Seattle's Newest Civic Poet Shares Their Remarks From Last Night's Inauguration by Dujie Tahat Yesterday, Seattle inaugurated its fifth-ever Civic Poet, Dujie Tahat, in a ceremony in the City Council Chambers. Hosted by the Office o f Arts and Culture in partnership with the Seattle Public Library and Seattle City of Literature, the inauguration ceremony marked the beginning of Tahat's two-year term. These are their prepared remarks. I’ve been rather insistent on having an Inaugural Ceremony. Not because Poet Laureates in our peer cities have them. Not because I love a party (which I do). And not because I want the world to tell me I’m pretty (although I certainly don’t mind). I’ve insisted on having an Inaugural Ceremony because I believe this city, which raised me in so many ways, deserves for its poetry to be taken seriously.  Seattle deserves formal recognition of the office of Civic Poet. And if the Civic Poet does not have a formal office, if the Civic Poet is but a programmatic line item in the Office of Arts and Culture budget in a great City of Literature like Seattle, then it is my duty as recently named Civic Poet to invent one, to furnish the city with a formal ceremony in recognition of its wide and varied literary traditions. I cannot help it. As a poet, I am obsessed with the formal structure of truth.  I believe in the essential role of poetry to bring people together in the provincial but necessary work of imagining a world not yet realized. This is because I started writing with Youth Speaks Seattle—a social justice program masquerading as a youth writing program. I owe Youth Speaks my writing career. A Youth Speaks writing circle on the top floor of the Downtown Central Library was my first workshop. A Youth Speaks slam at Youngstown Cultural Center in Delridge (which I lost because I couldn’t keep time) was my first publication. Hosting the Sunday night weekly open mic at Café Allegro in the University District was my first editorial gig. And the  Wednesday night Seattle Poetry Slam at Re-Bar in South Lake Union was my first scholarship—the Grand Slam stage at Town Hall Seattle, my first fellowship. Here, then, a short and woefully incomplete list of the Seattle poets who I owe, who I watched, with awe, poets who pushed the door a little wider for me as I lived and breathed: Daemond Arrindel, Karen Frinneyfrock, Roberto Ascalon, Denise Jolley, Ebo Barton, Mat Blesy, Robin Park, Rose MacAleese, Hollis Wong-Wear, Maddie Clifford, Mary Lambert, Tara Hardy, Gabriel Teodros, Nikkita Oliver, Jojo Gaon, R.J. Delos Reyes, Greg Bee, Jack McCarthy.  I insisted on having an inaugural ceremony in no small part because I insist on submitting these names and places to the public record. In college, when I decided to try writing a poetry manuscript for my undergraduate thesis, my advisor told me that spoken word, particularly slam—which I’d invested so much of my youth in and had given me so much back—wasn’t real. We were in her office, surrounded by her books and awards. I looked down at my red sneakers. Whatever slam was, she said, it wasn’t poetry. It took me years to realize that this was less an appraisal of art born of an aesthetic literary tradition and more a political position that betrays an ethics of art. She was telling me what I made and the people that helped me make it were not real. For a great majority of my life, between the ages of 11-34, I was not real. I found myself a dependent on an immigration case that was denied over and over, placed in deportation proceedings, administratively closed, then when I came of age, was removed from the case altogether and released into the ether outside civil law. For nearly a quarter century, I was either in process, ordered removed, out of status, without or with too many documents. I wore brown leather oxfords when the federal judge said, Sorry son. My claim on the place I called home was not real.  This brief history of my immigration status is, of course, not a matter of art; it is a series of legal appraisals. But in this telling, my old professor and the judge both take on the same temporary rhetorical and aesthetic maneuver; they both require the author—which is to say, one with authority—to deny that a thing, a person who lives and breathes before them, and the legal and social conditions that may or may not labor my breathing are, in fact, very real. Now, years later, we find ourselves at this dais—here in Council Chambers, where, every day, appraisals are made that have a profound impact on Seattle’s citizenry. I insisted on having the ceremony in this symbolic hall of power because symbolism begs interpretation. And what I’m reaching for—what I’ve conscripted you all here with me now into—is the collective act of interpretation. Interpretation is the essential freedom that underlies all other freedoms in a democracy. The legal foundation of American civil society rests on interpretation: lawyers dueling over interpretations of a law (nevermind the rules that govern the duel), the adjudication, the decided upon interpretation archived and referred back to as precedent to reinscribe or reinterpret when a new reality, a new case, a new kind of person emerges. This seemingly endless series of interpretations and reinterpretations should be instructive for policy-making. But let’s consider, for a moment, the act of appraisal, how it requires the author to size up a possible new reality. Thus begins interpretation. There is, almost daily, a moment every one of us learns the world, as we knew it, has ended, that our lived reality has out-paced the language we had ascribed the world. A news alert. You find a gray hair. The crocus have bloomed overnight. In that moment, you have two options: to seal the world as you knew it, or imagine a different world through a new language. I’m committed to a poetry and a politics of the latter. Interpretation, at the end of everything, is an act of confirmation, of collaboration, of saying, “Yes, this is how it is. How should we proceed?”  It is, perhaps, my most strongly held belief that art is a social practice. Every poem, every painting, every work born of a person’s mind, pushed or prodded into being is to be read, to be encountered by another person necessarily in some other time and place, to be met as an act that completes its making. Collaboration. Confirmation. Interpretation. Like all of us, I am a product of those who thought about and after me. Ancestors, lineage, inheritance—all yes. But also, more immediately, the people I owe: my children, family, neighbors, colleagues, the laborers who feed, clean, tend to life all around me.  No one lives alone. Seattle not only introduced me to writing but brought me back to it. The people I write with and my many beloveds who call Seattle home remind me every day that attending to place and people is the most critical act of writing, So, too, Seattle taught me to read, in a group, sharing what we love about the poems that made us feel, for a moment, alive or less alone. It was in a group I learned close reading makes possible other ways of being—not just with ourselves but with others. I’m saying, here, interpretation, both the legal maneuvering and the other half of art-making, is, too, a social practice.  When I immigrated to the States, my family stayed in Seattle suburbs, which began a lifetime of orbiting the place and idea of Seattle. I’ve always loved this city. In my teens, I drove between Yakima and Seattle, writing, performing, and organizing with queer and trans kids of color, developing a political practice inextricably linked to community and art-making. I moved permanently to Seattle shortly after college—after gigs as a non-profit youth program manager, graveyard gas station clerk, and business reporter didn’t pan out. I accepted a job as a corporate management consultant; I had two young kids; my life took a detour away from writing. I returned to writing—after a divorce and a career change—in large part due to Seattle, by which, of course, I mean the people writing here, some of whom overlap with my time writing in Seattle as a youth. I’m very lucky. My third child was born here. My writing has done well. And I have no intention of calling anywhere else home.  This is one interpretation of my life—one in which Seattle was my city long before America became my country. It is a profound honor to be named Seattle Civic Poet, to use my time to read poems with others, to bring this collaborative sensibility of interpretation into City Hall. But before I tell you about my project and my poetic vision for the city, you’ll have to excuse me as I consider what a phrase like “Civic Poet” might mean, and what it might mean to occupy the role at a time like this. Again, I am a poet obsessed with the formal structure of truth. In the history of Poet Laureates in America, my identity makes me an unconventional choice; with respect to Seattle’s history of Civic Poets—the four women of color who preceded me—less so. It was not that long ago that I appeared in literature as a symbol, a metaphor, a projection by which the main character, narrator or speaker learns an essential lesson. There are, today, what we might call the archetypal Seattle Civic Poets from New York to Tukwila being rounded up, regardless of status, placed in prisons far from home without due process. Outside of the poem, outside of this very lovely ceremony, I am reminded by the current political reality that I am the monster of my own country’s making. I am an object lesson. I am not real. As a city, Seattle is good at a particular kind of counter: the political practice of offering the symbol the role of seeming speaker. We might refer to this as centering marginalized voices. Seattle has always loved to signify the shift from object to subject. After all, our city is the only major American city named after an Indigenous person, whose defining characteristic was friendliness to settlers, and our city is the seat of a county now named after a civil rights leader who warned us against the recruitment of his memory in the service of empire. I now belong to this tradition where I’m made symbol. But interpretation makes me real. Above all, I must insist that I am real. The role of Seattle Civic Poet reveals something about our city, about poetry, about how a queer immigrant poet might operate within the constraints of a city that at once both reifies and thumbs its nose at national tradition. Though I’m grateful for this post, this ceremony, the community that I am humbled would gather to celebrate any modest honor of mine, I’m unsure if the idea of the poet is widely held in high esteem. I’m unsure, too, what kind of emblem to a city or a nation’s culture a poet might hold. There is a tension inherent in the phrase Civic Poet: “Civic” as “related to citizens.”  “Poet” as in “to make.”  “Civic”—because “nation” is a story—is a long sentence hammered into a bright line of progress: straight, clear, inevitable, pure action.  “Poet” is wide, contains multitudes, is both node and network and language, itself. The tension between the two words is fraught, my footing unsure. The thread I string between action and language undone by every word not met with action and every action straining to outrun its consequence in language.  What do we use this language for? What is the point of poetry at a time where the government can illegally abduct, indefinitely detain, and indiscriminately revoke the status of a legal permanent resident? What can language meaningfully do if our figureheads sign the bombs my tax dollars paid for to kill seventeen thousand Palestinian children? What is a poet for when there are firing squads? What does my vocation with language materially do when Seattle Police Officers are not charged with the deaths they’ve caused and are only fired when they’re caught joking about it? What is a poet—to say nothing of a civic poet? There are no answers. Just the certainty that safety is not a place but a language, a series of relationships we agree to, a reality we apprehend together. Collaboration. Confirmation. Interpretation. Here, in this first-ever Seattle Civic Poet Inaugural Ceremony, for a moment, we might be safe. At the least, I have conscripted you all into this shared act of interpretation. Now imagine with me: What does it mean to be conferred with the role of civic poet? What does it mean today to be (emblematic) of Seattle’s citizenry? What especially might that mean if you have repeatedly been denied citizenship? I have spent the whole of my adult life imagining myself into our citizenry, despite what my country has told me about myself. So before aesthetics, I belong to an ethical tradition of poetry without which I am nowhere. Alone, I am not real. I insist that I am not alone. I insist that there are people I owe. You are who I owe. You are who I love. Safety is not a place but a language, a series of relationships we agree to, a reality we apprehend together. I have ostensibly gathered you all here to share a poetic vision for this city. If I could: An elegy for every death.A ballad for every worker.A curse for every abuse of power. An epithalamion for very wedding.An ode for every birth. Let these poems be written by every witness. Archive them all in a great leatherbound bookThat has to be passed around and read aloud from At the start of every meeting in City Hall for the rest of time. But I only have two years, so here are the nuts and bolts of my project:  For the past year or so, I’ve hosted Salonshops with friends and local poets where we discuss poems written by other people as a primer to a short workshop. As Seattle Civic Poet, I plan to expand this practice to public conversations about policy and civic life. In one-on-ones and small group discussions, I plan to facilitate public conversations with elected officials, civic leaders, and citizen boards and commissions with a handful of poems as a precursor and framing device to broader conversations about civic issues and policies they're thinking about and working on.   This project will kick off with four Salonshops in April, National Poetry Month, at King Street Station. The first will be a community Salonshop as part of the Office of Arts & Culture First Thursdays, in collaboration with jazz musician Jahnvi Madan, followed by Salonshops with a City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Seattle Public Library Head Librarian Tom Fay, and Washington Community Alliance Executive Director Kamau Chege. By starting with reading poems together, it is my hope to bring civic leaders closer to language and a shared understanding as the pretext to not only critical policy discussions but how we live a life with each other. Together, we’ll draw the line that connects poetry and policy, and in so doing, dissolve the standard exchange of palliative statements that passes for civic discourse. So, towards collaboration. Towards confirmation. A shared interpretation. Through this dream of a common language—and only through there—may we begin to find the grace, mercy, and love needed to survive. ...read more read less