By Kai Curry
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Dujie Tahat (Photo by Troy Osaki)
Do you ever think about how poetry’s is relevant to politics? Dujie Tahat does. Tahat is Seattle’s new Civic Poet for the 2025 to 2026 term. Tahat spoke to the Northwest Asian Weekly about how they utilize poetry as a resource in politics in order to find and create a shared language.
Tahat’s lived experience combines eastern and western Washington, two cities (Yakima and Seattle), two countries (Jordan and the Philippines), multiple cultures. As a poet and a lover of words, Tahat is sensitive to the characteristics of all of the places they visit and the people they meet, political and personal. By the time they were in high school in Yakima, they were coming over the mountains to participate in Youth Speaks, a nonprofit that fosters literacy and civic engagement in teens through spoken word slam poetry. A slam poetry champ, Tahat represented Seattle on the annual international competition, broadcast via HBO’s “Brave New Voices.”
Spoken word is the performance of poetry, with emphasis on the poet’s gestures, voice, and appearance. “Slam poetry” is what competing in spoken word is called. Spoken word and poetry are great for our attention economy, where we rarely spend a lot of time on something, Tahat acknowledged. Spoken word is a catchy sound bite. Poems can be short. Yet nowadays, Tahat is more interested in poetry on the page, and poetry as communication in civic settings and topics. They are interested, perhaps, not in increasing the “noise” of the world, but in decreasing it, in finding not just a shared language between disparate people and views, but a shared silence. That’s a difference, they explained, between spoken word and written word—slam is focused on the poet’s body, from the outside, while the written word, if you convene with it well enough, puts you back into your own body.
“There’s a way that, hopefully, when you encounter a poem, it takes you out of constant performance into inhabiting a thing for a period of time,” they said.
Dujie Tahat (Photo by Troy Osaki)
Tahat’s intention, and something they have already been doing, is to merge poetry and politics. As Seattle’s Civic Poet, they will engage in what they call “salon shops”—workshops in small groups to discuss poems, find what resonates for participants, and use that as a springboard for conversation on relevant issues for those participants. As it’s a civic role, these conversations will center on civic offices and civic concerns. Tahat’s “day job” is in political consulting, so they are familiar with all aspects of the assignment. In these poetry workshops, Tahat will utilize poetry as a “framing device” for conversation. Meetings, which elected officials from all levels will attend, will consist first of reading silently, then out loud. Poetry, as most know, is a practice of attention and new perspective. And it’s a language.
Policy, Tahat reminded us, is also a language.
“Civic dialogue informed poetry. Policy conversations injected by poetry.” That’s the orientation, Tahat said, of the project they will be working on as a Civic Poet. “There’s a whole universe inside of every word,” Tahat said. They aim to help civic operatives choose fresher, more effective words when engaging with the public. Otherwise, any language becomes boring and loses its effect. “That’s why nobody watches city council meetings,” Tahat suggested.
The Seattle Civic Poet program started in 2015. It was a successor of the Poet Populist program, and merged the literary, the political, and the citizenry to foster dialogue and celebrate literary arts. Yet the “public” part of this role hasn’t yet been emphasized well enough to make a lot of people aware of it. Tahat hopes to change that, through work on archiving and strengthening its infrastructure. The first-ever Seattle Civic Poet formal induction ceremony, open to the public, will be held on March 25 at Seattle City Hall. This will also kick off National Poetry Month in April.
For Tahat, poetry and society, poetry and politics, are inextricably merged. When they write poems, everything they are—politically, socially, culturally, romantically—is part of the mix. They realized in high school that they could affect others with their poems. At that time, slam poetry was becoming better known and broadcast on social media. Tahat already liked rap and hip hop and had always been interested in language, including foreign language, since childhood, when their family had moved often. Tahat’s mother, who is from the Philippines, and his father, who is from Jordan, met in college in the Philippines, where Tahat was born. The family then moved to Japan—Japanese is Tahat’s first language. Before coming to the United States, they lived for a year in Jordan. Tahat’s poems are incomplete without the use of words from the languages and cultures they live in and among—“salat,” “balikbayan.” They are a writer of “All-American Ghazal” (a form of Arabic poetry), as one of their poem titles indicates.
Dujie Tahat (Photo by Troy Osaki)
Tahat’s parents work in science and engineering. Tahat tried to do the same, to be the good immigrant child, they joked good-naturedly. They realized, though, that this was of no interest to them, and so switched their major in college to English Literature. Tahat encourages others to find the kind of poetry they like—there are many different types. Poetry gets a bad rap (“to say that you don’t like poetry is to say that you don’t like language,” Tahat said). They admitted it can be hard to encounter a poem for the first time. It’s an entire other mode of communication. But once you become familiar, Tahat claimed, you can see for yourself what poetry can do. It’s a matter of letting your imagination take hold, which can be scary to some. If you are frustrated, Tahat said, that is really a frustrated desire for connection with others, which is a good thing. That’s the beauty of poetry, Tahat said. Poetry can hold so many things. Including politics.
Kai can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.