also had a blog every month at the LA Public Library’s website. I’ll venture to say that in two years I spoke directly to more than twenty-five thousand people, and millions more via TV, radio, the Internet, and print media.
I shared poems twice with the LA City Council. I took part in Pacoima, California’s Celebrating Words Festival, and the Spanish-language book fair called ¡LéaLA! (Read LA). I also read at the annual Watts Towers Jazz Festival, Grand Performances at California Plaza, Grand Park’s Downtown Bookfest, and with the California Community Foundation. I read at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, Sirens Java and Tea in San Pedro, and Get Lit Players’ Poetic Convergence at the Skirball Cultural Center (Get Lit also did the first event for me at the Actors’ Gang Theater in Culver City and the ending event at the Mark Taper Auditorium). I performed poetry with my friend John Densmore, drummer for the Doors, at the Montalbán Theater in Hollywood, and later with John and Michael Meade for “Aloud!” at the Central Library. And I presented with master African American poet Kamau Daoud at Da Poetry Lounge in the Fairfax district.
I became part of LA’s Big Read book events, which during my tenure celebrated the novel Into the Beautiful North, by Xicanx writer Luis Alberto Urrea, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
In addition, I read a poem in Nahuatl (a language spoken by at least three million indigenous people in Mexico and Central America) for the Endangered Languages gathering at the Hammer Museum with my good friend Bob Holman of New York’s Bowery Poetry Club (other languages spotlighted were Hawaiian, Welsh, and Garifuna). I wrote two sonnets and a free-verse poem for the People’s State of the Union, a live-streaming presentation from the Bowery Poetry Club. I talked to students whose parents are in prison for POPS the Club (Pain of the Prison System) at Venice High School; did several keynotes for high school graduations, including one of the Augustus Hawkins academies in South LA; read at the Alivio Open Mic in Bell, California; submitted a “Love Poem to L.A.” to publications and for a film by John F. Cantú that was shown in area film festivals; spoke at Claremont School of Theology; took part in Los Angeles Times Festival of Books events at USC; poetry reading and panel at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights; the Charles Bukowski Festival in San Pedro; and a reading for the late, great poet Wanda Coleman at Leimert Park. I spoke to incarcerated youth at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall and during the Poetry Circus at Griffith Park.
I also undertook media interviews with Los Angeles magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, KCET-TV, Univision, Telemundo, MundoFox, TV Azteca, KPFK-FM, and KPCC-FM, among others.
I helped create the largest anthology of Los Angeles–area poets ever published, The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles, edited by Neelanjana Banerjee, Daniel A. Olivas, and Ruben J. Rodriguez (published in 2016 by Tia Chucha Press). This beautiful book presented 160 poets from ages eighteen to eighty; gay and straight; black, white, Asian, Native, and Mexican and Central American; Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist; migrants and citizens; women and men. I wanted to make poetry a radical and healing act for everyone, so the city could honor all voices, including those plagued by traumas and lifted by triumphs.
American poet E. E. Cummings once penned these words: “Well, write poetry, for God’s sake, it’s the only thing that matters.”
That statement, by a man known for highly stylized poems, whose own views moved from Unitarian to Republican, may appear odd, contrived, out of touch. I can’t say Cummings’s words are entirely true. How can poetry be all that matters? Most poets wouldn’t say that. Even good teachers can’t claim their students are “all that matter.” A master mechanic most likely wouldn’t say that of cars.
Yet, it’s a declaration we need to seriously consider, especially in our culture, where poetry is relegated to the margins, to the status of a “weird” art, a practice rarely compensated or honored outside of a small, and often quarrelsome, group of people. President Trump didn’t even consider having an inaugural poet, although Presidents Clinton and Obama both did. (President Reagan and both President Bushes had no inaugural poet either.) In fact, it took around two hundred years after George Washington’s inauguration for a poet to read at one (John Kennedy’s).
Today, again, we ask the perennial question: Does poetry matter at all?
It’s hard to figure out poetry’s worth when there is a hierarchy of “values” hanging over our heads determined not by nature or skill but by powerful men in the publishing, media, and political industries—entities that are about making money. I’m not talking about family values or cool traits. I’m talking net worth, the bottom line: “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”
If that’s the case, poetry should perish.
Many of us are among a disparate group of “po” poets. Our main currency is the appreciative applause of the relatively small audiences who hear us. Yet the art of poetry persists in this country; like a genetically evolved organism, it adapts. Poetry is strong among the young and overlooked. It sprouts in movements like free verse, takes root among the imagists, the confessionals, the Beats, the 1960s Black Arts poets (and around the same time, the Puerto Rican, Chicano, Native American, and LGBTQ poets), the formalists, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, as well as practitioners of hip-hop, slam poetry, and more.
Poetry in its varied forms of presentation is a staple in MFA programs, thriving in cafes, bookstores, storefronts, schools, libraries, bars. And there are presses—hanging by thin threads, I admit—that only publish poetry and that heroically keep churning out chapbooks, books, and zines. Despite the constraints, poetry continues to be, as British poet Matthew Arnold once stated, “simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.”
Once, during my first year as LA’s poet laureate, I took part with several poets of all colors in reading poems by black writers in response to Black Lives Matter. Similar readings were held around the country to speak out against the disproportionate number of unarmed black people killed by police. Appropriately, the organizer read names of those recently killed, although she also included Latinx people and others.
I read a poem by Henry Dumas, a black fiction writer and poet, who in 1968, at age thirty-three, with two small children at home, was killed by a transit police officer at a Harlem train stop: His “crime”: jumping a turnstile (the officer reportedly mistook Dumas for another person). All his books were published posthumously. What a powerful event this was, at the Sweat Spot in Silver Lake, with every emotion evoked, singed by diverse voices, and a catharsis steered by resistance to the continual police murders.
Poetry is not easily monetized and exploited, hence its lack of “importance” in our modern culture. In addition, any upstanding poet would refuse the commercialization of their name and work. Nike once offered several Xicanx and Boricua poets to be photographed by fashion photographer Annie Leibovitz for ads. Martín Espada, Sandra Cisneros, and others, myself included, refused to take part.
Poetry’s appeal goes beyond the mundane or profit-oriented. Poetry is a powerful way to movingly and artfully convey ideas and emotions, which in turn is a way to impact and change this world. As long as the world needs changing, we’ll need poetry.
Poetry is also how one establishes a shape to one’s own life, as opposed to the inauthentic shapes imposed by others, by norms, by societal value systems. Go to the broken parts of life and risk presence not pretense, ritual not performance. Go to the fiery places. Create movable operations that challenge the absences in the world. As in all artistic practices, poetry helps realize our most healthy instincts, including from unconscious ancestral determinants (what depth psychologists call “archetypes”).
The “giants” in our world—big wealth, big media, big politics—seem daunting to take on. But poetry can be a David with multiple slingshots, like vivid imagery, clear ideas, and strong narratives in the finest sequence of words.
Looking at it this way, I recall when I was in shadowy spaces, lost, pissed off, tired as hell. Poetry then came and claimed me. An art, a practice, an inside itch you can’t scratch, can do that. When that happens, you may realize the lifelines are inside of you. And this is when poetry means everything.
On historic Central Avenue near East Forty-Fifth Street, the Vernon Branch Library looks like a jail—tall fences surround the circa 1915 building, and a fenced walkway leads up to the doorway. Like the surrounding neighborhood, the library appears beaten down. It’s situated on the edge of the high-crime Central Alameda reporting area of LAPD’s Newton District. In the six-month period ending November 22, 2013, there were 249 violent crimes there, with an average 145.7 crimes per 10,000 residents.
Yet, once inside its doors, the library is alive with children, parents, teachers, and some of the most engaged librarians you’ll ever meet. Inside is an oasis of books, computers, CDs, and DVDs. I conducted a writing workshop there with thirty mostly middle school–aged Mexican, Salvadoran, and African American children. I displayed Tia Chucha Press books and several of my own. I read a poem. I had the children put pencil to paper, including from prompts that opened up their psyches as well as their imaginations. They wrote descriptive and emotion-laden words. This workshop was a highlight of my first year as the city’s second poet laureate.
Books. Poetry. Healing.
This City of Angels is indeed a city of poets. And these poets do more than just sing the city fantastic. Many dare to address poverty, police killings, failing schools, mass incarceration, climate change, homelessness. They are bards of beauty and bounty, especially when these are lacking elsewhere.
Poetry is the essential soul talk we rarely find in this society.
Civic society should provide more opportunities to listen to poets. For example, why don’t we have poetry at graduations, celebrations, rallies, sports events, or commemorations? Unfortunately, we’re in a country that marginalizes poetry, yet elsewhere all over the world poetry is widely written, memorized, and recited, even in the most deprived areas.
In the United States, when a poetry book sells a thousand copies, this is considered a “best” seller for poets. In Japan, poetry books can sell three million copies or more. Throughout Mexico and other Latin American countries, children learn to declamar, to recite classic verses from memory. Poets in the Middle East, Russia, Europe, Iran, China, and India are revered; in these countries storytellers and verse purveyors have held audiences entranced for centuries. When Pablo Neruda read at Santiago’s soccer stadium, the audience of ninety thousand people would echo back his every word. And Rumi, the Persian poet who lived some 750 years ago, is perhaps the most read poet in the world today.
Poetry, like all art, needs to be at the center of our culture. Our country is deprived for lack of enriched expression, powerful performance, compelling language. In Los Angeles I’ve seen poetry practiced with strong conviction. I see high school students writing in worn journals outside of class assignments. I see the growing number of spoken word venues throughout the LA area, including every Friday night at Tia Chucha’s. This is also true for organizations like Get Lit Players, Say Word, WriteGirl, Urban Word, Street Poets Inc., InsideOUT Writers, Los Angeles Poet Society, Writ Large Press, Red Hen Press, and others, which bring classic and new poems to our schools, playgrounds, juvenile lockups, and community spaces.
Poetry won’t solve LA’s enormous problems. But with images and visions we can inquire into what can; we can construct bridges across the divides; we can illuminate what’s new, healing, and pulsing with vitality.
I finished my two-year tenure as LA’s poet laureate at the end of 2016. I waved from a lowered 1962 Impala at neighbors of mostly Mexican and black communities as grand marshal of the Latino Heritage Parade in Pasadena. I served as a panelist at the Southern California Poetry Festival in Long Beach. I read poetry with Shakespearean themes alongside actors, writers, musicians, and others at San Diego’s Old Globe theater. I taught and performed at the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse. And I had a public conversation with writer Rubén Martínez at Loyola Marymount University, near Santa Monica.
Even in these times of racial, class, and political discord, there are many healers, teachers, and caretakers we need to heed. They include poets. Please listen. They are truth. They are medicine. They are Los Angeles.