Here’s What California Needs: a Poet in Every Paper

In 1928, Herbert Hoover won on the slogan, “A Chicken in Every Pot.” So what if the Depression destroyed his presidency, making pots and chickens into endangered species? We’re talking slogans, and the value of such succinct statements is their ability, like peanut butter for the psyche, to stick to the roof of the mind.

I’m a fifth-generation Californian, and I’m tossing my hat into the ring (along with the state’s million or so other poets) to become California’s second poet laureate, a no-pay position appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. (No pay is fine with me, and I don’t wear a hat, so I haven’t ventured anything yet.) My slogan?: A Poet in Every Paper.

William Carlos Williams wrote, famously, in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

But in other countries -- all through the Spanish-speaking world, for instance -- poetry is the news, and poets labor daily in service of making their countrymen and -women think, question, debate.

My wife, the poet Kaaren Kitchell, and I volunteer for “Poetry in Motion,” the Metropolitan Transit Authority project that puts poets at bus stops and on subway cars all over Los Angeles every Friday in April. We are clad in orange safety vests and armed solely with poetry, not necessarily our own.

Each year we relearn that our Spanish-speaking L.A. neighbors -- like the women who queue politely atWilshire and Westwood waiting for the second or third bus they’ve ridden that morning to whisk them to the Westside -- can recite to us, from memory, in their native tongue, the poets we read to them in English -- Neruda, Machado, Zamora, Paz. A street-corner reading becomes a communal reunion, as those raised on poetry find common ground with the eager poets, far fewer in number, who have come to offer them culture. (Oh, irony, here is thy sting.)

It’s time to raise all Californians on poetry. My platform is simple. I ask every media outlet in the state to incorporate poetry into its publications, its broadcasts, its websites. Try it and see how your audience reacts. No coercion, no state mandate, just a simple request to present the slant on truth (to twist Emily Dickinson’s phrase) that poets bring.

My platform doesn’t mean that Westchester’s Wanda Coleman has to dress like an anchorwoman, or that Venice’s David St. John has to shave and go to City Hall press conferences. We want our best and brightest as they are, examining the world with their highly polished but unvarnished eye.

Nor is this about injecting “liberal bias” into, say, Fox News. Let them choose any poet they like, from the Sonoma Republican Dana Gioia to L.A.’s politically undefinable Teka-Lark Lo.

Shelley called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Thank you, Percy, but we decline the title. Instead, we are people plagued by (or blessed with) the ability to pay attention to our surroundings, and report back, in fresh, new language, what we see.

We believe, like Williams, that men die every day in need of that.

We believe we write the news that fits.

I was taught in a journalism class that a 26-word lead was the goal to shoot for when writing a news story. Korean American poet Suji Kwock Kim’s “Drunk Metaphysics” tells a whole story in only 23:

I’ve never been one soul.

Sixty trillion cells stagger

zigzag down the street,

laughing, trash-talking, quarreling,

singing-crying, living-dying.

Sixty trillion cells -- all drunk!

Need to know the thoughts of young people in South-Central? Jasmin Vargas, 20, wrote “Where Am I From” as a 17-year-old Venice High student (this is an excerpt):

I am from pozole y enchiladas,

Pescado frito y camarones a la diabla.

From monarch butterflies in the spring,

And midnight dancing by the beach ....

My house is located on the corners of Chaos and

Mayhem.

It is the big house with the large yard and towering grapefruit tree.

The one with glass windows and rusty pipe drains

Perfect paint job on the outside with crumbling walls on the inside.

I just ask that the media pick one poet and stick with him or her for six months. Is this just a make-work program for poets? If global warming is just make-work for scientists, I guess it is. If running a war is just make-work for politicians, I guess it is.

The stakes in contemporary poetry are no less vital, and our craft is where such issues, and more, are being illuminated every day. Instead of sound bytes and factoids, we need the voice of the poet in everyday debate.

We need news outlets that recognize, to quote Williams’ “Asphodel” again:

The poem

is complex and the place made

in our lives

for the poem.