Embracing intimacy and uncertainty: At work with Oregon’s poet laureate

On a Portland side street, in a nondescript building across from a schoolyard, there’s a window just above street level. This is the window Anis Mojgani looks out of while he works. Behind the window is the room that serves as his studio. This is where he writes and works on artwork. It’s crammed full of books, papers and art supplies. This humble space belies the exalted title Mojgani has held for the past four years: Oregon poet laureate.

“It’s not, like, cool. It’s not sexy. It’s just a room,” he said.

The thing Anis Mojgani likes best about his studio is the window.

“Part of it is that I love that this window slides side to side,” he said. “The light comes in really, really lovingly.”

One night, a friend dropped by and inadvertently gave him the idea for a poetry event he’s been doing occasionally for the past two years.

“Yeah, I was hanging out at the studio and my friend Jenn was coming by and she knocked on the window, and we started talking through the window as opposed to, like, going to do something and it just felt fun,” he said. “There was something about it that felt very old school, like Sesame Street ... And we were like, we should do this again, just hang out with the window, but maybe with more people.”

The event is called, simply, “Poems at sunset out a window.”

“I made up a poster and two days later, like, 50, 60 folks were outside the window sitting on chairs in the street and I read them poems at sunset. And, you know, it just felt nice,” Mojgani said.

One of the things he likes about it is that it’s different every time he does it.

“I have a list usually of poems that maybe I’ll read, but I never know what’s going to happen at the window, what I will talk about, what I will say. And so it allows me, as an artist, to, I think, connect a bit more fully with my own ideas of what does it mean to to engage with performance? What does it mean to engage with audience? ... What does it mean to perform art for people?”

For the latest installment of OPB’s “At Work With” series, we visited Mojgani’s studio to learn more about the work life of a poet and what it’s like to serve as Oregon’s official poet laureate.

What does the job of poet laureate entail?

According to Mojgani, the only duty that accompanies his title is doing 20 public engagements over a two-year term. But of course, there’s more to it than that.

“[The job] involves basically finding the ways to serve the people of Oregon and to serve poetry and how those two things might get to have larger conversations with one another, a fostering of one towards the other, an introduction of one towards the other, a developing and stirring of one towards the other,” he explained.

What does a good writing day look like for you?

Mojgani says there isn’t one simple answer to this question and a good writing day isn’t necessarily about productivity for him.

“Sometimes, a good day is just, like, the fact that I showed up and sat down for work, you know? And that I’m just here and I’m making myself present and I’m doing the work of just kind of like seeking to let go of any of the noise and the doubt and the hurt that is just kind of in constant conversation, seeking to keep me from those tasks at hand,” he said.

Did you discover you were a poet or did you always know it in some way?

For Mojgani, it was a discovery he made as a teenager.

“I’m not one of those folks who, when I was very, very young was just always writing poems or anything like that,” he said. “I definitely had the room to let my imagination spin stories and write those down, but didn’t really think about what my relationship to poetry could be until taking a creative writing class in my last year of high school. And that introduced more poems to me than one normally receives in the classroom throughout school and also prompted me to start writing poems.”

What was it like to find out you were going to be Oregon’s next poet laureate?

Mojgani was born and raised in New Orleans. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2004. He said becoming a poet laureate made him feel like his chosen home was really embracing him.

“It feels really, really great to step up and want to serve a place that is important to me in a specific way, and that place essentially saying, yes, we would like you to serve us in this way. You are welcome to do this. You are part of here, you are part of us.”

On the Oregon poet laureate web page, one of the described roles is to reflect on public life in Oregon. What has that meant for you?

At first, Mojgani said he wasn’t sure about the meaning behind that phrase. As he considered it a little more, he started talking about how he’s subverting people’s expectations of what someone from this place is supposed to be like.

“Portland has an ongoing many, many decades relationship as being the whitest metropolitan of its size in this country and rightfully so. It is, and I think that that’s an important conversation for people to have with regards to, what impact does that have? Why is that the case? Those things are of great importance to talk about and, at the same time, that truth, that fact, has also at times been used to essentially erase those who are not of whiteness,” he said. “So, I say that with regards to, personally, with considering myself, it is important for me in reflecting on public life in Oregon: what does that mean? That means that I’m an Oregonian. An Oregonian is not simply just one, specific type of person.”

He explained that, sometimes, he doesn’t necessarily want to experience nature in the same ways as his fellow Oregonians.

“I love the nature and environment of the state so much. Like, it’s a huge reason as to why I love getting to live here, but I also have a different engagement with it than someone else perhaps,” he said. “The element of being in Portland where as soon as the sun is out, it’s like, all right time to go do this hiking or this rafting or this exploration amongst the woods. And me? As soon as the sun’s out, I want to sit at that table next to the window in the coffee shop and have the sun warm me. I want to step in the middle of the day into a very cold movie theater just so that I can exit into the sunlight. These are things I love to do when the sun is out.”

Two years ago, you created “the Tele-poem telephone line.” It’s a phone line anyone can call at any time during National Poetry Month to hear a different poem being read aloud each day. What do you love about providing this service to people?

For Mojgani, it’s about intimacy.

“There’s an intimacy to poetry. There’s an intimacy to being read a poem by somebody else. There’s an intimacy to being the only person that another person is reading a poem to,” he said. “There’s an intimacy to simply listening to something and not like being in a position where one is able to respond or needs to respond.”

It’s also about uncertainty.

“To be human is to be constantly navigating uncertainty and seeking to find the things in our lives that can be certain to kind of protect us from the uncertainty or relieve us of the stress from the uncertainty, but the reality is that every aspect of our life is uncertain, and that’s a really tremendous, large, sometimes scary thing to reckon with,” he said. “It behooves us to be able to have an engagement with uncertainty in life that is welcoming.”

At the end of this year’s National Poetry Month, you will also be ending your second term as Oregon’s poet laureate. You’ll hand the title over to someone else. What advice do you have for them?

Mojgani said he hopes the next person enjoys the job.

“There may be parts of this that are very different than what you might expect them to be,” he said. “That’s all right and that’s how it is with everything ... There’s so much really miraculous stuff to experience, I think, as laureate. I hope that they are able to take great advantage of what that might mean in a multitude of ways.”