I Want a Laureate

Last year, we presented an event called Future Laureates in partnership with the National Young Writers' Festival. In this speculative event, the 2025 Youth Poetry Ambassadors were asked to respond to the prompt, “If you were Poet Laureate for a day, what would you do?”, delivering their first (fictional) address as Australia’s next national Laureate.

Below is a version of Youth Ambassador Charlee Brooks' speech.

The task of standing here, of speaking for the tapestry of young Australian poetry today, and pretending that my singular words could represent everyone, would be ignorant. The very idea of a Laureate risks creating a single mouthpiece, a solitary figure elevated above the rest. But poetry isn’t about singularity. Poetry is a chorus. It’s contradiction, it’s community, it’s a weaving of voices that don’t always agree, but together hold more truth than any one person ever could.

If I were Laureate, my role would not be to speak for others, but to amplify voices that insist on being heard. Voices that disrupt the polished version of what poetry is supposed to be. Voices that carry survival, anger, humour, vulnerability.

When I was asked to think about what a Poet Laureate might look like, I was brought back to one of my first and favourite encounters with poetry: Zoe Leonard’s 1992 piece ‘I Want a Dyke for President’. For a little context, Leonard wrote the poem during the U.S. presidential election for her friend, the poet Eileen Myles, who was running a write-in campaign for president. Their campaign was both protest and performance, an act of imagining politics beyond the narrow limits of what it looked like then, and, in many ways, still looks like today.

Of course, the poem is not only about the presidency. It’s about representation itself: who gets to speak, who gets heard, and who is excluded from power. That’s why it still feels so urgent when we think about laureateship today. Because what I want, what I think Leonard wanted, is for all of us to be Laureates. Not one voice elevated, but a multitude of vessels, carrying the role together, a chorus.

If I were Laureate, these are the voices I would want to amplify. The kind of voices Leonard imagined back in 1992, and the kind still demanding to be heard now. So, if you would humour me, I’d like to share this poem with you all:

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president, and I want a fag for vice president. I want someone with no health insurance. I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia.

I want a president who had an abortion at sixteen. I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils. I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest. Who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying.

I want a president with no air conditioning. A president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office. A president who has been unemployed, laid off, sexually harassed, gaybashed, deported.

I want someone who has spent the night in jail, who had a cross burned on their lawn, who has survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president.

I want someone with bad teeth, someone who has eaten hospital food, someone who has crossed the border, someone who has been jailed, someone whose landlord has evicted them. I want someone who loves the people and loves being a president.

I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. Why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown — always a John and never a hooker, always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.

Excerpt from 'I Want a President' by Zoe Leonard (1992).