Healdsburg Jazz — the nonprofit behind the popular Healdsburg Jazz Festival — has appointed Windsor jazz enthusiast, poet and former Sonoma County educator Enid Pickett as the organization’s first poet laureate.
Pickett will be commissioned to write poetry and will also help with expanding Healdsburg Jazz’s educational outreach.
“I’m very, very excited, and honored to be literally the first poet laureate for Healdsburg Jazz. It is something that is very close to my heart,” Pickett said.
Pickett first got involved with Healdsburg Jazz when founder Jessica Felix held an informational meeting in the early days of the organization’s infancy.
“My history (with Healdsburg Jazz) began when Jessica Felix held the very first exploratory meeting and I attended that meeting 22 years ago and I’ve been in and out with my participation since that time. I moved a few times since then, but I’ve been involved with jazz my entire life and I’ve always been a lover of jazz and I sing jazz, and now I’m able to kind of write about it as well,” Pickett said.
Healdsburg Jazz Artistic Director Marcus Shelby said in a statement that he’s thrilled to be working with such a brilliant artist and to be working with someone who he’s known for the past decade.
“I am personally thrilled to partner with such a brilliant and eloquent artist. I have known Enid for almost 10 years, and I’m inspired by her ability to weave words and sentences like a musician playing the blues-full of clear, articulate tension and release,” Shelby said.
So, what does being a poet laureate entail? Pickett said she’ll be kept busy with several different tasks and commissions.
“I’ve been charged with a few things besides being commissioned to write poetry for Healdsburg Jazz. This year the Healdsburg Jazz Choir is starting up again so they will have a theme and there will be a poem that accompanies the performance so that’s part of it,” Pickett explained.
The poet laureate role is also expanding to more of an educational outreach role according to Pickett.
“(It’s) expanding to more of an educational outreach to look at students who are interested in poetry and to expand and blend in the intersection of arts and social justice when it comes to jazz,” Pickett said. “Jazz is a very special genre that looks at not just the aesthetic of music, but at the social issues around the music. I continue to look at social issues using poetry and blending them all together.”
In her new role Pickett will also work on some special projects.
Pickett said,“ This year is a whole new vision for Healdsburg Jazz and it began with the gala and we just finished our Martin Luther King Jr. through the eyes of children (concert). In the spring — during the poetry month of April — we’ll be honoring Maya Angelou, and if COVID allows we’re going to be having an actual brick and mortar place for spoken word following the tradition of how poetry and jazz was in the cafes and coffee shops back in the day,” — think of the beatnik era of San Francisco were young folks in turtlenecks read their poems with the likes of Allen Ginsberg while sipping on cappuccinos at Tosca’s Cafe.
In June, Healdsburg Jazz will be commissioning a special celebration of Juneteenth and will be using poetry as an outreach.
“Poetry is always something that’s been I guess you could say misunderstood and has been considered something that is for elitists, or for the European or Eurocentric kind of literary types of arts and that’s not true. Poetry has been very important throughout the African American historical experience and I’m an African American woman so it has been a part of my personal history. There’s been many poets that have been a part of our historical landscape,” Pickett said.
She said she’s also going to be focusing on being an advocate for young poets who haven’t had the opportunity or the chance to display their art or have their work nurtured or supported by others.
“It’s not that I’m going to be teaching poetry classes because this is going to be an organic experience just to encourage the students who are involved in our educational outreach. They get the experience of learning about jazz and now we’re going to enhance that experience with learning about poetry,” Pickett said.
Pickett is a former Sonoma County educator and taught for many years in Sonoma County’s public school system and in Rohnert Park.
“Education is very important to me and is a very important part of poetry because it’s a literary art. If you can’t write a story you can express yourself through poetry and you can express yourself in many different ways in poetry … People can tap into the literary arts through poetry,” she said.
Pickett, who’s interested in other forms of writing such as short stories, said she’s been writing poetry her whole life.
“I’ve been writing poetry my entire life. I found some old journals from junior high … I was surprised to find that, but I’ve always been interested in writing, not only poetry, but in writing a cookbook and short stories, but poetry would be my number one fan out of all the literary skills that I’ve been dabbling with. It seems to be my closest friend,” she said.
Pickett said she gravitates more toward the metaphor and alliteration style of poetry.
“Metaphor is a style that is more organic, and alliteration is another style that I use a lot. It’s something that I’ve gravitated to and have tried to study on my own, so I guess you could say I’m a home-grown poet,” she said.
When asked if she writes about certain subjects in her poems or just whatever comes to mind, she said it’s typically whatever comes to mind.
“Poetry is a very sensitive literary art that picks up on what’s going on in our social world and sometimes it’s more like a detective, it picks up on things that’s not always mainstream or something that’s not always understood and it may look at things in a way that may be more invisible to others. What happened on Jan. 6 was very traumatic and I didn’t realize I was going to write something about that,” Pickett said.
She equated her poem writing process to being pregnant with something, an idea or poem perhaps, and waiting for it to arrive and not quite knowing what it’s going to be like until you address it.
“When I’m about to think about poems I say that I’m pregnant, a poem is going to be born, I can feel it coming. I don’t know what it is, but I know that it’s about to come so I sit at my computer or I get a paper and pencil and I do a lot of it by hand and then I’ll go to my computer and then I’ll write down what I call bones, some ideas or words, or just one word,” she explained.
Pickett said she’s very fascinated by the power of just one single word and will often title her poems with just one word.
“I’ll gather the bones together and then sit at my computer and play with it and see what happens and it happens rather quickly. Within a couple of days, I’m able to give birth to a poem,”
she said.
Although Pickett conceptualizes and writes her poems on her own, she said there are two individuals who have really helped inspire her.
“I have been inspired by two people who are from northern California, and one person I’ve been working with for 25 years was very instrumental and very inspirational and his name is Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and he’s from the Bay Area and when I met him he was with Youth Speaks. He was a National Youth Speaks Poet Slam Champion back in 1999 and this was when I started working with him. We did lots of workshops together. He’s now the artistic director of Social Impact at the JFK Center in Washington D.C. Bamuthi has been a poet angel,” Pickett said.
The other person that’s lent a hand in inspiring her is Carlton Page and two-person poet team of Climbing Poetry.
“He’s been very supportive, and I recorded on one of his songs, ‘L.A. to the Bay/One Time.’ He asked to me write something, it’s a hip hop genre, and I said I don’t know if it’s even going to fit, so we talked about it for a couple of months and kicked around some ideas and finally I wrote something called ‘Before,’ and Carlton Page and I did this and he was the first one to pull me into a recording studio, which was really exciting. I really want to give props to Page and Marc Bamuthi Joseph because without them I would not be the poet I am today.”
