On Friday, Feb. 6, more than 300 poets and writers from across California will gather on the west side of the state capitol in Sacramento for A Courage of Poets, a peaceable, statewide act of remembrance and resistance.
This four-hour gathering will honor Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Silverio Villegas González and all individuals who have been killed by ICE on the streets or in custody across the United States.
The event, sponsored by Sonoma County’s Sixteen Rivers Press, with support from the Sacramento Poetry Center, brings together a wide range of voices from poets laureate to spoken-word artists and community members. Participants will link hands and create what organizers describe as a “collective poem,” with each poet offering two to three lines of poetry spoken aloud, one after another, in an unbroken chain of witness.
“As poets and writers, we feel kindred to Renée [Good] since she, too, was a poet,” says Moira Magneson, the event’s organizer. Good was the winner of the Academy of American Poets 2020 Poetry Prize.
In addition to the names of Good, Pretti and González, names including Heber Sanchez Dominguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, Keith Porter Jr. and Geraldo Lunas Campos will all be spoken aloud—an insistence that none of those killed remain invisible.
“Our event will certainly remember them all,” says Terry Ehret of Petaluma, a poet and member of the Sixteen Rivers Press.
At some point during the event, participants will raise their voices together in a 15-second “barbaric yawp,” a collective cry inspired by Walt Whitman’s famous line from Song of Myself: “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Organizer Moira Magneson describes the yawp as a way to voice “grief, outrage, hope, joy,” and to summon Whitman’s vision of democracy at a moment when many feel it is under threat. The gathering will conclude with a final poem offered by California poet laureate Lee Herrick before participants disperse, “energized and inspired to engage in continued peaceful acts of resistance,” says Magneson.
The idea for A Courage of Poets emerged from private grief and collective urgency. Magneson traces its roots to a poetry reading she attended last fall, where a question posed to the audience—what can poets do to stand up against the rise of fascism in America?—lingered long after the event ended. The use of the word “Courage” as a collective noun was chosen by the Sixteen Rivers Press collective itself.
For Sixteen Rivers Press, the structure of the event reflects the values the collective has practiced for decades. Founded as a non-hierarchical, all-volunteer press, Sixteen Rivers operates through shared responsibility and consensus decision-making.
Ehret notes that the capitol gathering mirrors this model: “with every person attending having equal status and an equal voice.” In that sense, the collective poem becomes not only a memorial, but a lived expression of democracy at its best.
Choosing the state capitol for the event was deliberate. Rather than holding a traditional memorial in a literary venue, organizers wanted poetry to occupy California’s seat of legislative power. Magneson envisions the event as a linked poem unfolding in public space, where the eloquence of poets won’t be separated from the political realities being addressed.
As Magneson puts it simply, A Courage of Poets seeks to recognize “all individuals killed by ICE,” and to affirm a belief shared by those gathering: that art, arising from the human heart, still has the power to kindle compassion and imagine and model a more just democracy.
‘A Courage of Poets’ will meet from 10am to 2pm Friday, Feb. 6, west side of the state capitol, 10th Street and Capitol Avenue, Sacramento. sixteenrivers.org.
