Published 12/11/2024 by Praniti Gulyani
If you are a UC Berkeley student with the slightest inclination towards the world of Arts and Literature, chances are that you would’ve come across Poems For Berkeley, an Instagram account run by Juliette Zhu— a Poet, TedX Speaker, Dancer and Cognitive Science Major at Cal.
So, how does Poems For Berkeley work?
The project invites students or anyone around the UC Berkeley community to request a poem about anything they’d like. After putting in the request, Juliette, the founder and facilitator of this initiative writes up a poem based on the request and sends it back. While for most students, Poems For Berkeley is their way to communicate with people they love or put the difficult and inexpressible emotion on the shoulders of a poem and convey it, Juliette sees her brainchild differently. For her, Poems For Berkeley is a compass through which she managed to find direction and purpose on the UC Berkeley campus. Like many other incoming students, Juliette felt overwhelmed by the intensity of what it means to be a Cal student, and didn’t want to be, as she puts it, a nobody on campus.
As I read Juliette’s poetry to myself, her words lingered on my palette like the sour aftermath of a spicy mango and possibly left deep green footprints around my lips. Her words weren’t just figures on a page— they were living and breathing individuals with an anatomy of their own. As I reckoned with the intricacies of this literary anatomy, I decided to reach out to Juliette and schedule an interview with her. Luckily enough, Julie responded within seconds and before I knew it, I had successfully scheduled what was going to be the most unique interview that I’ve ever taken for We Are Cal— a long walk around our UC Berkeley campus interjected with several visits to coffee shops that bloomed like little rosebuds along the way.
“In your poems, you tend to focus on the rawness of the emotion. It’s like eating a raw mango where the sourness hits you before you realize you’re eating a mango. How do you accomplish this?” I ask Juliette, my mind heavy with endless examples of her literary prowess. “I listen. I close my eyes and listen to how I’m feeling instead of logically analyzing it. And I feel like I obey whatever phrases come to me when I’m feeling it rather than trying to create something. I feel poetry is about delivering that something that thousands of humans have felt before you, and I’m like the vessel to draw that out,” she says.
As Juliette speaks, I’m deeply inspired and moved by her inherent humility and tendency to place her art before herself. Clearly, it’s this humility combined with her talent and passion for the written word that led to the conception of Poems For Berkeley. This is when I turn the conversation to her beloved brainchild, asking her what inspired it. “It’s given me a purpose. It’s given me a reason to rediscover my identity as a writer and gain a sense of responsibility on this campus. I feel responsible for all the requests that are given to me. I take it as someone giving me a piece of their heart and now, I have to validate it, amplify it and give it back to them,” she says. “Does your poetry follow a specific theme?” I ask Juliette, as she responds with surprising instantaneousness. “Yes. Loss and misunderstanding. I feel like it’s huge because there are a lot of things that are unspoken, things we feel but can’t say to someone who’s not in our life anymore. I like to sprinkle a little bit of hope, a little bit of recognition and a little bit of light into my poems that talk about loss and misunderstanding,” she adds.
To maintain the structure of this column, I have to say that our conversation eventually came to an end. But on a personal level, I don’t think it did. As Juliette continues to flourish on the UC Berkeley campus, I think I’ll continue conversing with her about all things literature. And she’ll continue to converse with the world— shaping communities, minds and answering those challenging questions through her poems. After all, in Juliette’s words, when the dust storms of distress overwhelm your sky, what else is there to do “but bite into the dark”?