Form is everything to Dujie Tahat.
As an acclaimed poet, their obsession with form manifests in how they use words to create a poetic structure to contain a truth. And as a political consultant, they similarly use language to traverse various political or social formal structures to connect people with policy and resources to change their lives. Now, as the newly appointed 2025–26 Seattle Civic Poet, Tahat is putting the "civic" in "Civic Poet" by bringing poetry to institutions like City Hall.
Tahat is the fifth poet to be selected in the Seattle Civic Poet program, a two-year position overseen by the Office of Arts and Culture. During their tenure, each Civic Poet is charged with "fostering community dialogue and engagement between the public and artists while celebrating the literary arts" however they see fit. Tahat is taking the reins from 2023–24 Civic Poet, Shin Yu Pai, following in the steps of Jourdan Imani Keith, Anastacia-Renée, and Claudia Castro Luna.
Born in the Philippines to a Filipina mother and a Jordanian father, Tahat spent their early childhood in Japan before moving to Yakima. They remember being obsessed with language — Tagalog, Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, English — in their youth, leading them to take up an interest in poetry as a teen. Through Youth Speaks Seattle, a program empowering marginalized teens through storytelling, Tahat developed a poetic practice and participated in writing circles, poetry slams, organizing, and open mics, growing deep roots in the city. Now based in Beacon Hill with three chapbooks under their belt, they balance writing poetry and hosting a poetry podcast with their work as a political consultant at their own firm, DTC.
Ahead of their official induction as Civic Poet this evening, the Emerald caught up with Tahat on the phone to talk about their obsession with form, how poetry can be a beacon in these dark times, and what they plan to do in their new position over the next two years.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What are you most interested in exploring through your poetry?
I'm someone who's really interested in form. I'm a little less interested in the thing that is being said, but rather the formal structure that expresses its truth. I am really interested in how form refreshes language. I'm a millennial person living in the 21st century — I've got kids, I'm an immigrant, there are certain identity markers that I'm interested in. But I'm interested in articulating the experience of my life in the most honest way and how form conveys that.
In addition to being a podcaster, a poet, a writer, and a critic, you're also a political consultant. How does that role or involvement in the political/legislative scene shape your poetry (if it does at all)?
I think one of the ways that I'm obsessed with form as I move through life is like, policy is also form. Politics is also form. What I mean by form is the invisible structure that orders anything, and I think, in a really material way, policy is the invisible structure that orders civil society. There are lines on the road, there are traffic lights, there are ways we literally move through the world that are organized by these policies — and policy making is also a vocation of language, too. I don't know that it was always thought of that way, but I find a natural pairing between those things.
My first political gigs were as a communications person. I think the thing that I really excelled at is how to frame an issue or how to talk about a certain thing because I'm really interested in the way that policy and rhetoric are framing devices. They are forms themselves for conveying an idea and getting people to move towards that idea. In my own writing, it shows up a lot. The poems themselves are interested in the forms of the poems. I, as the person writing them and who places my own experience inside of them, am interested in the formal structures I come up against. Whether that's my immigration status or, you know, I got divorced many years ago and that is also a changing of a formal structure of one's life. Having kids and a changing nature of your identity, their changing nature … all of those things are part of my obsession with form. And I think all of those things are political in the sense that they all exist in the context of a political world, of a policy-structured civil society.
Building off that, I think people often look to poets for a way to make sense of this world that feels so nonsensical. So much of your work deals with the experience of being an immigrant in this country and with the recent news of deportations of documented and undocumented immigrants, what do you think about what the next few years will look like? How can poetry help with that?
There's two answers to this question. There's the part of me that is frank and honest that poems don't actually do anything in the world. They're silly little art objects I make on my laptop and I send out into the world. They're little language boxes, and sometimes they're really beautiful. If I'm lucky, it moves someone closer to their own reality. It gives them a container to experience a thing. And that's sort of the greatest thing one can imagine. I think I belong to a tradition that is really clear-eyed that the poem doesn't move a mountain.
That said, by the same token, the other half of that answer is — giving someone a container to experience their life, making someone feel like a little less alone or that they want to die a little less, to my mind, is maybe the most important thing that any human being can do. Or the most important thing a poem can do. If, by some grace that I do not know, a poem of mine has done that in the world, that's more than I could ever imagine. I do think with respect to any particular immigration policy — or the lack thereof — in contemporary America, we have been arriving at a total disruption of form around immigration itself, around the idea of nationhood and citizenry and executive power. There's a lot of chaos that will, ultimately, harm a lot of vulnerable people.
Again, in that context, it's really hard to say that poems do anything or will help, but I do think insofar as they might be able to help, without form, people turn to poems to create a container, to create a form, to make sense of this disruption. To the extent that there is work to be done through poems, it would be how do we move forward? How do we tell a story? How do we articulate an experience that takes in this unfathomable amount of harm, grief, death, upending of norms, and basic human decency? That's the starting point for any poem, for me. That's the context that we're operating in when we're writing poems.
How do you see the role of Civic Poet playing out in the city? What are you hoping to do in your tenure?
My predecessors have all done really exceptional work in surfacing poetry around the city. Given my day job and daytime vocation, I'm really interested in bringing poems into City Hall … and having conversations with people about poems. It's like this salon shop thing I've been doing at my house. We do workshop, but the emphasis is really on like, let's read a poem that one of us found interesting, and talk about why we find it interesting. That ends up being a framing device for whatever other conversation we have next. I want to do the same thing with elected officials, civic leaders, and the citizen boards and commissions at the city level.
For National Poetry Month, my hope is to have about four salon shops. One is a community salon shop, one is going to be with The Seattle Public Library head librarian, Tom Fay, one is with a city councilmember, and then one with Kamau Chege, who's the executive director of Washington Community Alliance. I say all that because I think that's illustrative and emblematic of what I'm hoping to do over my term. I want to do the salon shops ahead of actual citizen and board committee meetings where we spend the first 20 to 30 minutes, like, reading a poem or a couple poems and talking about them, and then let that be sort of a framing device for subsequent conversations.
My hope is that bringing people into a common, shared language, bringing people closer to the things they're actually saying at a policy, civic discourse level into the realm of the real. Not just exchanging talking points, but rather actually be in touch with, like, what are we actually saying? And, more importantly, how do we look at a thing together with language? Because if our civic leaders aren't doing that, then how can we as neighbors begin to look and apprehend the same truth together in a shared language? That's the crux of the project.
Where is poetry most needed in Seattle right now?
Basically at every level of leadership. That's not aimed at City Hall specifically — it's also aimed at the White House, at the governor's office. As someone whose job has been to consolidate political power through language for political principles, I'm acutely aware of the way that job is, in some ways, to dead-end language and, frankly, co-opt the work of culture.
I say that and, simultaneously, I think the work of cultural workers is to refresh language, make it new, and make it not co-optable. That's just how power functions. And so given that, when you're in that [political] context for too long, you see people quitting City Council, right? It robs you of your own humanity. It robs you of the ability to just look at a person and see a person. It robs you of being with others, it makes you really lonely. So to my mind, poetry presents an opportunity for people to feel a little less alone, but it gives them a container to articulate an experience that allows more than one person to look at a reality, look at truth and apprehend it together in some kind of way.
I would give my left arm for every single elected official to, like, to put a Mary Oliver poem in front of them and actually come face to face with their own mortality. Just for a moment! I think it would really dramatically change the way we not only talk to each other, but literally look at language as policy, look at language as the way it orders the way people live.
Help keep BIPOC-led, community-powered journalism free — become a Rainmaker today.