Source: The Conversation – Canada
“Should taxpayers fund poetry or potholes?” Since my appointment as Calgary’s poet laureate, I have heard versions of this question more than once. Invoking taxpayer outrage is a familiar way of questioning public support for the arts.
When cities face pressure over roads, housing, transit, taxes and public services, culture is often framed as an optional extra: something nice to have after the “real work” of city-building is done. That framing is tempting because it sounds practical.
But it rests on a false divide. Cities need roads, pipes, transit systems and emergency services. They also need memory, language, celebration and care. They need ways to hold grief and to help strangers live together.
Poet laureates occupy a curious position in civic life. They are sometimes treated as ceremonial figures: invited to read at official events, compose occasional poems or represent a city’s cultural aspirations. But across Canada and elsewhere, the role has increasingly expanded beyond literary symbolism.
Poet laureates now work in libraries, schools, transit systems, community centres, festivals and are concerned with public conversations about history, identity, reconciliation, climate grief and belonging.
Poetry belongs where people gather In Vancouver, former poet laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam developed the City Poems Project starting in 2022 that encouraged public engagement with poetry connected to historical, cultural and ecological sites throughout the city.
In Victoria, the poet laureate program combines civic readings with community poetry initiatives and mentorship of the city’s youth poet laureate. Edmonton’s Arts Council describes the role as helping residents reflect on “everyday life and grand moments alike.” ‘Still in Edmonton,’ poem by Edmonton’s poet laureate, Medgine Mathurin.
What links these examples is not a single model of civic poetry, but a shared assumption: poetry belongs where people gather. It can enter a library, a classroom, a transit station, a public square or a commemoration.
Its civic value lies not in replacing practical services, but in helping residents notice the human meanings those services are meant to sustain. Fostering forms of attention Infrastructure alone does not create civic life. A functioning city also depends on forms of attention that are harder to quantify: the ability to listen, remember and imagine oneself connected to people we may never meet.
Calgary’s poet laureate history offers similar examples. Kris Demeanor’s term helped establish the role through The Calgary Project, a collection of poetry by Calgary writers. Natalie Meisner’s 2020–22 term, which unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic, included This Might Help, an audio poetry project offering 35 poems for listeners seeking connection, comfort and reflection.
Sheri-D Wilson’s YYC POP: Portraits of People invited Calgarians to write word portraits of one another. These projects suggest that a poet laureate’s work is not simply to speak for a city, but to help a city listen to itself.
Advocacy for poetry, language, arts Toronto offers another useful model. Its poet laureate program defines the role as advocacy for “poetry, language and the arts,” but its history shows how varied that advocacy can be.
Lillian Allen’s appointment in 2023 has brought spoken word, dub poetry, youth work and community-building into the centre of civic poetry. Al Moritz delivered original poems on the anniversaries of the North York van attack and the 2018 Danforth Avenue shooting in Toronto.
Anne Michaels’ legacy project translated the phrase “We teach each other how to live” into 140 languages. In these examples, poetry enters civic life not as luxury, but as a language for public memory, multilingual belonging and shared grief.
Public-facing role Literary critics have long understood poetry as more than private expression or ceremonial ornament. Literary scholar Erin Wunker, for example, situates Canadian poetry within the cultural, political and historical contexts in which it is written and read.
Canadian literary criticism has a name for examining how poetry addresses who and what count as “the public” in the first place when we imagine civic life in Canada: public poetics. The public life of poetry has changed beyond Canada as well.
In the United States, the poet laureateship has moved from a largely advisory position at the Library of Congress toward a more public-facing role. Poets have done this in varied ways. Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 brought poems into classrooms; Robert Pinsky’s Favourite Poem Project gathered recordings of Americans reading poems they loved.
More recently, Ada Limón’s laureateship has been described as attentive to what it means to have “America in the room.” Read more: Ada Limón is a poet laureate for the 21st century, exploring ‘what it looks like to have America in the room’ In Britain, Özlem Aydın Öztürk argues that Carol Ann Duffy’s tenure as Britain’s poet laureate showed how the role could address political and social concerns rather than simply produce poems for official occasions.
Together, these projects show that poetry can circulate among people who may not think of themselves as literary readers. The city is not one story Addressing different ways of paying attention to civic concerns matters for Calgary because the city is not one story.
It is a place of Indigenous presence and treaty relationship, migration and settlement, oil and water, Prairie weather, neighbourhood memory, faith communities, artistic communities, newcomers, griefs and celebrations. A poet laureate cannot represent all of this.
But the role can also create moments where language helps residents recognize what they share, and what they still struggle to hear from one another. As Calgary’s poet laureate, I am interested in poetry as a form of civic listening.
This understanding is informed by broader traditions of thinking about how literary imagination and the stories we share matter to public discourse because they help readers attend to lives beyond their own. That listening can happen in a library, a classroom, a parish hall, a community centre, a park or a public reading.
It can happen through page poetry, spoken word, song, translation, youth writing or a brief poem encountered unexpectedly in a public place. How strangers learn to live together At a public event, a poem changes the air.
Sometimes the shift is barely visible: a pause before applause, a room growing quieter, a few people hearing their own experience returned in language. That is not policy. It is not road repair. But it is one way a public becomes aware of itself.
A city is not only a system of services. It is also a shared story about who belongs, who is heard and how strangers learn to live together. The better question, then, is not poetry or potholes.
It is this: What kind of city are we trying to build when both matter?
Clara A.B. Joseph does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/05/27/as-calgarys-poet-laureate-im-interested-in-poetry-as-a-form-of-civic-listening/