Regie O’Hare Gibson wasn’t having it. He was listening to another poet laureate describe their plans.
“This individual was saying, ‘Well, I’m young and right now it’s trying to explore myself and I’m trying to see who I really am, so that’s what I’ve been doing a lot of writing about,’” Gibson recalls. “I was like, ‘how dare you?’ Perhaps it was just the difference between this individual’s age and mine speaking, but I was like, this is a public office. If I heard any politician say what you just said, there’s no way I’d vote for them. No way.”
Gibson is emphatic: a poet laureate is a poet-statesperson, in the service of the people. Now past the halfway mark of his two-year term as the Commonwealth’s inaugural poet laureate — he was sworn in on May 30, 2025 — Gibson sat down with the Lexington Observer to reflect on the past year and his ambitions for the next.
Gibson acknowledges that many poets may be uncomfortable in this highly visible public role. “I think that I generally like people, whereas most poets are less gregarious,” Gibson says. “What we tend to do is navel-gaze and discuss the quality of the lint.”
“My thought is to always speak to the ‘us-ness’ of things and the ‘we’ of things,” Gibson says. That sensibility animates Dear, Paul Revere, or Forge, Shape, Shine! and Song of Massachusetts, two of his recent works.
An accomplished performer, Gibson is equally comfortable before a classroom of fifth graders, a gathering of musicians, or a community room of elders. But “Poet Laureate of Massachusetts” put him on his largest stage yet: the Boston Pops July 4th Concert Celebrating America’s 250th Anniversary. There, with the Pops and the Boston Children’s Orchestra, he delivered a soaring rendition of his Song of Massachusetts, set to original music by Boston Symphony Orchestra Composer Chair Carlos Simon. (View Gibson’s entire performance, courtesy of The Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular.)
“It was a bucket-list moment,” Gibson says.
Demand for Gibson’s time has increased as awareness of the poet laureate has grown throughout the Commonwealth. “I was always fairly busy,” he says, “but now it might be that I’m doing four very different sorts of events or engagements in a week. I might be doing a kindergarten one day, a retirement facility the next day, speaking to people at a theater the day after that, going to the statehouse the day after that.”
With a mandate to promote poetry, Gibson’s instinct is to listen first. “I didn’t want to come in with an agenda because I don’t know what people need,” Gibson says. “The needs of Billerica are not the needs of Cambridge, which are not the needs of Springfield, which are not the needs of Hyannis. The idea of meeting more and more poets who are on the ground doing things and hearing what they need as far as the poetic needs of their community was something that was very important to me to listen for.”
Gibson holds deep moral and political convictions, but he concluded early on that the poet laureate should be politically neutral. For example, he declines, in his official capacity, to engage in any politically partisan fundraising activities — which is not to say that Gibson minces words. “Poetry for me is a way to say really tough things in a beautiful way, so that by the time people really realize what they’ve heard, they’ve already taken it in,” he says. “I’d like to have a hand in returning eloquence and statesmanship back to the political landscape and to have more and more people wrestle with ideas.”
So: We are “a paradox of Pilgrim’s pride and genocidal guilt,” he writes in Song of Massachusetts. His ode to Paul Revere implores the patriot-silversmith to “help us reshape the precious metal of our country — to help us remove the tarnish darkening its shine.” He recently appeared at a protest outside the Burlington ICE facility and recited, chillingly, what’s left of the Declaration of Independence when all its principled phrases have been redacted. But Gibson never means to leave his audiences in despair. He aims instead to rouse our best collective selves. “It is not in our nature to suffer in silence such pains,” he concluded in his Hatch Shell performance, “but instead to buckle up, muster up, roll up our sleeves and put-’em-up, toss back our heads, fill our freedom-loving lungs with air and sing! Sing, Massachusetts!”
One of Gibson’s priorities is to help make the poet-laureate position financially sustainable. Last year and again this year, the job was funded with a $25,000 stipend appropriated by the Legislature to the Mass Cultural Council. Other than that, there is no budget. Gibson is in negotiations with Mass Poetry to try to establish a 501(c)(3) charitable organization to further support and extend the work of future poets laureate.
Gibson also wants poet-laureate positions established in towns that don’t have them —including Lexington. “We have 351 towns in Massachusetts, and I think we have twenty poets laureate,” he says. “I’d like to see more poets-in-residence at hospitals and hospices, and working more and more with musicians… I’d like to see more poetry phone booths around,” he says. “I want Massachusetts to have the largest poetry festival on the Eastern seaboard.” Turning to his hometown, Gibson expresses surprise at how little his services have been called upon in Lexington. “I’m here, people,” he says. “Put me to use.”
Realizing these ambitions will require the poet laureate to develop and link together poetry champions in government, in business — wherever he can find them. In that effort, Gibson says, “I want to try to be a magnifying glass for the inchoate sunlight that is poetry.”