Comment on In a young poet’s writing, a nod to the future

Mostly, Tova sticks to the sort with spiral bindings. On a recent Saturday afternoon, at a park in West Oakland, a man introduced Oakland’s youth poet laureate to an audience. When you think that their reign is over,/ they’re already down your throats./ The modern European empire, has forced us back onto slave ships/ but instead of sea vessels/ they’re collecting in devil vehicles of metal. [...] she walked off the stage, letting the poetry float, undisturbed. Imagine then, Tova, now a junior at Bentley School, her tightly curled, dark brown hair, cropped close on the sides, longer on top, her bright green-blue eyes and her still-brighter smile. There were books about black pride and black nationalism, and documentaries about Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. “Ever since I was little, there was always those insecurities that drove me crazy,” she says. “I was never too nosy,” she says. Around middle school, Tova began to get a sense for poetry after she was introduced to some of the greats like Langston Hughes and Edgar Allan Poe. The teacher, Peter Hagen, walked the class through all the basics. “I encourage them to dig in the places you get hurt,” he says. “It was a little scary because a lot of the stuff was really personal,” Tova says. When you read it on the page, you can hear her voice coming through, the spaces where she’d take a breath or where her voice might grow louder. From a poem called “Eyes”: During the seminar, Hagen encouraged the students from Oakland to apply for the city’s laureate program. “We’d call each other ‘finalist’ or ‘laureate,’” he says. “Once she won, I finally got to rub it in her face,” Labossiere says. The Oakland youth poet laureate program is highly selective. The winner gets a $5,000 scholarship and becomes something of a literary ambassador. The idea isn’t so much to hold up one student, says James Kass, the executive director of Youth Speaks, one of the groups that sponsors the program, but to show people what literature looks like in Oakland today. [...] there is something special about Tova, he says, the way she “pours a true energy and passion into the world.” Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Excerpt from ‘Shout the Truth’ by Tova Ricardo: Pressing their runny mouths beneath my jazzy feet Sometimes I wish white minds would feel guilt for once. [...] defensive rifle radicals protest against my voracious words, shredding charms of black nationalism off my taste buds. in america’s bus back seat.