San Diego Poet Laureate Paola Capó-García says poetry is a 'thriving thing'

Paola Capó-García is the city of San Diego's new Poet Laureate, the third to take on the role since the program began in 2020. She follows Ron Salisbury and most recently Jason Magabo Perez.

Raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Capó-García moved to San Diego to study creative writing at the University of California, San Diego. She is a former journalist and has spent the past seven years as an educator in the High Tech High (HTH) charter school network — first as a 12th grade English teacher and now at the HTH Graduate School of Education.

Capó-García is driven to demystify poetry — not just to make it accessible, but to show people that poetry is a "thriving thing that exists out in the world," she said.

She also stressed the urgency of art in today’s world. "There will never be a time when we don't need poetry or when we don't need art. It's just unimaginable to me," she said.

Capó-García officially begins her two-year term as San Diego Poet Laureate with an inaugural reading and panel discussion at the San Diego Central Library at 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 18.

Interview highlights

On becoming Poet Laureate

I think my role as San Diego Poet Laureate is one of stewardship in some way, of just offering something. It's not about saying that this is the only mode to interpret or channel your feelings, but this is a mode. That this is a way to do it. So, offering maybe new possibilities and new opportunities for people who otherwise maybe never thought of poetry as something they would ever come close to.

My expectation is being able to collaborate with a lot of organizations that either I have already collaborated with in the past as a teacher or just personally and also finding new organizations to collaborate with and hopefully making connections for them. I anticipate more connections with schools. I expect and anticipate getting to know more local poets. That's something that I would love to do. I'm excited for this position to connect me with more local writers, and to really champion them and collaborate with them.

I also see my role as someone who can continue, with Jason (Magabo Perez), to demystify poetry, to dispel whatever misconceptions we have about poetry, and really think of it as something of the people. That it is an incredibly democratic and accessible form of writing — that as long as you can feel things, you can write a poem.

On following in the footsteps of her predecessor, Jason Magabo Perez

Big shoes to fill, although I don't want to think of it that way. I think of my shoes being side by side with his shoes, like that collaboration. I'm really trying to think of it that way, because when you look at everything he accomplished in those two years — bringing more poetry to different communities, the events that he put on, the way he was able to get into schools and also connect poetry to ethnic studies — that connection is so incredible to me and what we need in schools.

It feels really powerful to also have, you know, a Filipino poet in this position to represent so many people in San Diego. I think that was an incredibly powerful thing for the past two years to have that model, and to have the model of someone who really thinks of poetry as a radical tool. It's not just pretty words strung together. It is something that elicits movement and action.

On poetry's misconceptions

I think a lot of (the) misconceptions come from academia — that it is this Ivory Tower sort of thing, that it is overly complex and that not everyone can understand it. And that is certainly not my poetry. That is not the poetry that I have been transformed by. And I don't actually think that that's the poetry that thrives and is celebrated today.

When I think of the great poets of today, I'm thinking about Ross Gay, Danez Smith, Ilya Kaminski and so many other writers who put it to you beautifully and plainly. You know what they're communicating. It might take you a few steps with each line to break down what's being said, but it's conveyed in the whole poem. In your body. You understand what they're saying.

I think that it's really important for us, as poets, to constantly show people this is what poetry actually is. It looks like 50,000 different ways. It sounds different from poet to poet. There is play that's happening on the page. Poetry is a physical object that you curate on a piece of paper — the way that you format it, the way that you have intersecting lines, spaces, enjambment. That choreography on the page is super interesting. And that's a way to connect with more people who maybe have more of an appreciation for visual art to think of poetry just in the same way.

On teaching and writing in a time of change

Poetry was the main thing that I would focus on every semester. Students knew that coming into my class. I was the 12th grade English lit teacher, and they'd come in and they'd say, "We heard we're going to do a lot of poetry with you." And they would be really, really skeptical about it. So, so much of my energy went into showing them a side of poetry that they had never seen. With that came showing them contemporary writers — to show them that poetry is this thriving thing, that it exists out in the world. We're not just reading Walt Whitman, we're not just reading writers from the early 20th century.

During the pandemic, that was huge. Instead of doing my usual class, I said, I'm going to do a poetry intensive. An eight-week poetry intensive where they're going to read and write poetry and we're going to read Claudia Rankine's "Citizen: An American Lyric." You can imagine that during the pandemic, right? We're talking 2020, 2021, as we're seeing this movement and this push to seek justice for George Floyd, for Ahmaud Arbery, for Breonna Taylor.

So that felt like a really important moment to get them to express the anger, the rage, the confusion, whatever it is that they were feeling and to then use a text like Claudia Rankine's "Citizen" to give them a language and a historical awareness of how exactly we came to this moment in time in 2020 and 2021.

The writing that came out of those eight-week chunks — and the conversations that we had — even though distance learning is something a lot of teachers want to forget, for me, it felt like the most powerful semester or year that I've ever had, because of the conversations that the students allowed me to have with them and because of the rawness of what they were expressing in their writing.

On creativity in two languages

I grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Spanish is my first language. English also always felt like my other first language, just because I grew up with a lot of TV — and it just baked in my brain. So I felt an ease, always, with English.

(English) always felt like a language where I could access a lot of my creativity in, because I watched so many films and so many TV shows and I listened to so much music and so much hip-hop and so much alternative rock. I felt like that's a language where I could find a different side of myself and maybe articulate things that I couldn't otherwise.

Now, of course, I'm trying to constantly get back to Spanish — that's what happens at that (young) age, the grass is always greener and you think of other things outside of your upbringing that are more interesting than what you're living through. That will always be a regret, but I think that's why I incorporate so much Spanish in my work now. But at the time, English felt like a really interesting creative avenue.

I need to come back to my own writing. I'm really hoping to use these next two years also as meditative time — to just write, to potentially go on a retreat, to have space to really do it. I have focused so much on my work and my students that I really just didn't make any space for my own writing — and I was feeling like: do I have anything to say? I don't know how to articulate in new ways what I'm going through. I think it's been in the last year or two, where I found myself coming back to it and writing one-off poems, or using my Notes app again and just writing a line here and there, or seeing something and having it sort of inspire a line or an idea. And so I'm excited to work off of that — as a catapult or a jumping off point to really come back to my writing and to hopefully get a second book in the works.

On Puerto Rico, San Diego and the search for home

I grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico in an area called Miramar, and I came to the U.S. during undergrad. I was hopping around every two years, it felt — from Puerto Rico to Syracuse, to New York City, to Davis, to San Diego. And when I got here, I felt like: Oh, I'm here. This is my other home, other than San Juan. This feels like my other home. That movement, that restlessness, and trying to search for what home looks like definitely inspire some of my poetry.

I think everything about my Puerto Rican upbringing informs my writing. In some of my poems, it's important to have little Easter eggs for Puerto Rican readers — (things) only they will understand — because you feel really far away from home. Through text, I can make that connection with people. It's culturally my longing to be in Puerto Rico, to connect with it, the sort of political complication of being from Puerto Rico, and wanting to connect with others and make them understand what Puerto Rico is. Because like San Diego, I think Puerto Rico is another place that is very, very misconstrued. That thrust, or that desire to clarify, I feel like that's a big part of my writing.

Courtesy of the author

On the role of poetry in a messy world

One of the big things that I've always come back to is the ways in which we pursue these hyper-consumerist lifestyles as a way to avoid, or as a way to numb ourselves in many ways. So materiality, consumerism, media — those things come up a lot in my work because that's always been the way that I self-medicate. That's always been the way that I cope. Or sometimes pursue, not just avoid, but that's the way that I'm gonna attack it — by naming it.

Specifically now, in this bizarre moment that we're living in, I find that writing and connection and collaboration are more important than ever. So I'm excited to be in community with people and be writing with them. I don't want to be the facilitator that facilitates them writing, I want to write with them and see what comes out of that and what conversations will that elicit.

Like my students during the pandemic, these moments breed the discomfort that we sometimes need to get out these feelings and to articulate what's happening to us and what's happening to those around us. I think this is a time we need it. We need it not just in the next two years during my term, we're going to need it during the next four, during the next eight, during the rest of time. There will never be a time when we don't need poetry or when we don't need art. It's just unimaginable to me. So I think that that is my role not just to be led through these times with writing but to hopefully co-lead others.