We all know I struggle to keep secrets especially since I wrote a whole chapter on the benefits of gossip. I confess I’ve been keeping a secret from you all for a couple months. Now I can tell you the secret… I’m a Poet Laureate!
Earlier this spring I was selected to be the Poet Laureate for the city of Anaheim here in Orange County, California. It is a great honor to be the literary ambassador of this city. It feels all the more wild to know that I was chosen while still being an emerging poet. I’m looking forward to working with the nationally recognized and award winning Anaheim Public Library as well as other orgs to create opportunities for the literary arts to thrive.
There is much to say about the wonders of Anaheim. We are a city known by our sports and entertainment. We house Disneyland, the Angels baseball team, the Ducks hockey team, and the Anaheim Convention Center. There is more to us than the businesses we house. We are a diverse city filled with a diverse range of people with stories to tell, histories that deserve recognition, cultures to protect, and dignities to own. The role of the Poet Laureate is not to be the vessel that tells our stories but to equip the people to tell their own and create pathways for our individual stories to be known. I’m looking forward to the ways my experience as an author, an organizer, and a trauma informed education specialist will be used in this role.
There is more that I can say but also much more that I hope to do in this role. I will let the speech I gave and the poem I wrote to speak on my behalf.
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Poet Laureate Presentation to City Council
Thank you to the Anaheim Cultural and Heritage Commission for choosing me to be the Poet Laureate. Thank you to the City Council for my introduction. It is an honor to be here with you all and stand before you today as Anaheim’s Poet Laureate.
I will share two secrets with you today. The first is that I struggled with poetry for most of my life. I’ve wondered if this thing I love has importance in this world. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to proclaim that it does. Poetry is essential not just because it is beautiful, but also because it is strategic. The role of the poet is to play and contort language, and we struggle to do this.
My second secret is about poetry and therefore the poet: we bend and break language (and sometimes ourselves) because we know how easy it is to see language dehumanize people. The role of the poet is to strengthen the great muscle of empathy, equipping people to recognize our thin webs of interconnection. From the hill tops to breathtaking murals, in the immigrant barrios to the ethnic enclave of Little Arabia, to our upcoming Juneteenth festival to our many forms of Pride celebration, at the public libraries and in the museums, to the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples who still exist here on Hutuknga – we have on this earth what makes life worth living.1 It is through dignifying empathy that a Poet Laureate’s work keeps hope alive, preserves the cultures that formed us, creates new pathways of being, and remembers the people who remind us that we are important enough to deserve care. Words are the medium we poets choose and the unbreakable human spirit is the canvas we create on.
I’d like to end my short time on this microphone with a poem I wrote entitled “harvest basket”
—And when gathering oranges, don’t forget the land who held you tenderly Through each impossible day you survived. Thank the tangled branches for how it taught us to intertwine our souls in this dusty rumination of living. Try to embrace the breeze who cradled the sweet symphony of blossoms in the dry air. Wrap your fingers ‘round the rind and remember the grandmothers and grandfathers who taught you how to laugh through wrinkled skin and leathered living. Read each leaf as if it were a love letter delivered at dawn. You have permission to be disappointed in its bitterness, sweetness isn’t universal but let its absence remind you that a life filled with flavor is one that’s entangled intertwining its strengths into each other, encapsulating each glowing memory, enchants to recognize how we gather will peel back the storms that kept us apart
Darwish, Mahmoud. “We Have on this Land What Makes Life Worth Living.” In Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. 6th Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Siiiiiis the way I am celebrating you!!! Whoo hooo!!!!!! YAAAAS!!!!!!
Congratulations Camille!! This is such important work and the City of Anaheim couldn’t have chosen better. 🍊🍊🍊