David Denny — Cupertino’s first poet laureate and De Anza College Professor Emeritus in English — stands onstage, filled with excitement. Cupertino’s Quinlan Community Center is teeming with people, ready to welcome Denny as poet laureate. The events pass in a blur — a laurel wreath is placed on Denny’s head, crowning him the city’s inaugural poet laureate, after which he stands before the city council to be approved.
The office of the Cupertino Poet Laureate was established in December of 2010 by the Cupertino Library Commission. With the motto “Celebrate creativity,” the laureate’s role throughout their two-year term is to promote cultural and literary awareness in Cupertino and make poetry accessible to residents through organizing workshops and events.
According to Denny, whose tenure lasted from 2011 to 2013, the project was led by Cupertino resident and CLC member Ron Miller, who noticed other cities adopting the practice of appointing poet laureates. Denny says the CLC put up advertisements across the city, searching for published poets living in Cupertino. With an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon, Denny felt he was suitable for the position. He applied and was ultimately chosen.
“Learning I was chosen was really cool, because Cupertino is not a city known for the arts,” Denny said. “We have a lot of different artists who live here, but we’re known for Apple and technology, and most of our neighbors work in the tech industry. So it’s a place where people have a lot of networking opportunities in the tech community, but not so much in the arts. So the committee thought, ‘Well, let’s see if we can foster some creativity in the arts in Cupertino.’ And so we tried to spread creativity in Cupertino, mostly through poetry, but through supporting all the arts.”
Illustration courtesy of Canva | Used with permission
Fifteen years after Denny first took the position, Cupertino’s eighth poet laureate, Thomas Celerier, began his term on Jan. 1, with a welcoming reception held on Jan. 22 to honor him, as well as the outgoing poet laureate Keiko O’Leary. Celerier says he heard about the position through the Cupertino Library newsletter, and since he already had experience organizing poetry events — including an international poetry competition — he thought being able to organize events on the local level would be a good opportunity to bring the community together.
“I was very honored to be selected, because I’m French, and I’m a first-generation immigrant,” Celerier said. “I was very joyful, happy, excited and a bit anxious as well because now I have to fulfill the expectations of the role. But I want to position this as less about the poet laureate and more about bringing people together, using myself as a beacon or an anchor. And I think if I’m able to do this, I’ll be happy. Because it’s not going to be about me. It’s going to be about others in the community and people sharing their poetry, because we have this occasion and the city is giving us this platform.”
Celerier says he hopes the other applicants considered for the position will apply again, saying they all deserve to have the opportunity to share their love of poetry. The year-long selection process includes a written application that opens in March, where the top candidates are invited to interviews by a selection panel and are asked to recite one or two of their original poems. In August, the selection panel — made up of two library commissioners, the city’s art and culture commissioner and sometimes a teen council commissioner — then shares their selected candidate with the rest of the CLC and then the Cupertino City Council, where the candidate is approved and formally appointed.
CLC Chair Minna Xu, who has been part of the commission for just over a year and is on the poet laureate subcommittee that selected Celerier, says she found the interviewing portion of the selection process particularly interesting. Although she says all the candidates considered would do an equally good job, she felt the others were very similar to previous poets laureate she had met — quiet, with similar backgrounds and writing styles. However, Celerier stood out.
“When Thomas came, he was so different,” Xu said. “He’s so energetic and he has young kids in school, so he’s younger than all the other candidates. Another very important thing is that he has an IT background, so he knows how to build a website, how to set up his own account on social media and make it very attractive. I know the other candidates; they are also strong and they can do a good job. We have trust in them, but we believe he’s a new option. He may bring fresh air to this program, so we want to take a chance and see if this choice will give us something new. It’s a little bit risky to have something new, but if we don’t try, we will never know if we can get a better outcome.”
Already, Celerier has planned a poetry contest for Cupertino students to enter, which opens in March, as well as an open mic in April for National Poetry Month, among others. He also wants to continue a popular poetry-in-the-dark event started by previous laureates. As connecting with the community is important to Celerier, he hopes these events will increase community spirit around writing and sharing poetry.
Illustration courtesy of Canva | Used with permission
“I think what fuels me is to see the energy, the passion of the people and the opportunity to meet people through this,” Celerier said. “It’s the beauty and value of sharing your work, but also seeing the work of others and being exposed to it, and then having interactions based on this. To learn about them.”
Denny remembers the events he organized, including a citywide poetry contest and a series of 12 local coffee shop poetry readings, as well as collaborating with other cities’ poets laureate to host events. Xu says one of her favorite events, which she hopes will be held again, was a multi-language poetry reading organized by O’Leary, and recalls how participants of many different cultural backgrounds shared their own poetry with each other in their mother tongues.
“Even if you cannot understand the language, you can feel the passion,” Xu said. “You can feel their feelings. So that’s a unique experience for us and shows we areinclusive; we welcome everyone. Other than the busy daily life, we still have some time to spend together.”
Ultimately, Denny says his term as the poet laureate was a positive and fun experience, adding that he also enjoys now becoming friends with and fans of each new laureate. Additionally, from setting the precedent for the role to watching it become more established, Denny enjoys seeing how the position has lasted.
“In the end, I really enjoyed it, and it had a good effect on the community, because we were able to get a lot of people to come out and start thinking about the arts in Cupertino,” Denny said. “I see now that there’s a lot of fun artistic stuff that comes out of our library. The Cupertino Library is an awesome place, and they have live music in the summer, as well as poetry readings and poetry and art classes year-round. A couple of my paintings have been hung up in the library as part of the community art project. And so I think the whole idea of the poet, the city poet, being seated in the library and being a part of it is a great thing in Cupertino.”