Spoken word took over the capital last week as the city celebrated its inaugural Sacramento Poetry Week.

Poetry Week is an expansion of Poetry Day, which was first announced in 1986 by then-Sacramento Mayor Anne Rudin. The week was officially recognized by the city council in a resolution presented to Sacramento Poet Laureate Andru Defeye on Oct. 22. (Defeye has also been a contributor to Comstock’s.)

“In my five years as laureate, our city’s poetry community has become a model for cities across the country,” Defeye said at the meeting. “Thank you all for a commitment to valuing and supporting our poets in Sacramento.”

In addition to celebrating Sacramento poetry with a variety of events, the week is also meant to highlight other important aspects of poetry and those who make it, including education, mental health and opportunities.

An important facet of Poetry Day has been to bring poetry to the classroom through both a specially made lesson plan and through having poets meet with and perform for students virtually. Diamond Key, one of featured poets of Poetry Week, said she was proud to be included in these activities.

“I feel like it was an eye opening experience for them, because I am also a songwriter-poet and explaining to them that songwriting is a form of poetry,” Key says. “I feel like I’ve helped kind of plant some seeds there.”

Put together by Sacramento Poets and educators, the lesson plan is available to all teachers who are interested in sharing it with their students across all grade levels. The curriculum also includes poetry in Spanish and Spanglish (a blend of Spanish and English).

According to the event’s official website, the organizers of Poetry Week have also partnered with the Sacramento Native American Health Center to create a mental health support network for the local poetry community. The partnership aims to bring low-cost therapy and counseling services, as well as aid with Medi-Cal enrollment.

Defeye said that much of the work of poets is often used to help others heal and deal with their trauma, but that artists often do so by bringing up their own issues to the forefront.

“Other people get a chance to heal from it, but that could leave you damaged,” Defeye said. “We wanted to make sure that we’re providing the actual support that our poets who are doing this work need.”

The week is also an opportunity to advocate for better funding for poetry in Sacramento. Lorena Rodriguez and Julian Guleano, who helped organize the Spanish-language event Minga Poetica on Oct. 26, said one of the biggest hurdles for poetry in Sacramento was getting people to invest in the arts.

“We do a lot of work with little funding, and the work is good and the community is grateful,” Rodriguez says. “Imagine if we had more funding, the things we could do.”

Rodriguez also says it can be even harder to get funding for Spanish-language poetry. For example, she says it took Escritores Del Nuevo Sol, a group of bilingual writers in the Sacramento region, nearly 15 years to get an anthology book published.

“People think that maybe Spanish-speaking people don’t read poetry,” Rodriguez says. “I directly connect with the structural racism that exists within the system.”

The week officially kicked off on Oct. 20, with celebrations starting with a kickoff party at the Torch Club’s Sunday Sessions. Throughout the week, a variety of open mic events, featuring not only poetry but music and comedy, were held across the city, culminating in an awards gala on Sacramento Poetry Day, Oct. 26.

One of these events and a staple of the Sacramento poetry community was the Mahogany Urban Poetry open mic at Our Place Event Space & Kitchen on Oct. 23. Khiry Malik Moore, a co-founder of Mahogany, said a big reason for its initial creation 25 years ago was to create a space for poetry in Sacramento.

“Back then it was almost like an insult to say, ‘Hey, I wanna have a poetry night,’” Moore says. “We continued to push forward till it got as big as it is now, where we have a whole week.”

Moore also pointed to the role his Mahogany co-founder, Cleo Cartel, played in helping the space to grow. Cartel, who died in 2023, was recognized at the Poetry Week Awards for her importance to the Sacramento poetry community.

For Poetry Week, a mix of new and seasonal poets took the stage, speaking on a variety of topics ranging from romance, spirituality and politics. Featured poets included Camille Janae and Denisha “Coco” Blossom.

Another highlight of the week took place at Bear Dive on Oct. 25, where Speak Out Sacramento and Sac Queer Takeover partnered up to host an open mic night for queer poets to take front and center.

As with the other open mics held throughout the week, the celebrations at Bear Dive featured a mix of experienced speakers and first timers. One of the latter was Amy Freeland, who performed for the first time at the event.

“I’ve been coming here and watching folks perform for a couple of years now,” Freeland says. “It’s really just inspired me to realize that I can write and perform about matters that are close to my heart.”

Freeland, who works as a lawyer, says she has written primarily in an academic form before this, so it was great to have an opportunity to express herself in a more personal way.

Also performing that night was Cloudy, an experienced poet who has been performing in open mics since she was 14. Identifying herself as a queer woman, Cloudy says she had made the effort to attend all the Poetry Week events.

“This whole week has been extremely beautiful,” Cloudy says. “Especially for me, being able to be in a queer space, doing the things that I love with the community that I love means a lot.”

In addition to performing at Bear Dive, Cloudy was also a featured poet at the open mic held at the Crocker Art Museum on Oct. 26. Also featured were Emmanuel Sigauke, Aeisha Jones and Patrick Grizzell.

Grizzell has long been involved in the Sacramento poetry scene, having helped found the Sacramento Poetry Center in 1979, a literary center and nonprofit which still operates in Sacramento today. On stage he read some of the works of B.L. Kennedy, another influential poet who died on Oct. 21.

“He was a mover and a shaker,” Grizzell says. “He was really dedicated and committed to, you know, what was going on in the poetry today.”

Grizzell said Kennedy was a key part in putting together “Landing Signals,” a 1985 anthology of Sacramento Poets whose publishing led to the creation of Sacramento Poetry Day.

Performing on the open mic portion of the event was Raj Dosanjh, who has been doing open mics since 2017. While originally from Sacramento, Dosanjh said he lived in various places before returning in 2019 but only just started hitting the stage again in his hometown.

“I’ve been writing poetry since I was in 8th grade,” Dosanjh says. “I haven’t really spent too much time in the scene here in Sacramento, but I’d love to do more.”

Dosanjh says he would also highly recommend other aspiring poets to take the time to participate in open mic opportunities, even if they’re nervous. He also said putting his poetry online helped ease him into performing it live.

“I started a Substack called birdiesongs,” Dosanjh says. “Just knowing that my poetry was online made me more comfortable with the idea that it’s something to be shared with others.”

The sendoff to Sacramento Poetry Week was held in the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria on Oct. 26. An awards gala, the event saw prominent poets being given state resolutions recognizing their contributions to the arts, as well as performances by poets, including Defeye, and capping off with a performance from The Philharmonik.

“Sometimes there are earthquakes in my voice because I’m scared I won’t pronounce ‘love’ right,” Defeye quoted from his “The Pokey Poem.”

Defeye said this year may be his last as the Sacramento Poet Laureate, but he was proud of the work he and others had done to help create Poetry Week. He also said he was excited for what future generations of poets would bring to Sacramento.

“You can really change the world,” Defeye says. “What we’ve got in Sacramento needs to be protected.”

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