KIM SHUCK
San Francisco native Kim Shuck, the city’s seventh poet laureate, is a celebrated voice in Native American poetry. Shuck, a member of the Cherokee Nation, is known as much for the written word as she is for the visual arts. She is a master basket weaver and bead worker. Her 2019 collection, “Deer Trails: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 7,” a love letter to the city, explores indigenous San Francisco as a form of resistance to gentrification and urbanization. Her new book of poetry, “Exile Heart,” is due out soon.
But for the past 10 months, Shuck, 54, has been wrangling poets as part of her Poem of the Day project with San Francisco Public Library. She posts a poem for every day of the pandemic. It started as a way to support poets and help residents mark the passage of time this year.
“New rituals become necessary,” says Shuck, who has published the works of new and emerging voices through this initiative. “So we provided one.”
Originally, her poet laureate project was to create an online interactive map of San Francisco by poems. Mouse over a street or landmark, discover a poem about it. Shuck’s goal is to celebrate all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods and illuminate poetry pockets beyond the famed North Beach.
“We have microclimates with art as much as we have microclimates with weather, and they have to be represented,” she says.