Ever since Pindar first penned it, poetry has been a salve for the soul. Through sonnet, haiku, rhyme and free-form, we have relied on poets to make sense of the world and how we live in it.
But poetry is having an unexpected moment. This past year, “We Are the Dream,” an HBO documentary about Oakland’s youngest oratorical poets, took home an Emmy. Brandon Leake, a relatively unknown Stockton spoken-word poet, won NBC’s “America’s Got Talent.” And poets laureate from California to New York found a new calling, posting verses to comfort families grappling with pandemic fears and the fight against racial injustice.
Poetry’s current popularity has to do with its immediacy. It forces you to pay attention to what is happening in the moment, on your skin and in your heart, says Oakland poet James Cagney.
“This year has forced people to look at their lives and ask questions,” Cagney says. “Our response as poets is to engage with those questions and allow the audience to wrestle with the answers. I think the only machine that can unpack that is poetry.”
Historically, Americans have turned to poetry in times of national crisis, says Robert Pesich, a poet, scientist and president of the San Jose Poetry Center.
“We saw this during both World Wars, in the late ’60s with civil rights, and we’re seeing it now,” he says. “Because of the grief that has befallen us, there is a hunger for a nuanced, emotionally forward form of communication.”
Also, unlike some art forms — opera, ballet and theater — poetry is portable, easy to share and accessible to all. You can text it, forward it in an email and use Twitter to spread a poetic offering. The pandemic hasn’t stopped poets from producing and sharing, either. Virtual readings and workshops around the country continue to thrive, from Poem Jam and Sacred Ground Open Mic in San Francisco to Da Poetry Lounge in Los Angeles and the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
And 10 months into the pandemic, when concepts like hope and patience seem inaccessible, a simple poem can center you in a way few things can.
“Poets are good at showing appreciation for the smaller things in life,” Pesich says.
That’s something we have all learned to do in 2020.
We asked six prominent California poets — Kima Jones, Luis J. Rodriguez and Eloise Healy Klein of Los Angeles County and Janice Sapigao, James Cagney and Kim Shuck of the Bay Area — to talk about their work this year and poetry’s larger role in 2020. Here’s what they said.
Janice Sapigao
As the Santa Clara County poet laureate, San Jose native and Filipina-American Janice Lobo Sapigao is known for documentary poetry that tackles family lineage, fatherlessness and the female immigrant experience.
Her first book, 2016’s “microchips for millions,” explores the unfavorable conditions in which Silicon Valley immigrant women workers, like Sapigao’s late mother, assembled microchips in the 1970s.
In March, when the pandemic hit, the 33-year-old began posting poetry prompts to help people process their emotions. Responses flooded in. “Even Lorna Dee Cervantes responded,” says Sapigao, an assistant professor at Skyline College in San Bruno. “To me, she’s San Jose OG poetry royalty.”
But Sapigao’s goal as poet laureate is to bring forth the voices of unknown poets, especially young poets. Through a grant from the Academy of American Poets, Sapigao has launched Santa Clara County’s first Youth Poet Laureate Program and will name the inaugural poet in 2021.
“The activism and collective youth response to this year’s events has been inspiring,” she says. “My role as poet laureate has been to be a poetician, to help those voices be heard.”
Kim Shuck
San Francisco native Kim Shuck, the city’s seventh poet laureate, is a celebrated voice in Native American poetry. Shuck, a member of the Cherokee Nation, is known as much for the written word as she is for the visual arts. She is a master basket weaver and bead worker.
Her 2019 collection, “Deer Trails: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 7,” a love letter to the city, explores indigenous San Francisco as a form of resistance to gentrification and urbanization. Her new book of poetry, “Exile Heart,” is due out soon.
But for the past 10 months, Shuck, 54, has been wrangling poets as part of her Poem of the Day project with San Francisco Public Library. She posts a poem for every day of the pandemic. It started as a way to support poets and help residents mark the passage of time this year.
“New rituals become necessary,” says Shuck, who has published the works of new and emerging voices through this initiative. “So we provided one.”
Originally, her poet laureate project was to create an online interactive map of San Francisco by poems. Mouse over a street or landmark, discover a poem about it. Shuck’s goal is to celebrate all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods and illuminate poetry pockets beyond the famed North Beach.
“We have microclimates with art as much as we have microclimates with weather, and they have to be represented,” she says.
James Cagney
Oakland native James Cagney is a fixture on the Bay Area poetry scene. His first collection, 2018’s “Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory,” examines the complexities of family and intimacy for an adopted person. Cagney was told he was adopted when he was 19.
The pandemic has been a time of deep introspection and “memory exorcism” for Cagney. After spending what felt like a month in bed, the 52-year-old says he used the quarantine to write a 15-minute poem about a haunting childhood memory.
“It was an energizing thing for me,” he says. “Emptying my head and heart.”
Online workshops, readings and manuscript editing for Nomadic Press have kept him busy this fall. The Oakland-based publisher will release Cagney’s next collection, “A Martian: The Saint of Loneliness,” in 2021. He calls it “the best I can do as a poet.”
“It deals with loneliness and my experience being a Black male in this country,” he says.
In “The Mask,” another poem written during the pandemic, Cagney recalls what he saw out the window the day he was furloughed:
“On my final day of work in San Francisco, I slammed glass after glass of merlot while watching a
cruise ship slowly drift into the turquoise bay/ Cloudless sky/ The ship a poisoned cake lit with
electric candles.”
If the pandemic has taught Cagney — and the country — one thing, it is patience, he says.
“For the first time, every hand on deck in America has to work together for a common goal,” he says. “It’s difficult to wait when you don’t know what you’re waiting for. We must be patient and wait in love.”
Eloise Klein Healy
In 2013, a few months after being named the first poet laureate of Los Angeles County, celebrated lesbian poet and literary legend Eloise Klein Healy suffered a case of viral encephalitis. The damage to her brain’s left temporal lobe resulted in Wernicke’s aphasia, a breakdown in the symbol system of language.
“It was a painful thing,” says Healy, author of nine books of poetry. “I was poet laureate, and then I lost my mind.”
Years of speech therapy helped the 77-year-old Sherman Oaks resident speak and write again and led to 2018’s “Another Phase,” a book of five-line poems that began as a focusing exercise from her therapist, Betty McMicken, who wrote the book’s foreword.
In the title poem, Healy writes: “It’s hard for me to read the L.A. Times. / I want to relearn, to reline part of me. / How did my brain twist? / How did the whack of it phase me? / Every page. Every word blank.”
During the pandemic, Healy has kept busy with therapy sessions, which have moved to Zoom. And the Antioch University professor emerita is at work on a second book of poems about living with aphasia, due out next year from Red Hen Press.
Kima Jones
As a Black poet and memoirist, New York native Kima Jones dedicated the first five years of her West Coast career to nurturing the careers of other writers of color.
“Telling the stories of Black and Brown writers beyond New York, Chicago and the South,” says Jones, who has been published in Poets and Writers, NPR and McSweeney’s. “That was the goal.”
Today, her publicity company, Jack Jones Literary Arts, which she founded in 2015 after moving to downtown Los Angeles, represents some of the most important names in poetry and fiction, from Tyehimba Jess, the 2017 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, to Rion Amilcar Scott, winner of the 2017 PEN America Robert W. Bingham prize for debut fiction.
Now Jones, 38, is stepping away from Jack Jones to focus on her own work, a memoir called “Butch,” about her life growing up in a hard-working family committed to staying together (Jones spent six years of her childhood in foster care). It will be published by Knopf in 2023.
Like everything she writes — essays, text messages — she considers it a work of poetry and says the pandemic has allowed her the time to think about the ways that she has survived in her life and that everyone is surviving now. Poetry has a role in that, too.
“Poetry is so revolutionary,” Jones says. “It is complete and portable and moves in ways that other language doesn’t move.”
Luis J. Rodriguez
Sandra Cisneros has called him the poet prophet of our time. Here’s just one reason why:
As the 2014 Los Angeles poet laureate, Mexican-American poet, critic and activist Luis J. Rodriguez was supposed to curate six events and visit two libraries. He did 110 events and visited 40 libraries.
“I wanted to be a poet laureate that was in every neighborhood,” says Rodriguez, who is the author of 16 books, including the 2012 best-selling autobiography, “Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.” and 2020’s “From Our Land to Our Land: Essays, Journeys & Imaginings from a Native Xicanx Writer.”
Over the course of his 66 years, Rodriguez has changed lives as a peacemaker among gangs and facilitator of prison writing workshops. Through Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Book Store, which Rodriguez co-founded in 2001, he has helped bring low-cost or free arts and literary programming to the marginalized communities of Northeast San Fernando Valley.
Tia Chucha’s has been a beacon during the pandemic, as all workshops and readings have gone virtual, and the book shop is doing better than it has in 20 years. They even started a social justice book club in the wake of the George Floyd shooting this summer.
“Young people are hungry,” Rodriguez says. “They are looking for revelatory, meaningful words. For language that moves thoughts and hearts.”
