It’s three o’clock on an afternoon in April, and a troop of rowdy fourth graders is skipping out of their after-school program at Harding Elementary in El Cerrito, California, chasing each other down the sunbaked streets to KECG, a scrappy radio studio housed at El Cerrito High, two blocks away. Even though the station is technically off the air (facing our underfunded school district’s perpetual maze of budget cuts), the fourth graders, who have been writing poems together with me and the poet Gabriel Cortez for the past ten weeks, will use the studio to record their own poems about resilience for KQED’sThe California Report. The kids are enchanted by the studio’s waffle-padded foam walls and dangling mics. They’re ready to offer us, their assembled grown-ups, their sharpest wisdom.
“What does resilience mean to you?” Sasha Khoka, host of The California Report, asks each student as she records them. Making the question more challenging, she adds, “And what does resilience have to do with poetry?” Maya, age ten, doesn’t miss a beat: “Writing poetry reminds you that you have a truth inside yourself that no one can take away,” she says. “It’s a truth that maybe you haven’t admitted to other people, or even to yourself, but when you uncover it, it will keep you strong no matter what happens.” I hear myself inhale sharply. Maya’s exactly right. Poetry helps us unearth and delight in our bright, fierce human experience; to sound our truths, our life pulse, which cannot be stamped out.
Later, when the session is over and the kids are home, I remain grateful for Maya’s words. I also think about wider ways in which poetry is a force for community light, community resilience, and community health. In a moment when so much feels politically fraught, even violently torn, poems allow us to imagine our complex dreams, hold ideas in tension, and find language for joy, rage, grief, and possibility. All the more reason we—and our kids—need poems now. At this time, when arts interventions of all sizes and scales are being slashed indiscriminately without a full reckoning of their true value, I’m seeing newly the kinds of connections arts workers make between and within communities, on behalf of our collective well-being.
For most of my career, I’ve practiced largely as a lyric poet. While I travel and teach, I write alone in the mornings and send out work in relative privacy. This year, as poet laureate of my small, diverse, working-class town, I’m practicing differently, more as a constellation builder, copper wire, conductor, real-time hub. The community where I grew up and live now is one of the most diverse school districts in the United States, on the poorer side of a county with our country’s greatest wealth disparity. It is also (and yes, these things are deeply intertwined) a community which has largely had the worst arts funding per capita in the state of California. This year, I’m back in the schools I attended, making art with kids. With the help of six teaching artists, I’ve been writing poems with 512 kids across our district, offering poems, mentorship, field trips, and public-facing events for the community. Bearing bright notebooks and erasable gel pens, we show up in school classes or aftercare and offer kids time to find language for their dreams and their world. They listen to their own word-music. They name where they’re from. They imagine whose dreams they are carrying and how they’d carry them (in “backpacks of infinityspace,” as one third-grade class put it). They write amazing haiku: “It’s the end of autumn: / But dead bugs are still dead bugs.” They write about pickles and tacos and curry and momos and yogurt soup. They notice that it’s a universally true fact that the word massive is cooler than the word big. They recite their own poems to one another and stand up taller as they do. They listen more carefully to one another and to themselves.
As I do this work, I’m also calling my community into an implicit conversation about how to value each other’s voices, about how the presence of art helps us deepen our connections. Like some kind of poetic-repair-worker, my work manifests in small, site-specific patchwork mendings. At El Cerrito High, for example, many students in Advanced Placement English literature, those who work on the Gaucho Review, and those who participate in Poetically Speakin’ (a poetry club for African American students) had never really hung out with one another. We invite Ishmael Reed, who once lived in El Cerrito, to speak to us all. We hook into the radio station to amplify our explorations. We help each organization connect with a local foundation that could help them do fundraising. We take everyone on a field trip to 826 Valencia, across the Bay, and to eat burritos and look at the cool pirate stuff at McSweeney’s. “I never really knew that art could be a way of making a living,” says Lucia dreamily on the train ride home. We hold literary public-facing events filled with people of all ages. We talk about our urgent need as a community to build a new library as a space to build culture and share ideas.
These events are each raucous and joyful and abundant. I’ve watched them cross-pollinate communities and allow diverse groups of people to uplift our many voices. It is also bittersweet to be doing this work right now. Funds like the one that made this year possible are disappearing. In May, we gather for a final community festival, attended by families from all over the district. There is a typewriter stand and a zinemaking stand and a songwriter who sets poems to music. Over five hundred people gather to eat donuts and tacos and momos together, and to read their poems. Together, we are a community of voices, ideas, and care.
Even as we’re reciting those poems, there’s an ominous edge to our happiness. We hear that other festivals happening on the same weekend have lost their funding right in the middle of delivering such joy. We’re together, cheering each other on. But the chainsaw people are cutting arts interventions down right now, tree after blessed tree. As with all kinds of clearcutters, the chainsaw people rely on narrow, short-term thinking. (The question of whose efficiency they serve is always open.) As it happens, arts culture is vital to community sustainability and civic health. It’s a well-studied fact that people with long-term engagement with the arts are more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be leaders in their communities, more likely to vote, and more likely to have lasting friendships across racial and ethnic lines. Artists and people who engage with art help pollinate healthy, joyful, connected, pluralistic civic life. Helping our kids make art helps them, but it helps all of us, together, at the same time.
All year long, amid kids and community, despite the moment’s drumbeat of cutbacks, I’ve been unearthing my own bright dream: More festivals. More poems in the schools. More zany wordplay. More listening. Maybe if we hear and feel the joy of sharing our lives in art, we’ll also see the joy of investing in one another’s stories, words, rhythms, languages, and songs. Maybe we’ll invest in one another’s gardens, not in a few people’s chainsaws. At the year-end festival, my students each picked up a gorgeous paperback anthology, in which their words and their work had been gathered. Anthology comes from the Greek anthologia, which means “flower gathering.” One of my students, Melina, wrote a line in a poem that gives our book its title. She envisioned a world where we could go “gardening in the public flowerfest.” I love Melina’s dream. I want all of us out there, tending our brilliant, wild, unruly, garden. May we steward this water. May we tend this bloom.
Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry including, most recently, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange (The Museum of Modern Art, 2020). Taylor has taught at numerous institutions, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Queen’s University Belfast, where she was Distinguished U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre. She is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and reviews poetry on air for NPR’s All Things Considered. In 2024, she was appointed poet laureate of El Cerrito, California. In the same year, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Taylor will mentor students at El Cerrito High School’s new literary magazine; connect local writers and editors of larger regional literary magazines with El Cerrito High School students; and help the magazine create an event where all contributors can celebrate. Taylor will also bring in Bay Area poets to offer writing workshops at each of the city’s five public schools, helping students at each location access poetry.