Two Years in the Life: My Time as Tacoma's Poet Laureate

At the end of this National Poetry Month, I thought I'd share a glimpse at the past two years I spent as Tacoma's poet laureate. I've been asked often about what a poet laureate is and does, and while each person spearheads different projects for different lengths of time with different amounts of financial support and different goals, my experience is one I'm happy to reflect on and share. This has been one of the most meaningful honors of my career so far--to serve Tacoma through poetry and presence. As a military spouse, it's meant more than most people know. But I'll get to that soon.

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I found out I'd been selected as Tacoma's 2019-2021 poet laureate in March 2019, shortly after two events (a brain injury/broken arm and my first book winning the Perugia Press Poetry Prize) had shaken me up proper. I was in the middle of teaching a second annual series of weekly poetry workshops at the Selma Carson Home in Fife, where undocumented youth are detained, often transferred from the Northwest Detention Center on the tide flats. I planned to return in April 2020 but didn't know then how 2020 would collapse and reshape itself into a lifestyle none of us understood. 

Actually, I was sitting behind the Anthem on Pacific Ave when Naomi Strom-Avila called to give me the good news. I'd just downed an espresso and half a bag of sour gummy bears. My heart ricocheted in my ribs. I'd like to say I never combined espresso and sour gummy bears again. That I learned my lesson. I'd like to. Anyway, I was sitting with Jake Nau, talking about starting up poetry workshops at the Beacon Center, where he's the Shelter Project Manager. I'll get to those workshops in a minute.

As a transplant to Tacoma (I was born in Puyallup but I've spent half my life living and working in Alaska, Oregon, Georgia, Colorado, and I moved back to the Pacific Northwest from New York), I'd already gotten to do more cool things and meet more great people than I expected. I met Christina Butcher and hung out on the Prickly Pear podcast, met Mike Haeflinger and participated in Louder than a Bomb and Crossing the Street, met Jackie Casella and read for Creative Colloquy, met Amanda Westbrooke and appeared on CityLine, met Erin Guinup and wrote a song for the Tacoma Refugee Choir. My day job includes teaching rhetoric in military strategy for fellows from the Army War College sent to UW, and in 2019 I was also teaching writing at School of the Arts, so I'm used to seeing the importance of writing in all things, all the time.

For Tacoma poets laureate, the term begins at the Pass the Torch event, hosted every two years in April by the outgoing laureate. Kellie Richardson hosted in 2019, performing with Byron Gaines II, Thy Nguyễn, and one of my favorite people, Iris Parada, who translated for me at the Selma Carson Home. I pretended not to be intimidated, that everything about the evening wasn't enough to make me a stammering, speechless mess. People signed a book with good wishes by the door. There was music. People ate and drank, and the whole thing took place in a black box theatre-- remember theatres? I miss them. People hugged. Remember hugs? I miss hugs, and I didn't consider myself a hugger before Covid. 

One of my main goals for the following two years was to make poetry connections beyond conventional literary hubs (i.e. universities, bookstores, performance halls) and increase poetry events and access in south and east Tacoma. And it was important that I did it without prioritizing my own poems, focusing on Tacoma's already thriving artistic community instead, which includes those who may not have considered themselves poets or artists before. There are so many poems and stories to hear. No time to waste.

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My first summer, I taught a couple of six-week workshop series: one open to the public at the Eastside Community Center, and one on JBLM in the Red Cross building. I baked shortbread or meringues or these gifts to the foodie universe for every workshop because I can feed people's stomachs while they feed their souls. Workshops centered on everything from form and publishing to writing through trauma and recovery. I published Collateral's sixth issue and hosted a reading for previous contributors Carla Sameth and Rena Priest (who is now our state laureate--yasssss!) during the Hilltop Street Fair (remember street fairs?). I attended readings and performances around town, listening to all kinds of poems about belonging, climate change, human kindness, racism and dismantling White supremacy, surviving military sexual trauma, and remembrance for the dead. And yes, I shared some of my own poems at readings and awards ceremonies and things. I met the daffodil princesses. Victoria Woodards touched my arm. 

That after-workshop glow. Or sweat. Mostly sweat.

That fall, I took on a new cohort of War College fellows and my kid started first grade. I published another issue of Collateral, accepted a GAP grant from Artist Trust, participated in a symposium on drone warfare at PLU, and flew to the east coast for an amazing book tour. Perugia Press released my first full length collection, Hail and Farewell, in September, and in November, I spoke at Smith College and Westfield State University. I read with Massachusetts' Northampton poet laureate, Karen Skolfield, author of Battle Dress, then I read with Fran Richey and Pam Hart in New York City at the new McNally Jackson opening. When I got back to Washington, I hosted a workshop at the Tacoma Public Library, where anyone could stop in and write poems as gifts, complete with prompts, inspiration, sparkly paper and ribbon; I remember several kids came in and wrote about their heroes, then taped their poems to their wrists like shields. Before the year ended, I taught a series of workshops on poets of the Pacific Northwest at a senior center as part of Pierce College's Community & Continuing Education program. I featured Rena's poems, and those of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and Peter Sears, plus poems from local journals and presses, Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, and Blue Cactus Press.

In January 2020, I was burning out and crashed into a couple weeks of rest. I went to readings and read and wrote. I think I gave one reading. Trump was still president. Puerto Rico was shaking. The U.S. was pushing to the brink of war with Iran.

Looking back on it, I wish I'd muscled through till March, when everyone's ability to gather shifted. In February, we knew about Covid (of course, people were aware of Covid in 2019, warning the world, but Americans faced a colossal failure of leadership and the chaos it spread) and those of us who traveled for work did so cautiously, wondering when everything would be called off. I traveled to New York and taught & read at West Point and my PhD alma mater, Binghamton University. I came home and visited Gray Middle School a couple times, and I had the honor of a high school student shadowing me for her own school project (you're awesome, Carmella!). I attended AWP to represent Collateral and celebrate my book, but we were all wary of the looming pandemic. A week after returning from San Antonio, my daughter's school closed. Time leaked from the once-full calendar, and we all floated from task to task on rafts of confusion and worry. A week after that, I started a Grit City Poet Laureate YouTube channel and introduced Poem Friday.

With the help of my friend Sarah Reebs, web design & editing pro, I created weekly video poetry workshops that went live on Fridays. We couldn't go anywhere or gather. I couldn't bake for people anymore. No more hugs or sharing microphones or crouching next to someone to read their writing. But. I'd been meaning to take some leaps using online platforms and Sarah has seemingly endless patience with me, so, another workshop series was born. Sessions featured local artists (including Christina Butcher, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Raúl Sanchez, Renee Simms, Gretchen Yanover, and Lindsey T.H. Jackson, who continued to collaborate with me on Two Poets Talk About Race, another series on this channel). I'd give a flash craft talk and offer prompts, then encourage people to send me what they wrote, responding with feedback to everyone who did. God I missed their poems. God I missed baking for them. Poem Friday workshops ran, as promised, until Pierce County was out of Phase 1 in early summer.

An out-take from Poem Friday, featuring my cat.

My return to the Selma Carson Home was indefinitely postponed in 2020. We had planned to return in April. Nope. I didn't have the option of visiting SCH in PPE, and online visits weren't possible, though I'm still in touch with some employees and volunteers there. I wonder when I'll be able to go back.

In April, Jake asked if I'd come to the Beacon Center to offer some poetry workshops to the youth sheltering there. I tried to set something up virtually, but the connection was shit and the facility wasn't conducive to virtual workshops that could be meaningful through a screen. So I took the PPE route and after Poem Fridays went live I'd head over to the Beacon Center to teach in the afternoons. Some of the participants knew they were poets and wrote and performed work regularly. Some were suspicious of poetry but wanted to tell their stories. (I tend to gravitate toward those who are suspicious of poetry since I, too, suspect it sometimes.) I brought in poems by June Jordan and Tim Seibles, Raymond Carver and Natalie Diaz, Jimmy Santiago Baca and Hanif Abdurraqib, Adrienne Rich and Jericho Brown and Lucille Clifton, among others. We talked about addiction and homelessness and breakdowns and theft and forgiveness and friendship and performance. I ran these workshops through August of 2020, leaving tear-away prompts and poems on a poetry bulletin board between sessions. (Coming back to see prompts torn off the sheet was one of my favorite feelings to look forward to.)

These workshops were heavily influenced by what happened in May 2020. George Floyd was murdered in front of us all. Black bodies have been lynched in the U.S. since long before its inception, and yet this death was the quake beneath a wave of renewed protests and the energy to fight for Black lives. We know now that his murderer has been found guilty on three charges, and that is some justice--necessary justice. But the system has not been changed yet. My poems about war have examined complacency and complicity for years, but when this reopening of urgency began, my poems shifted, turning toward my participation in and benefitting from racist systems, which are still very much intact. 

Poems do not change systems. People do. Actions do. Legislation does. All these things can be inspired by poetry, but poems alone do not dismantle what's been built. Poems, to me, are the starting point and touchstone. 

Workshops that incorporate real resistance to hatred and brutality are helping us lift what is heavy right now.

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That summer, I taught two longer series of virtual workshops reserved for military communities: one centered on writing as healing, curated for the Museum of the American Military Family run by Circe Woessner, and one that ran from July through October for the Summer Arts Connect program, run by Valli Rebsamen and supported by the NEA / Creative Forces. 

I looked forward to them but was still nervous about teaching solely via Zoom and YouTube. Sometimes I'd start dripping sweat as soon as a workshop started and I'd tell the group I needed to go blow my nose, then wipe my face on a towel instead on the other side of the door. My short term memory is terrible, and while I'm comfortable reading work I can hold and see in front of me, when it comes to live performance and interaction I worry: what if I forget? Will I be able to hear everyone, respond in a way that's aware and compassionate and useful? Will I have what they need? What if I fail? What if I have nothing? I started keeping a fan aimed at my face behind the laptop; I looked like I was teaching on a windblown fashion shoot but no one seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn't mind.

I got to judge some contests (another Louder Than a Bomb, this time virtual, plus the Academy of American Poets College Prize for BU) and visit poetry and writing classrooms at Pierce and Tacoma Community College. People sent me poems and I wrote back. I missed them. I thought of them patching these poems together at a table somewhere, as I patched my own together at my own table.

In October, I was able to teach more poetry workshops at a senior living facility in Tacoma via Zoom, and by that time, I had collected the poems written by detained youth at Selma Carson. I worked with several translators (Jenny Miller, Kendall Burch, Sonia Hemming, Ana Rueda, Carolyn Keller, Iris Parada, and Alex Peck) who helped me shape a bilingual anthology titled corre y corre sin detenerte: run and run without stopping. It is still one of the most important books I've ever read. Working at Selma Carson was life-changing for me; to be writing poems with poets who all had two things in common (being young and apprehended by law enforcement for the "crime" of existing in the US) was unlike anything I'd done before. As a poet and person with a heart, I understood my involvement in a national crisis. 

Poetry, in these workshops, was intentionally crafted as a survival skill. For them, for me. It connected these poets to the outside world, where people saw them in language and metaphor, beyond concrete walls and barbed wire fences and buzzing locks. Many of the boys were learning to write for the first time, with poetry as their inaugural endeavor. This is courage.

Even if I wasn't a mother, I would have still felt called to care for these poets. And now I don't know, can't know where any of them are. Deported, transferred. Their book is all I have left and I drag the pieces of grief and love everywhere.

Shortly after our 2019 workshops at Selma Carson, I emcee'd a youth art awards ceremony for the Pierce County library system and met Angelina Cruz, a high schooler and one of the gifted winners, and I asked her to create the cover art for corre y corre. She did, graciously, after reading the poems and imagining flowers placed in a worn pair of boots. The anthologies were released in October 2020 as part of Tacoma's Arts Month, and while anyone could read the free downloadable PDF, I sold print versions at $10 apiece and donated 100% of the proceeds to Tacoma organizations serving immigrants and refugees. Strangely, I still have copies available if people would like to buy one. I never understood why these didn't sell out immediately so I blame my aversion to all things marketing and publicity. 

Around October/November 2020, we found out my husband was being transferred from JBLM to the Pentagon. He would start in January 2021. So we sold our house and I drove Tom cross country in early December, then flew back to Washington to finish the school year with my daughter. She was doing okay with distance learning but had already faced so much upheaval due to the pandemic that I didn't have the heart to throw in military life on top of it. Because her classes are taught in Spanish, I was also running to keep pace with her homework and at-home projects. Anyway, I returned to Washington resolute but emotionally wrung out and physically injured to boot, with a torn tendon that needed surgery. Great.

At least there was poetry, I kept thinking. At least there was community. I knew this. At least I still wrote a poem a week for a small group of friends. At least my War College fellows were lovely as always, patient with my Editor Voice (I find myself saying "fix this while I wait" a lot) and offering me all kinds of insight to military strategy and argument. 

At least there was poetry. There was poetry. That December, my mentor Marvin Bell passed away after battling cancer and the constant availability of poetry became even more important. Marvin taught me to "write with abandon" and, at first, I wondered how I would do that in a post-Marvin era. At least there was poetry. In the past two years, I've said "At least--" a lot, but what I really mean is "I'm so glad--".

In February, I taught a workshop on writer's block (which is really just a skewed perception of "good" and "bad" writing and the way we respond to it, frequently, with silence). One thing I do very well is garbage writing. I write shit all the time. (Hell, this blog post isn't even revised.) I have a file on my desktop called Poetry Compost and most documents in that file make zero sense, exploding like rockets then disappearing into nothing before the half-page mark. So what. So I write shit. All your "greats" write shit too. Some poems are born knowing how to run because death is the only alternative, and most poems are born in a wobbly pile of bones that need to be shown how to move. All poets make both. Get into it. 

Later that month, I attended a workshop on land acknowledgements run by Ta7talíya Nahanee and continued processing my understanding of the history of this country and how my own history is intertwined with generations of occupation and stolen land. I've been to too many arts events that begin with empty land acknowledgements that sound more like tasks to complete than offerings of gifts and statements of personal and collective intent, then the events end with no return to the acknowledgement anyway. But I was at those events... and I didn't say anything. So I'm learning: bring gifts, show gratitude, share your intent as you work on the land you live on. Acknowledge the land through everything you do, rather than limiting it to a prologue before an event. If you honor something or someone and they do not know it, what have you really honored? I wrote a poem about White entitlement and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest and performed it for Tacoma Arts Live and PBS / KBTC made it beautiful.

I also taught a guest lecture at West Point that considered the co-existence of pacifist and military thought in poetry and scheduled surgery for my arm. Did a reading for Writer's Resist and kept up with my Poem Friday community. In March, I started teaching poetry workshops for a girls' empowerment group through Proyecto MoLE, one of the organizations supported by profits from corre y corre. We meet every third Friday of the month and the poets, all high schoolers, write brilliantly--truly, it is bright, dazzling--in only an hour and a half. When I was a doctoral student, we had day-long two-day workshops during which my mentor, Maria Gillan, would give out prompts and twenty minutes and the requirement to share what you wrote after that short amount of time. People freaked out. These high schoolers? Would mop the floors with us. They make writing look easy.

And then... I started reading applications for the next Tacoma poet laureate. Soon, Lydia Valentine will take the position and dance with it.

I gotta tell you, I started writing this blog post yesterday, thinking I'd just share a bit about what being a poet laureate looks like. And now... I'm emotional. I just returned from a week in DC, where it was hard to leave, and I came back here to Washington, where it is also hard to leave. Everywhere I go right now, I am struggling to leave. My instinct is to find the place I am heading toward, to feel less lost, but I never know how to do this, all over again.

I don't know if another military spouse has been given the chance to serve as poet laureate anywhere, especially while their partner was active duty. I might not be the only one. But when Tacoma said they wanted me to serve in this role, I felt like thousands of people indirectly impacted by war and military culture were suddenly told that they were needed where they were, off post, in the civilian (or "real") world. That their communities saw them as whole and wanted to hear more from them, that they didn't need to be isolated on post. I'm not going to get into detail here about the ways spouses are ignored and expected to dissolve in a practice of "good" behavior, but these two years have felt like something I could give the spouses who've told me about their experiences with silence and invisibility. It feels shared. 

So what's next? Well, I'm moving to DC, then, with any luck, back to the Pacific Northwest, but who knows. I'll keep writing my weekly poems and teaching rhetoric and editing Collateral and teaching workshops and waiting to bake for people. I had an agent ask whether I'd written a book of essays yet, which I haven't, which I should. I have a second book of poems I need to send out and enough to put together a third if I get around to it.

Just checked my engagements spreadsheet and realized I missed a bunch of stuff. And it's late. (face palm) This is a messy draft. 

We end with gratitude. A big, blog-based hug to my family and germ bubble, who have supported my creativity while forgiving my forgetfulness and keeping an eye on my daughter. To Tom, for our marriage that somehow works. Thank you to the Arts Commission for trusting me, to Naomi Strom-Avila for ushering me in, and to Chevi for being a friend and answerer of questions. Thank you to my Collateral team, and everyone I work with who believes wholeheartedly that poetry is for everyone. Thank you to coordinators who have helped me talk poetry more often with more people at the Tacoma Public Library, Gray Middle School, JBLM, CityLine, We Art Tacoma, Write253, Creative Colloquy, Tacoma Refugee Choir, Selma Carson Home, Beacon Center, Museum of the American Military Family, Creative Forces, Collateral, TCC, Pierce College, PLU, So Say We All, Franke Tobey Jones, Proyecto MoLE, and chances are I'm forgetting someone. 

Thank you to everyone fighting for justice right now. For showing up, knocking down walls, remembering names. I'll see you in the streets. 

Lastly, thank you Tacoma. For writing with me and eating my meringues. You invited a whole bunch of voices into this civic role with me, and I will not forget what you've done for all poets--even those who have yet to speak.

A mediocre shot of my badass "Tacoma For Life" earrings by Squirrel vs. Coyote