Sometimes I feel hopeless. The vanishing of people and species from this wide, beautiful world. A muzzle strapped to the mouth of the arts. Bodies a room-shaped hiding place for whom they love, while children stare at the night sky wondering if the stars are truly just stars. In the wake of this damage, I order new flavors of lattes at local cafes. If I am feeling brave, I take the quickest train into the nearest city and walk around leisurely, thinking about my many splendid futures, thinking about guilt. Young reader, at every stage of our living, the vast world will force itself upon you. You will feel small. You will want to bang your words against the brick wall of your mind until they break. You will look down at your scrawled creativity and think, how could this possibly matter? And how could it when aging lawmakers force youths to an early surrender? How could it when the arts, our most accessible form of democracy, are defunded and villainized? When I wrote my first poem during the dry, cold bite of a Pennsylvania autumn, I did not know how much my words mattered. I did not know it then—that I had already committed myself to hoping.
Poetry directs our focus to our communities, our country, and our world. When we perceive our surroundings through poetry and art, we are inadvertently enacting change. My personal catalyst was a poem I wrote during the wreck of the pandemic. “The Blood We Inherit, The Blood We Spill” was a spoken word poem written about my personal run-in with a microaggression. It was meant to hold my temporal rage and confusion, but after collaborating with my school district to center a cultural forum on forms of microaggressions and allyship, I came to witness, firsthand, how a poem about myself quickly became a poem about others. I had no choice in the matter. I was unknowingly proving the power that poetry has not only on the page, but off of it, in the movement and hustle of our lives.
These moments represent landmarks in my career, illuminating the inspiration behind my impact as a young writer and our collective power as young creatives. In a speech I delivered to a room of youth delegates from over 80 different countries, I said, “The treasure of being young is how much everything can change you.” Poetry itself is a state of youth. It takes risks. It overshares. It will always want something. And today, more than ever, one of those desires is change. To support my county’s Pride Flag Raising Ceremony amidst backlash from conservative groups, I read an LGBTQIA+ love poem alongside government officials. To affect policy for young people, I worked with the White House and performed poetry in the U.S. Department of Education. To advocate for ethical AI development and use for students, I flew to London to speak and share a poem with Google’s AI team. In each of these cases, a poem has transformed into a rallying cry, a mouthpiece for the unspoken, and a call to action, but only if the way we read and allow a poem to enter us activates this metamorphosis. This is why poetry has a role with the masses. It holds its heart out to anyone willing to look. Poetry is the people’s language.
The treasure of being young is how much everything can change you.
But poetry is much more than that. Because it is everywhere around us—in the way we love and grieve and think and speak—it has allowed me to converse with everything. I have engaged in cultural diplomacy by working with the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to bring American poetry to Russia, redefined poetry’s place in entertainment by collaborating with composers to create new musical pieces, and led various arts organizations as an administrator to provide programming to youth communities. I share these accomplishments to communicate that poetry allows us to approach even the most rigid systems. Rather than a statistics report, poetry allows us to see how systems like public health are forms of social communication. By writing and thus caring about a political system, I am already changing it without having to navigate policy. The images and messages that companies share with their audiences rely on human resonance, which is understood most effectively through poetics.
In short, poetry can be utilized to navigate interests outside of the literary: in healthcare, politics, and many other spaces.
For those uncommitted to a career in writing, poetry then becomes a lifestyle and an attitude. A way to see the world as a place capable and worthy of change. I experienced this perspective shift firsthand in my journey toward becoming the 9th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, which was by no means easy. I started at the grassroots level. Each poem was an inquiry for myself, but marked a larger question for the nation. The “I” and the “you” of my poems expanded beyond any one body. What started as discontent with the devaluation of poetry became an exploration of the current attack on the academy and what that meant for national politics. A grueling search for love became a journey of traveling backwards to the AIDS epidemic and the government’s inaction. But before I could effectively leverage poetry for civic engagement, I had to first understand what it meant to write poetry. Without a foundation rooted in the literary arts, I would be writing statements and speeches—not poetry. The form requires responsibility, bravery, and hope. Today, it takes all of that and more to pursue the arts, but I see young writers doing it.
From Notes apps to Google documents to journal pages, I see you defying the odds. I see you doing the work. You are speaking truth to power. You are reminding us to breathe. You are here—have been here—and you are hope.
Author Bio: 王潇/Evan Wang is the author of Slow Burn (Northwestern University Press, 2026), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and the 9th National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, the first male and East Asian individual to hold this title. His work appears in POETRY Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere, and he has been featured at and recognized by the Biden White House, the United Nations, Teen Vogue, the Smithsonian Institution, and Google DeepMind. Learn more about his work at sincerelyevan.com or on Instagram: @sincerelyevan_ or TikTok: @sincerelyevan_