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A Poet Who Doesn’t Do Lofty

THE WORK Tina Chang juggles caring for her 7-month-old son, Roman, with writing and teaching. As the Brooklyn laureate, she wants to create a Web site spotlighting other borough poets.Credit...Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

AFTER Tina Chang puts her 7-month-old son, Roman, to bed, she pads, barefoot, about three feet over to her office, where a desk cohabits with the changing table. She opens the window to take in the sights and sounds of her neighborhood, Park Slope — men arguing on the street, neighbors sipping wine on fire escapes, apartment lights twinkling. She opens a spiral notebook from the 99-cent store and begins scribbling. One night she started with a recipe for black bean sauce, another with the first line of a rejection letter from a literary journal, another with a to-do list.

“Then something takes over,” said Ms. Chang, 40. Over days, weeks, months, her stream-of-consciousness musings grow into poems like “Birthing a Boy”:

My child was once a thought and he had

no name, locked in the stall of my making.

The child was housed inside me for a long time,

held still in water, his limbs floating on a screen,

fingerprints intricate as aerial maps.

Ms. Chang is no ordinary journal keeper: She is a college teacher, published author and Brooklyn’s new poet laureate, the fourth person — and first woman — to fill the august, if odd, post. But don’t be intimidated. One of her chief goals is to “demystify the role of the poet.”

“People use the word ‘lofty’ a lot when they think of a poet,” she said between bites of portobello-mushroom-and-leek quiche baked by her partner, who sold his stake in a Boerum Hill bar last year to work a more family-friendly schedule at a catering company. “Being a poet is anything but lofty.”

Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, who, with the help of a selection committee, chose Ms. Chang from 22 applicants, said he was taken by her passion for bringing poetry to the people and her embodiment of Brooklyn’s diversity: the daughter of Chinese immigrants, engaged to the son of Haitian immigrants, with close relatives from the Middle East and Latin America. It did not hurt that she was unfazed by the lack of salary, stipend, office or budget. “It’s like I gave her an Academy Award, she was so happy,” Mr. Markowitz said.

Brooklyn was the first borough to appoint an official bard, in 1979. Queens followed in 1997, and is searching for its fifth. Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx have no laureates.

With flowing black hair and a remarkable ability to pull off form-fitting black leather pants, Ms. Chang is a particularly glamorous ambassador of an art form not necessarily associated with lipstick and glitz. She speaks softly, having grown up, she said, in a family with three boys and lots of yelling. And the pants, she notes, are cheap chic, from Topshop.

Ms. Chang would love to see poems carved into benches and chiseled in placards throughout Brooklyn’s parks; mindful of money woes, she might settle for verses scrawled in chalk, “only to be washed away in a replica of nature’s constant cycle of growth and rebirth,” as she wrote in her winning application. She hopes to create a Web site that will spotlight other Brooklyn poets, and she yearns to bring them into the borough’s public middle schools.

“I love that age, when it’s sort of a middle ground between being a young child and being an adult,” she said. “They won’t be afraid to say what they think the poet really means, because they haven’t yet learned the fear of being wrong.”

Even many of Ms. Chang’s writer friends find poetry opaque and mysterious, she said. But this is not about them.

“We don’t only want to engage Park Slope and Williamsburg and Dumbo and places that might be considered — I want to phrase this carefully — places that might, um, already benefit from these rich communities of literature,” she said. “We also want to be able to penetrate neighborhoods such as Bensonhurst and Bed-Stuy.”

Ms. Chang was born in Oklahoma, to Chinese immigrants who had met in Montreal, where her mother was working as a nurse and her father was earning his doctorate in physics. The family moved to New York when she was a year old, so her father could be treated for liver cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. After he died, Ms. Chang and her brother were sent to live in Taiwan with relatives for two years. “I started questioning even at a very young age, well, what is language?” she said. “What is the role of words?”

Then it was a move to Queens, where their mother, Teresa, was working. Teresa Chang later married a man from Hong Kong with two sons; because she spoke Mandarin and he Cantonese, the Brooklyn poet laureate was raised in “slightly broken English.”

A professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton was the first to pull Ms. Chang aside, in her junior year, and say, “I really think that you can be a poet.” She was tickled but unsure what that meant, so she pursued a string of typical English-major jobs: teaching, advertising, publishing.

“I was working with books that had to do with surgery of the foot,” she recalled. “I was not inspired.”

There was a year and a half spent answering phones, opening mail and dreaming up story ideas at Cosmopolitan. Most of her suggestions ran along the lines of “What is it like to be a woman in Ghana?” “I’m afraid a lot of my ideas were not taken,” she said.

Ms. Chang enrolled in a master of fine arts program in poetry at Columbia in 1995. Her first book, “Half-Lit Houses,” a collection of poems tracing the life of a girl who loses her father back to Hunan, China, in the 1930s and ’40s, came out in 2004. She now teaches two days a week, at Hunter College and Sarah Lawrence College.

On a quest to bridge cultural misunderstandings after Sept. 11, 2001, she co-edited a poetry anthology called “Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond.”

Her family is a study in multiculturalism: Her brother’s wife is from Afghanistan, and that woman’s brothers have wives from Colombia and Ecuador. Ms. Chang’s partner, Claude De Castro — they are hoping to marry in the fall, but the word “fiancé” makes her cringe — grew up moving between Haiti and Jamaica, Queens.

The couple met five years ago, after she walked into his bar, Kili, with a poet friend. “That’s a woman I could fall in love with,” he told a co-worker.

Mr. De Castro moved in last year, after they discovered she was pregnant. Mr. De Castro just had a feeling; Ms. Chang, who had come to believe that she would never experience motherhood, purchased multiple pregnancy tests. They read T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to Roman in utero.

“I wanted to give my son, at a very young age, the opportunity to access very complex emotions,” Ms. Chang said. (“Time for Bed, Elmo!” is another favorite.)

A product of the Queens public schools, Ms. Chang first discovered poetry in the library, where she would wait for her mother after school. As a teenager, she was drawn to literature because, unlike in math class, there was no right or wrong answer. That sensibility, she says, too often falls away.

“The ultimate goal is to break down the wall between people and poetry,” she said. “Somewhere along the way, we have felt intimidated by it, or we have felt we have to be well-educated in order to be able to access it or walk into that world.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Poet Who Doesn’t Do Lofty. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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