Tacoma’s newest poet laureate: ‘What story do I have the moral responsibility to tell?’
Christian Paige is a poet. That’s not something the native Tacoman would have admitted as a 10-year-old living in the city’s south end.
“I grew up in neighborhoods, where if you were carrying a journal, that wasn’t going to be something you were likeable for,” the spoken word performer said this week. “The rules of masculinity were a lot different at that time.”
Paige is now 30 — what he calls “slightly post-young” — and the father of two young children. On April 12, Paige becomes the 2023-2025 Tacoma Poet Laureate, as chosen by the Tacoma Arts Commission. In his role, Paige will participate in and host public poetry readings, workshops and other community events. He succeeds current Tacoma Poet Laureate Lydia Valentine.
The position comes with a $4,000 stipend and another $1,000 to aid in implementing projects.
Paige is a professional speaker and educator who has worked in a variety of scholastic settings. His art and his avocation center on community, anti-racism, equity and empowerment. A video he made of one of his poems was nominated for a regional Emmy award.
It all started with that notebook he kept hidden from his peers.
“I had a green notepad that I filled from cover to cover with poetry, with writing, with rap songs, with just times where I needed to process things,” he said. “I carried that, I imagined it, I thought about it.”
There’s a through line from that notepad to where Paige, and by extension Tacoma, is today.
“I showed up on stage,” he said. “I continued to do the work. And now, there’s a title attached to it. I feel, in some senses, that Tacoma has seen this blossoming story coming. And so have I. And now we’re here.”
Paige’s journaling allowed him to express himself in the early 2000s, a bewildering time in his life. His older brother Anthony was serving in the military during the Iraq War.
“He often found himself in dangerous situations,” Paige recalled of the brother he looked up to. “He’s 19. He’s a kid. I can’t comprehend why he’s at war and there are people shooting at him.
“I would write to my brother. And I would send him cards. Like, here’s the last thing that I wrote, here’s a rap song or a verse. That was the way that we communicated to each other.”
Multi-generational Tacoman
Today, a smart phone with its recording and memo capabilities has mostly replaced Paige’s journals. In his youth, he bounced around the city, attending Mount Tahoma and Stadium high schools before graduating from Life Christian Academy. From there, he attended Trinity Lutheran College in Everett. He’s the first in his family to be awarded a college degree.
His mother’s family extends multiple generations into Tacoma’s past.
“I grew up on the south end of Tacoma,” he said. “My grandmother lived on the Hilltop and I didn’t know that the Proctor District existed until I was 17.”
In school he learned about subjects like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But it was through artists and activists that he learned about redlining and housing covenants — codified policies that were meant to exclude people of color from housing.
The ability of artists to illuminate hidden histories is something he holds dear.
Faith
Paige isn’t just a Christian in name. His faith is important to him, he said, but you might not know it from his poetry and performances.
“I really think that if you’re a person who’s Christian, that the world should understand you by the way that you model that,” he said. “Not necessarily by the things that you say.”
His poetry covers love, community and taking care of one another.
“I would never be on stage like Moses,” Paige said. “I’m not showing up with the tablets by any means. But you’ll realize, if you are someone who knows the scriptures, that my work is inspired by them.”
His art also touches on anti-racism, equity, employment and empowerment.
“I’m just somebody who wants community to work for everybody,” he said. “Whether that be educational spaces, whether it be for profit spaces, whether it looks like art, whatever that looks like ... those themes always show up in my work.”
A sense of place
Much of Paige’s work is rooted in hip hop. Like any credible hip hop artist, he writes what he knows.
“These are about experiences that I’ve actually lived or ideals that I’m trying to live up to,” he said. “Not necessarily pulling something out of thin air or speaking in abstract terms.”
Paige’s work is solidly about Tacoma.
“My poetry is about the place that I grew up in,” he said. “It’s about the people that I’ve interacted with. It’s about the lessons that I’ve learned at the feet of my grandmother. It’s about things that I want to share with the world.”
The lines between his art, life and work become blurred.
“If I’m not living that out, and I’m not modeling that, then my poetry is not really worth much,” he said.
Connecting with youth
As he ages, Paige increasingly sees himself as a role model for youth. It comes as a bit of a shock, as life’s journey into maturity often does.
“I find it really interesting sometimes, that there are elders that see me as peer,” he said. “Or that there are young people who see me as mentor.”
He doesn’t accept generational gulfs.
“You will hear young people say, ‘OK, Boomer,’ and then you’ll hear the older generation, ‘Man, these kids these days,’ but I think that there’s a middle line where we have commonality.”
In line with that and his role as a spoken word artist, Paige urges young people to share their stories.
‘Trees’
Paige has performed “Trees”, the poem that garnered him the Emmy nomination, around the country.
“They called us low income. They called us at-risk,” the poem begins. “Always speaking from a deficit didn’t realize that my learned experience was prerequisite to be a leader in this community. How could you ever know unity if you’ve never seen the broken?”
After a performance at a high school in Salinas, Calif., Paige was approached by a student.
“ ‘Yo, you’re not from my community but that story is my story’,” the girl said to Paige. “The amount of confidence that I watched her walk away with ... and now they teach ‘Trees’ at Alisal High School.”
There’s been rough times in Paige’s life. Times when he feared he didn’t belong, that the world would be better off without him. But with the support of friends, jags of “ugly tears” and other help, he got through it. Poems recounting those periods have resonated with young people.
“There have been multiple times in my life where people have come up to me after that performance,” Paige said. “And we don’t say anything at first. We just kind of look at each other. We know we hold each other. And there have been instances where people have said, ‘I was going to end my life this weekend.’ And ‘I don’t know for how much longer but I know that I still want to be alive’.”
His poetry has matured, Paige said, as he has. Poems about school boy crushes have given way to a poem about hearing his daughter’s heartbeat for the first time.
“I think at one stage in my life, I was curating pieces,” Paige said. “Now ... what story do I have the moral responsibility to tell?”
If you go
What: Pass the Torch
When: 6-7 p.m. Wed., April 12.
Where: Tacoma Public Library’s Moore Branch, 215 S. 56th Street.
Admission: Free.
Information: cityoftacoma.org/poet
