"People use the word ‘lofty’ a lot when they think of a poet ... Being a poet is anything but lofty."That's Tina Chang talking to The New York Times. As Brooklyn's fourth poet laureate (and its first woman), Chang hopes to use her unusual vantage to "demystify the role of the poet" while engaging with the diverse urban neighborhoods of her borough. From the Times profile on the poet:
Ms. Chang would love to see poems carved into benches and chiseled in placards throughout Brooklyn’s parks; mindful of money woes, she might settle for verses scrawled in chalk, “only to be washed away in a replica of nature’s constant cycle of growth and rebirth,” as she wrote in her winning application (to be Brooklyn's laureate). She hopes to create a Web site that will spotlight other Brooklyn poets, and she yearns to bring them into the borough’s public middle schools. ...
“We don’t only want to engage Park Slope and Williamsburg and Dumbo and places that might be considered — I want to phrase this carefully — places that might, um, already benefit from these rich communities of literature,” she said. “We also want to be able to penetrate neighborhoods such as Bensonhurst and Bed-Stuy.”
... “The ultimate goal is to break down the wall between people and poetry,” she said. “Somewhere along the way, we have felt intimidated by it, or we have felt we have to be well-educated in order to be able to access it or walk into that world.”
Chang, age 40, is the author of the poetry collection Half-Lit Houses, a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award. She is co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond with Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar. Her poems have appeared in American Poet, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, and Sonora Review, among others.
It's great to see such a centering of Chang and poetry in the Times; the expansive profile is accompanied by an audio slide show on the birth of a poem. But I was a little weirded out by this bit of the article: "With flowing black hair and a remarkable ability to pull off form-fitting black leather pants, Ms. Chang is a particularly glamorous ambassador of an art form not necessarily associated with lipstick and glitz." Umm ... really?
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