The New Yorker Profile on Paolo Javier

The New Yorker profiles poet Paolo Javier, who served as the Poet Laureate of Queens, New York, from 2010 to 2014. (The search is apparently still open for a new laureate, reports Ian Frazier.) In "Lack of Center," Frazier gives us some background:

Only two boroughs have poets laureate; Brooklyn is the other. More languages are spoken in Queens than in any place of comparable size on earth. So what and who should its poet laureate be? Well, take Javier: born in the Philippines, where he spoke English and Tagalog, and also understood some Spanish; moved to Katonah, New York, in seventh grade, when his father, an employee of PepsiCo, was transferred to the region; moved to Egypt the following year, when ditto; attended Cairo American College, an expat high school, where a teacher introduced him to the work of Robert Frost; learned some Arabic; moved with his family to Vancouver, where he discovered the work of Gertrude Stein; got a degree in creative writing from the University of British Columbia; ran an experimental theatre in Vancouver; accepted an offer to teach Tagalog at N.Y.U. in 1999; and moved to Queens, where he has lived ever since. His wife is Taiwanese-American, and his two-year-old daughter understands English, Mandarin, and Tagalog.

“In 2010, I saw an announcement posted in Listserve that Queens was looking for a new poet laureate,” Javier recalled. “The term of the previous laureate, Julio Marzán, a Puerto Rican poet, had just ended. I applied online, and they invited me to the borough president’s office, in Kew Gardens, to make a presentation. Six people sitting at a table. I was so nervous. Poet laureate is an unpaid position—we know that poetry is part of the gift economy—and I hadn’t realized before how much it meant to me. A month or so later, they announced I had been chosen.”

Javier's work functions well alongside Queens as a physical lack of center:

“I was afraid the judges wouldn’t want me because my work is ‘experimental’ like that and not really narrative—not, like, stories about Queens,” Javier said. “But I guess that didn’t bother them. By tradition, as poet laureate you can be as active or inactive as you want. I decided to be active, and set out many duties for myself. My first event was at a Romanian restaurant near here called Transylvania. I invited two Queens poets, and the evening went pretty well. There were some Romanians but also Filipinos, Japanese, and others from the neighborhood.” He went on, “When the poet laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan, came to read at LaGuardia Community College, the people there introduced me to her, one laureate to another, and that was pretty cool. What I love about Queens is there’s no center. The energies here are so diffuse. As Frank O’Hara wrote, ‘My force is in mobility.’ This is a time when so much is going on in poetry, with hundreds of small presses, so many poets of all kinds, new interactions with technology. Queens is a physical correlative of that complexity, that lack of center.

More at The New Yorker.