Ottawa introduces first poets laureate in nearly three decades
Andrée Lacelle and Jamaal Jackson Rogers are the City of Ottawa’s first poets laureate in nearly 30 years.
VERSe Ottawa and Mayor Jim Watson introduced the two poets Sunday during the closing night of VERSeFest, the annual poetry festival in the city.
Lacelle, an award-winning poet and promoter of French-language literature, was inducted into VERSeFest’s Hall of Honour in 2016. Rogers, whose stage name is JustJamaal The Poet, has gained recognition through his performance poetry and promotion of spoken word art.
VERSe Ottawa and the city partnered to resurrect the poet laureate program this year. The last time the city had a poet laureate was in 1990, but it was a unilingual program. Now, the poet laureate program will feature a French-language poet and an English-language poet.
The program budget is $25,000 annually and each poet will receive a $5,000 honorarium. The rest of the money will support programs and events to promote poetry, as suggested by the poets laureate.
VERSe Ottawa keeps a roster of more than 200 local poets on file. Two special committees selected Lacelle and Rogers to be poets laureate for a two-year term.
Source: Ottawa Citizen
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Newly crowned Ottawa Poet Laureate Jamaal Jackson Rogers took to Facebbook to share this honour
Good morning friends and family. As some of you may know by now, last night I was honoured to be selected as Ottawa’s Poet Laureate for 2017-2019. It is with humility and gratitude that I accept this award. I pledge to give my full service and dedication to the role. After 27 years of the Laureate position being absent in our city, I can’t tell you how deep my gratitude is towards the individuals and organizations who have worked hard to reinstate the official station. Thanks to theCity of Ottawa, VERSe Ottawa, Jim Watson and the nomination jury, who have entrusted me to carry the mantle of literary excellence, safeguard the rich tradition of poetry and spread awareness of one of the nations capital’s most cherished and practiced art forms. Below is an original poem I wrote and recited last night at the inauguration:
POEMS SHOULD
A poem should wander
Like caravans of camels
Scattered across the dessert peninsula
Settling only when the sun sips caramel sand dunes
They should communicate in languages
Something like dolphins or motheresing
Not understood simply through lexicon
But transmitted through a psychic connection
Far beyond DNA strands of time that bind scientific findings
Poems should be specific
For vagueness is suspicion left to fester
Breathe wasted for the imposter to take a stance of innocence
If an intruder invades your home of words to vanquish your spirits
Your hands will twitch before logic compels you
So let the posers of your poems leave with a taste of their own medicine
Kidnapping time for time lost
Trading traditional griot for contemporary rituals so that you remember to never forget that poetry is the art in storytelling
Emancipated phrases preserving the value of the words love, failure, triumph or whatever muse or prompt that gets you off
There are so many ways to portray poetry that it will blow your mind when you finally come to realize that good poetry is that which heals all of you
So poems should be revealing
An excavation of the places buried beneath the mountain of loose thoughts, curating between the rubble of unpronounced feelings
A hitchhiker’s guide to the hysteria that awaits your celestial being
A lost and found for all your petty and every bit of your profound
A basket of angst waiting to be wrung and hung so that the soaking blood stains left from peeling back pain can be eaten by the hounds of your intelligent emotional agents
A poetical cycle to reach, breach, untie, unite
Until each piece of speech is complete enough to be released before the beautiful struggle repeats
Now
In an emergency
Where you need to address the opus steaming off your chest
Poems should be a reflection of celebration
For the urgency of time is best utilized when there exists nothing left behind
When the tongue speaks in syllables and your hands signals symbols
When you clap because joy comes after insurmountable fear
When the scholar of life was first an intimidating roller coaster ride and now you show the world how you have travelled linguistic landscapes to tame the bull with bravery and pride
And you write songs because what better way to hold words but in harmonic symphony
And you scribe plays because the stage of theatre is the ultimate way to relay full bodied self-expression
And you burn and you burn and you burn
A hole into the memory bank of humanity’s collective deck of suits
And pledge page of poetry to undo the neglect we paid towards nature and its roots
And connect the dots that suspend Universal truths
If the thunder that breaks sound waves in your throat become silent
And creativity leaves the room
Then come,
Bring these cursed miracles together with pad and pen
Write prayers in lore and appreciation in verse
For there is nothing that poems can’t explore
And even less that sharing can’t cure
Because poems should be everything that stands as a metaphor for support
Until all we know and feel
With certainty
That every second that passes
Becomes an unforgettable relic
Of what poems should be.
POEMS SHOULD
By Jamaal Jackson Rogers
Photo by Pearl Pirie
Congratulations Jamaal. Great poem, and in my opinion describes art. However, perhaps using the judgemental connotation “should” in your title is an oxymoron to the message in your poem about poetic expression having a universal resonance, as is in great art. I’m writing this from the perspective of a visual/media artist.