Can There Be A New Jersey Poet Laureate Again?

New Jersey has always been a hub for literary talent. 

Since the American Revolution, notable figures like Philip Freneau, Walt Whitman, Alan Ginsburg and William Carolos Williams, have found the Garden State to be fertile ground for inspiration. This trend has continued through modern-day, with events like the long-running Dodge Poetry Festival, and even more recently the SOMOS NJ Poetry and Cultural Festival at Rutgers University-Newark. 

Despite all of this celebration of the arts, New Jersey hasn’t had a state poet laureate since 2003, despite them existing in other major cities like Newark, Jersey City, Union City, and Teaneck. 

New Jersey is only one of two states in the United States that doesn’t have a state poet laureateship, the other being Pennsylvania. Luckily, there are several New Jersey poets who hope to change that. 

“There is a lot of possibility in getting this program running again,” said Pierce Logan, who operates qwertpoetry.com. “My main interest in this is to have someone who can give a voice to poetry in the state, particularly younger people who are interested in it.” 

The original NJ Poet Laureate program was originally established by Joel Lewis, who has been a writer since the late 1970s. It was originally established as the William Carlos Williams Poet Laureateship in 2000.

“When Pierce called me up about this, I thought it might be worth exploring,” said Lewis. “Its been almost 25 years and the parties that were involved are now retired. I did suggest it when Mikie Sherrill was elected in a letter I sent to her congressional office, but I never heard anything.” 

During his time teaching creative writing at Rutgers, Lewis was doing a reading at the former Barnes & Noble in Edgewater when one of his students brought a friend who happened to be a legislative aide in Trenton. Lewis took the chance encounter as an opportunity to advocate for bringing the poet laureateship back. 

“She made a note of it and I thought it was just meant as a polite gesture, but then a few weeks later she followed up and said they had an assemblyman that would sponsor a bill for a poet laureate,” said Lewis. “I got invited down to Trenton to explain why this was important and then the bill was signed into law a few months after that, to which I just disappeared entirely with no further involvement.” 

There were only ever two state poet laureates ever in New Jersey. The first was Gerald Stern in 2000. The second was Mari Baraka of Newark, who would go on to share a poem at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo Village that many found controversial in 2001. 

Baraka’s poem, Somebody Blew Up America, was written following the attacks on September 11, 2001, and implied that Israel had knowledge of the terrorist attacks before they happened. 

“When you think of people like Bukowski or other loudmouth wild card poets, it’s not unheard of in the poetry scene,” said Logan. “But what happened was he shared it at the Dodge Poetry Festival, which has a huge audience.”

The New Jersey State Poet Laureateship was abolished in 2003, following Baraka’s reading at Dodge. Jewish members of the audience found the poem to be antisemitic and took offense to it, citing antisemitic tropes. While Baraka couldn’t be removed from the event, as it would be seen as a violation of freedom of speech, the only option was to do away with the poet laureateship entirely. 

“I knew Baraka for many years when I was at William Patterson University,” said Lewis. “I brought him up in ‘76 to do some readings and we always remained in contact. I of course had my misgivings when he was selected due to how controversial he was.” 

Things escalated when the story got out to the Jewish Standard, a local paper in Northern New Jersey. It was then picked up by other local newspapers like the Bergen Record and the Star-Ledger before becoming a larger TV news story. 

Lewis claims that the bad press reflected poorly on all artists within the state, something that was hard to come back from. 

“To have a program like this, you have something that represents the writing in the state. It depends on how you use it.”

Logan, Lewis, and Richardson hope to meet with an assemblyman with the intention of getting a bill put forward to revive the NJ Poet Laureateship. Logan also cited the longevity and history of poetry, including its place in popular culture. 

“We just had a movie adaptation of The Odyssey, which wasn’t a book but prose; it was poetry,” he said. “It was a really old poem. Many students also studied Beowulf and epic poems. There’s a reason it’s still around and not going anywhere. Even with the importance we all place on technology, it’s still something humans are creating. I think there’s something to be said for that.”

The three poets are finalizing their proposal to revive the NJ Poet Laureateship before they meet with Assemblyman William B. Sampson.