CHICAGO — Avery R. Young, Chicago’s first poet laureate, wants to create more opportunities for Chicagoans to get involved in the arts.
Young was named poet laureate last week, and fans got to see him perform at the city’s poetry festival Saturday at Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State St. He’ll serve a two-year term with a $50,000 grant to commission poems and create a public program series — but he’ll also have great power to shape the role as its first holder.
“I’m doing this with the community,” Young said. “I’m not separate from them.
“I hope to create a situation where I can garner some support and resources so that we can open up opportunities for other folk artists to create poems and songs and art about the great people, places and things in Chicago, the greatest city in the world.”
Young’s work spans music, performance and visual arts and literature. He came up in the city’s spoken word poetry scene and has taught art for more than two decades. On top of his new role as poet laureate, Young co-directs The Floating Museum, an art collective that explores the relationships between art, community, architecture and public institutions.
That experience is necessary for the role, Young said at Saturday’s event, where he also performed poems and songs.
“The poet laureate has to be someone who’s walking into so many other rooms, outside of open mics and libraries and bookstores,” Young said. “The poetry is for the people. Poetry has never been for the poets. Somehow, poets messed around and made it for ourselves.”
Eve Ewing, a well-known writer, poet, scholar and activist, interviewed Young during the event — and told the audience about how he mentored her and shaped her and her work.
Ewing said interviewing Young was a privilege that she didn’t have words for because she “comes representing many” other students whose lives Young has touched.
“There are countless people with us in this room right now who you have mentored, cared for, loved on, had their back, loved them when they did not love themselves, loved them when this city did not love them, loved them when this country did not love them and raised them up,” Ewing said.
“I want you to know … that I, and so many of us, would not be here without you. I want to say thank you in front of everyone as my witness.”
Young said his students’ commitment to their art is what poetry means to him and what he hopes to promote in his new role.
“The fact that you all would get up however early you had to get up to make it to a poetry class to listen to some old white man talk to you all at 9 o’clock,” Young said. “That dedication is what poetry is, not the poem itself. A poem ain’t got nothing but one thing to do in life — that’s to be heard. … Poetry is that thing that makes you wake up to write the poem.”
As poet laureate, Young hopes to meet people where they are and connect as many of them as possible to Chicago’s vibrant poetry community, he said.
“I’m going to do the very best I can, with this laureate shit, to make poems go into a whole bunch of rooms,” Young said. “Even if I step in a room and go, ‘Oops, I didn’t see nothing, I swear! I’m just gonna leave this poem right here and go on about my business!’”
“We as poets, we have to live. We have to listen. We have to experience. We have to gather those stories that want to be heard. We have to, as poets, understand we can do that in so many other places outside of an open mic, outside of a book.”
Support Local News!
Subscribe to Block Club Chicago, an independent, 501(c)(3), journalist-run newsroom. Every dime we make funds reporting from Chicago’s neighborhoods. Already subscribe? Click here to gift a subscription, or you can support Block Club with a tax-deductible donation.
Listen to the Block Club Chicago podcast:
