Emeryville’s Poet Laureate Recasts A Small City In Verse

Five years ago, Kobrinksy moved here because it was the closest she could get to San Francisco, right there at the foot of the Bay Bridge, without paying San Francisco prices. About 10,000 people live in Emeryville, a puzzle-piece-shaped place founded by a man who didn’t like the rules of the towns that were already there and decided to make his own. For the past year and half, she’s been serving as the city’s poet laureate, the second in its history, teasing the poetry out of a place that is probably best known for its Ikea, in a role nobody knows about. [...] even if most people hardly stop to consider Emeryville, it’s still caught up in the Bay Area’s storm, and earlier this year Kobrinsky had to move to Point Richmond when her rent jumped 38 percent. “So here — on the left — is the famous Oaks Card Club, where people gamble,” Kobrinksy says. Kobrinksy doesn’t look much like a poet laureate. Stick figures play on the side of utility cabinets, and abstract sculptures twist up out of the ground. There’s the artists co-op on 47th Street, the art festival the city holds each year (its biggest annual event) and the percent-for-art development program. [...] Mayor Ruth Atkin knew all that when she proposed the poet laureate program four years ago. “People do it because it’s professionally satisfying,” Atkin says. Turns out the rumor’s true; bassist Mike Dirnt co-owns it. The truth is, there is poetry to be found here, but it’s easier to notice a Target when that’s all you’re expecting. “It has this industrial past, a rugged past, and you can kind of still feel an element of that,” Kobrinksy says. Heavy industry came next, a steel coatings plant, a paint factory, tanneries and canneries, dropping waste into the earth. Even before all that, back before Manifest Destiny, there were stories, like the one about the Emeryville Shellmound, a once-great hill with a sweeping view of the Golden Gate made by the Native Americans who lived here first. The refuse of life well-lived/ piled high at the water’s edge—/ In a hundred years’ time,/ what will we have left behind? Maybe, even if it’s not written in the official proclamation, that’s why Emeryville, a small city whose very name is small, like one of those towns from black-and-white television, needs a poet laureate. Each month, she prints 10,000 copies of a new poem and sticks them where the maps would usually go. (“That’s a better print run than most small presses,” Kobrinsky says.) One of the first came from Janell Moon, the city’s first poet laureate. Back in her Buick, Kobrinsky turns onto a narrow street and slows to a stop. A boxy, white house, 1½ bedrooms, framed by a skinny, empty tree. “It really struck a nerve,” Kobrinksy says.