Queens Chronicle: Little Neck Professor Named Poet Laureate
Walt Whitman once taught in a one-room schoolhouse on land that would eventually become the campus of Queens College. He wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
This passage, so aptly chosen for the occasion, was offered by Queens College President James Muyskens on Friday at the installation of the fourth Poet Laureate of Queens.
The title was passed from Ishle Park — a young Flushing woman who performs in both Korean and English, often with a guitar in arms — to Julio Marzan, a well-published professor and writer in both Spanish and English who was raised in Puerto Rico.
At a ceremony held in Borough President Helen Marshall’s office, Park offered praise to her successor.
“Your honesty is rare, wise and moving. You are a true poet’s poet.” She added that she was humbled and honored to be passing on the honorary three-year position to Marzan.
The choice of Poet Laureate was made by a panel of five judges that included Park and her two predecessors, Hal Sirowitz and Stephen Stepanchev.
Queens has had some trouble drumming up applicants for this honorary position — the final applicant pool of 45 was up from just 15 as recently as March — and even more trouble keeping them in Queens.
Stepanchev lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, Sirowitz lives in Brooklyn and Park relocated from her native Whitestone to New Zealand before her three-year term was up.
It is a bit unusual for an outer borough to even have a poet laureate (Brooklyn is the only other one that does) and even more unusual for that position to be one you apply for. Most are appointed.
Marie-Lise Gazarian, a professor at St. John’s University, noted that the selection among those who applied sought to balance the multicultural nature of the borough with the highest quality of work. Through the appointment, she hopes the poet’s voice can be shared with “every corner of the borough.”
She also reflected more generally on the attributes of an ancient art form, so often eschewed for the heightened sensory experiences of video and multimedia. “Poetry is the language of the Gods, the language spoken by the angels,” she said.
Maybe so, but the new Poet Laureate of Queens seems quite capable of keeping both feet planted firmly on the ground. On Friday, he shared two poems based on his quiet observations made at a Queens Courthouse.
In one, “Jury Duty,” Marzan reflects on the mothers, victimized by the crimes of their sons, lined up in corridors waiting for judgment. At the end: “here to defend her bad good boy/the splintery cross on her back/up the steep hill and then down/then up again, broken back.”
Marzan has been writing poetry since his college days at Fordham University in the Bronx, where he grew up. He has lived in Queens since 1971. While he says his “consciousness is set in Queens,” he considers himself a very portable poet, as likely to find himself writing in a Starbucks as anywhere else.
Marzan is concerned with the duality of his Puerto Rican heritage and his life as an American and often contemplates his relationship with airports, both in Queens and in Puerto Rico. He also takes a keen interest in the increasingly rich artistic life in the borough and the radical changes shaping its borders, which he finds appealing.
“If I were to be poet laureate in the middle of a cultural desert it wouldn’t be that much fun,” he added.
Marzan teaches English at Nassau Community College and has been a visiting professor at Cooper Union and Harvard University, among others.
His poetry has been collected in three books and published in prestigious publications including Harper’s and numerous literary anthologies.