LAHORE: Michael Cirelli is the founder of US Youth Poet Laureate programme and founding member of Urban Word, an organisation working in New York for promotion of poetry. He himself is an important voice in the realm of poetry with four collections to his credit. He was in Lahore last month to launch Pakistan youth laureate programme ¬¬ an extension of the US programme. Dawn had an informal sitting with him to talk about his personal views on poetry and related subjects.

When asked about his views on spoken word poems, performance or hip-hop poetry, Cirelli says it has opened an incredible door for the young people to find their voices and to fall in love with poetry just because of the energy around the spoken word poetry and poetry slam and hip-hop poetry. He considers the new waves of poetry a great medium that speaks to young people.

“A lot of content in that kind of poetry is confessional and it’s about your lives and where you are from. It more directly speaks to a younger, more vibrant culture of poets that we have in the US.”

However, Cirelli thinks that it’s still kind of connected to more historical and traditional forms of poetry too. His own poems are interspersed with elements of his personal life.

To the question as to what makes a good poem, it’s personal or social, he considers it a subjective question. “What makes a good poem is more aligned to what you want to do as a writer. For me, I like specific instances of insight into writers’ life, into their lived reality. It’s something that’s popular in the US and is pushed towards specificity rather than abstractions like love, hope and joy.”

Personally, Cirelli says, he loves food, hip-hop and surfing and taking specific things about himself and putting them into this bigger concept of poetry.

“That’s what I love to try to do as a writer. I don’t know if I always accomplish it but I am really interested in those specific moments. There might be more general metaphors but then there might be specific metaphors about washing dishes when I was a kid. I have also read poets that love to be more general without putting themselves into it.”

When asked about the importance of writing about the times one is living in, Cirelli terms it significant, pointing out that reading his own poetry would let anyone know what’s happening in his life at any given time.

“However, what you may lose sometimes in writing poems like that is that in 15 years, such poems may not be as relevant or make much sense. My collection, Dead Ass, is about exploring the relationship between myself as a white male and my connection with hip-hop as an art form, which primarily came out of young people of colour in New York city who have a different reality than mine. Sometimes if I were to criticise my work, it is a little bit too much of the time. About the Dead Ass, (a poem taking on the subject of changing vocabulary of the youth) that term is not really used in slang now. That poem is about 10 years old and the young people don’t use the term anymore.”

Regarding the category he wants to put himself in as a spoken word poet or hip-hop poet, Michael Cirelli thinks his career has taken shifts. “Of course, my first two books of poetry were centred in hip-hop. The first one was called Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the second one was titled Vacations on Black Star Line. As much as they are about hip-hop, they are about race and privilege. My third book, Everyone Loves the Situation, is more about being an Italian-American”.

He says that if his first two books were of the poet writing about hip-hop in contemporary America, his fourth book, Grind, was just about his family and him growing up in a restaurant, love poems with food as an overarching theme. Now he is writing Duas and a lot of poems about his daughter.

Cirelli has a sense of achievement when he looks back at his life, especially his meeting with Michelle Obama in the White House when his mother started taking his career seriously. “But my biggest career highlight was being here in Pakistan and launching the youth laureate programme. This is probably the biggest thing in my life. There is a personal connection to it too, I have a wife from here and a daughter who is half-Pakistani. We could launch this programme in Nigeria and that would have been great but I am not sure I would have called it my career highlight.”

The youth poet laureate programme being launched in Pakistan also involves mentoring and Cirelli thinks that mentorship is very important as it helps the young people to grow as writers and leaders. “There is so much content out there in social media, YouTube and books, there is so much that’s accessible to young writers that even if they don’t have direct mentorship, they can be mentored just by YouTube in a lot of ways. They can find poems that they love, emulate them and grow. For us, because we have an opportunity to work with the poets who are mentors to help support young writers, it’s been critical to the process.”

He says that through the programme in Pakistan also, a group of mentors would be engaged to work with the young poets and help them become writers.

The youth poet laureate is the first one outside the US and Cirelli wanted to do it for the last one decade. “We met a Pakistan man (Syed Azfar Iqbal), a big lover of poetry, in Starbucks in New York city 10 years ago. His wife was a painter. We talked about poetry and all. It was then that I had dreamt of launching a programme in Pakistan.

Cirelli has a plan to take the programme to other countries after Pakistan as there are a number of countries that have expressed interest in having this programme too, including India, Nigeria, the Caribbeans and Tanzania.

“I am excited about all of these countries because they have a deep poetic tradition and are under-resourced. We are not doing it in developed countries like England and France but in the countries where it would have a big impact on people,” says Cirelli.

Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2023