More Politics Than Poetry

In November 2019, I found out that I would become the sixth Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County while sitting in Lot C of the Santa Clara Kaiser Homestead Hospital in between my mother’s doctor’s appointments and a pharmacy visit on the morning before the start of the holiday season. I had spent the morning crying on the way to picking up my mother, as I was a caretaker and her medical proxy. I also cried in frustration after two different pharmacists gave me two different sets of instructions and while I waited a whopping forty minutes for a prescription-brand grade of acetaminophen and ibuprofen. I had to decline the first call that came while I was paying for fancy painkillers. After waiting, I escorted my mother, who had a history of back pain, through a pharmacy, through a crowded hallway, and out of a long doorway to a bench. This is no easy task for a person in need of adaptive technologies. She often had trouble walking with me to my car, and in the two minutes I took to get my car on my own so I could drive to pick her up, I answered the phone before heading back to the drop-off zone where I had temporarily left her. I cried again, for maybe the third time that day, after getting the glorious news of becoming poet laureate. Glory, after such a trying morning, felt like exhaustion.

I didn’t know how to adequately explain to my mother what a poet laureate does. When I described it as a civic position where I represent poetry, art, and literature from this area, she looked as though I should continue to describe it until something stuck. Nothing did. The more I described it, the more this position sounded like an unpaid internship after I told her that I wouldn’t be paid directly, and that I was doing it because of my writing experiences—all of which she’s supported throughout the years. I mentioned organizing and going to readings. I referenced previous events I’d done with her in the audience. I told her I’d have to develop and see a poetry project through, and she quickly lost interest, maybe from my inarticulation, though it’s more likely that it’s because I don’t come from a family of storytellers. I come from a family of jokes and teleseryes, of the TV always on without someone always watching, just to fill a room with voices. Of 96.5 KOIT and Wild 107.7. Of questions around paperwork and interpreting papers sent home from school. I come from immigrant parents. I am from a place that needs redefinition, which is exactly what I hope to accomplish as the 2020–2021 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate. I hope and want for readers and listeners to understand how poetry is linked to moving, guiding, creating, and necessitating change. Perhaps I will never be able to fully explain what a poet laureate does, but perhaps I will always have poetry to make full attempts.

Santa Clara County is Alviso to Gilroy. It is Stanford to Milpitas. It is Palo Alto. It is Mount Hamilton. It is Muwekma Ohlone land. It triangulates San Francisco and Oakland. There is no Bay Area without the South Bay. I was born and raised in San José near the Norman Y. Mineta Airport. I have family and students from the Eastside of San José. My first job was at Paramount’s Great America. My parents and family have worked in the electronics and manufacturing industries for companies like National Semiconductor, KLA-Tencor, Twin Industries, Linear Technologies, Vishay, Analog Devices, Lobob Laboratories, and Maxim Technologies. These companies have fueled and supplied microchips for all of our technological devices that we use to write our poems. My first book, microchips for millions, is an homage to the workers of the Silicon Valley. I’ve spent time here, and as a young girl, I did homework in parked cars in these companies’ parking lots waiting for my family members to appear outside from their lobbies—my parents and guardians often carpooled and shared resources, as many immigrant families do for their livelihoods. I attended elementary, middle, and high school in the San José Unified School District, and I read all of The Baby-Sitter’s Club Little Sister Series books at the Public Library at Independence High School. After I went away for college, this place I’ve known my whole life is where I returned.

I turned to poetry in the halls of San José High Academy (now San José High School), where a friend of mine passed around a collective notebook where my classmates would freewrite poems. The notebook passed from person to person, across grade levels and classrooms. It was respected, and most of the poems were anonymous, but it also kept a space for folks’ feelings. The sanctity of space is important, and I hope to recreate this for my project as the Santa Clara County Poet Laureate. Following a precedent set by former California Poet Laureate and former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who created online spaces for mourning of national and international tragedies, my project recreates and keeps spaces for everyday poetry in the moment. During my tenure as poet laureate, I will follow the trajectory of the path set forth by the poets laureate before me by developing a Youth Poet Laureate program for the county. This isn’t a new idea, but for us, it is a needed one. I believe that our youth have so much to say to us and this world that excludes them. We need to listen.

As a poet laureate during a pandemic, I have learned two things: 1) being online is exactly where my community is these days, and 2) my community shows up when they can. Starting the Santa Clara County Youth Poet Laureate Program enabled me to work closely with students, local artists and writers, librarians, teachers, parents, and community organizers from around the San Francisco Bay Area during the COVID-19 pandemic. I also worked with writers and youth organizers from around the country through the National Youth Poet Laureate Initiative, and while doing so, I have been continuously able to bring the knowledge of where I’m from into cross-cultural, youth- and people-centered spaces, which makes the work of poetry inextricably tied to the work of community. In online spaces, I believe that the pandemic has amplified feelings of loneliness for our youth. Adults have had more life experiences to find ways to cope, and I am worried for our youth who have less in-person exposure to those needed resources. I have learned that so many youth have turned to reading and writing poetry to make room and hold space for their thoughts.

When I taught an online writing workshop to students, I asked them to name the parts of their lives that have changed since shelter-in-place/COVID-19. It was difficult to read through any one response and not have my own reaction or personal connection to what students have shared with me during the pandemic, which is also the time in which I have been a poet laureate. I think it is my duty, as a poet who has written about, experienced, and sought community through recognizing struggles and injustices, to take deeper-than-surface level approaches to name, discuss, and share space to learn and be mutually transformed by what truths students have to say and teach. I believe that the more that (adult) poets and teachers can come into shared spaces with honesty and willingness to recognize power dynamics, the more likely we are to unsettle them so that our youth can be more honest with us—which also allows them to be more of who they are—and the more we make room with no one left behind or forgotten. When we address the root causes of society’s problems and harmful replications—which undoubtedly show up in our art, in how we move, and what we don’t see—we can start attempting to build an equitable world. Like writing, I think of equity as a practice that needs to be accomplished with relentless pursuit.

I have learned that being a poet laureate involves a lot more politics and confronting inequity than writing my own poetry. There are very real bureaucratic processes and barriers in place that I question and have questioned, including not having resources translated from English to Spanish when 27% of our (documented) county is Latinx, or when I was discouraged from paying youth to attend writing workshops so as not to set a precedent of honoring them for their time and creativity, or when I wonder if poets laureate enforce and represent created boundaries and borders—borders being a form of state violence and separation that I detest.

I am sad to share that my mother passed away six weeks after I became poet laureate at the start of National Poetry Month, and that I was not always given the grace or space of grieving I needed while being in this role. Now, I wonder how poet laureate positions might change if they weren’t attached to land, but to community, like diasporas, affinities, or journeys.

A year into my poet laureate tenure, I’m still not sure how I can explain what I do, but I know it is still an incredible honor to not only serve my community, but to collaborate and work alongside them. I hope that if anything, I can work with folks to show them that poetry doesn’t belong in isolated silos, but that it is already everywhere. And that before we can get to even write poetry, our art contends with the world in and outside of it.