Featured photo: Marcus Amaker
Written by Tanya Terry
State of the Nation: Poetry in the Community was a virtual event held this month, in August, and featured eight poets from different spaces across the country.
All the poets were recipients of The Academy of American Poet Poet Laureate Fellowship.
According to poets.org, the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowships are $50,000 awards given to honor poets of literary merit appointed to serve in civic positions and to enable them to undertake meaningful, impactful, and innovative projects that engage their fellow residents, including youth, with poetry, helping to address issues important to their communities, as well as create new work. The fellowships were established in partnership with the Mellon Foundation.
Brain Sonia-Wallace, serving until October of 2023 as the poet laureate of West Hollywood, said poets laureate have interesting roles that are becoming much more known and much more talked about since Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem for Joe Biden.
According to Sonia-Wallace there were a lot of communities employing poets laureates in the 1970s, and just in the last decade it’s happening again.
Flint’s Poet Laureate Semaj Brown read part 1 of the poem “Where Am I From?” In it, she mentioned Breonna Taylor, the Black medical worker who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville, Kentucky, in March 2020 during a raid on her apartment, whose death sparked wide-scale demonstrations.
Marcus Amaker read a poem called “Step Outside of Your Comfort Zone,” which he described as a snarky reaction to some social media posts. Amaker is the first poet laureate of Charlestown, South Carolina.
The second poem Amaker read had a very different tone. It was titled “Give Yourself Some Flowers,” and spoke about taking care of oneself, including spiritually.
Lloyd Schwartz, poet laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts, read his poem “A True Poem,” in which he says his poem said exactly what he thinks and he didn’t want to hurt everyone and wanted everyone to love him. So, he said in the poem itself the poem is one he would never show anyone.
The other poet laureates featured were Magdalena Gomez, Georgina Marie Guardado, Melissa Kwansy and Aileen Cassinetto.
Springfield, Massachusetts Poet Laureate Magdalena Gomez was asked to write poems for two events. One was celebrating those who had been supportive of the community during COVID. The other one was for 500 people who had died from COVID and their families. A bag of 500 candles was used to represent the dead on the steps on the local city hall for one of the events.
“It touched me so much that I couldn’t just do something I had done before,” Gomez said. “I created new work for both events, and it was beautiful to see the response to that-to understand the humanity of poetry. I took risks-because people that were being lauded were pretty much medical people, and I took it from the scalpel to the mop and talked about all of the people that were part of the healing of our community and taking care of our community.”
Gomez said her response to the project was mixed to “seeing the heroism of the people who have to clean up after us in hospitals,” which she feels is as important a role as the surgeons.’
“In the end, people really responded, and it meant a great deal to me,” Gomez expressed.
Schwartz said Somerville is a working-class community. He said he was surprised how interested the community members who were not poets were actually interested in poetry.
Georgina Marie Guardado is the poet laureate of Lake County, California. Guardado lives in a very rural community. Because it is so spread out, it’s not always easy for community members to get to the library or poetry readings. So, Guardado decided to “bring poetry to the people,” making it more accessible. She collaborated with a local wood worker and bought poetry box displays and also little libraries that went up all around the county.
Guardado’s original plan was to involve poetry murals. However, she said that idea wasn’t as popular as the box displays and the little libraries. So, she made more of those instead of the murals.
Brown’s Flint-based project the Voice of the Black Dandelion will be launched in the fall. The poem “Black Dandelion,” which Brown said caused people of many races to respond by saying how they identified themselves as black dandelions, will be sent to Michigan school teachers.
“We’ll have letters, and then we’ll vocalize it,” Brown informed. “We’ll have a program where youth actors will read the letters.”
Brown read “Black Dandelion” during a second round of each of the poets laureate reading poetry during the event.
A sneak peek of a collaborative poem was also given during which each of the poets represented in the virtual presentation, along with five other poets, answered in their own poetic words the question: “What is a poet laureate?”
To watch the video of State of the Nation: Poetry in the Community, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA2o5xHtCQU
