City Instates First Poet Laureate

On Tuesday evening City Hall resounded with beats, verses, and reminiscences, as spoken-word artist Sharmont ​“Influence” Little was proclaimed New Haven’s first poet laureate.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said poet Jason Dorsey, one of several speakers who took the mic to explain the importance of New Haven having a poet laureate, and of Little being its first. He took the assembled crowd back two decades, to a ​“magical time” for New Haven’s spoken-word scene. 

Dorsey hosted a regular event at Sandra’s, ​“when it was downtown,” he said. ​“It was one of the hottest spoken-word venues in New England, period.” Regulars from the New York scene came up to perform, and people ​“were coming down by the carload” from Boston and Springfield. Touring poets and spoken-word artists stopped through. But ​“we had such an amazing underground scene in New Haven that professional poets … were not the star of the show. We had something going on.”

Born and raised in New Haven, Little was then a ​“kid from the Farnam Court housing projects,” Dorsey said. He signed up for the open mic at Sandra’s under the name Bad Influence. ​“I had seen him around New Haven before,” Dorsey said. The applause for him when he took the stage was polite but skeptical. ​“First of all, he had a folded up, wrinkled piece of paper that it took him a minute and a half just to unfold,” Dorsey said.

But then Little read his poem. ​“It was all about delivering inspirational love and hope to the youth of New Haven,” Dorsey said. It won the crowd over, and Little went to sit down. ​“I ran up to the mic,” Dorsey said, and called Little back up.

“Brother, you just read one of the most inspiring poems I’ve ever heard for the youth,” Dorsey recalled saying to Little, ​“but your name is Bad Influence. From now on, we’re gonna drop the bad, and your name is just Influence.”

The audience at City Hall applauded.

“That was the turn of the century,” Dorsey said. ​“That’s how long this has been in the works.” 

Little went to New Haven public schools and to Gateway Community College and Goodwin College, and became a registered nurse through Lincoln Technical Institute. ​“There were times when he was going to stop writing,” Dorsey said. ​“But he just couldn’t stop, because his blood was the ink that flows through his veins.” 

He kept going, became a member of Connecticut’s slam poetry team seven times, and coached other slam teams. As Mayor Elicker pointed out later, he has also spoken on behalf of his union (Yale-New Haven Hospital 1199) and testified to members of Congress in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. He’s also the founder of Influence a Life LLC, which teaches coping and conflict resolution skills.

To Dorsey, Little exemplified the Elm City itself. ​“New Haven is poetry,” Dorsey said. ​“Have you even eaten Sally’s apizza and Libby’s cannolis under the cherry blossoms of Wooster Square Park? Or watched the moon shimmer on the Quinnipiac River after dark? Have you ever smelled the romance in the air, or held hands, walking from Fair Haven to Westville? Because it’s a walkable city. It’s a talkable city. We’re poetry in motion. We’re a fantasy of lights. We are beautiful.… We got big-city opportunities, but we got small-town love.… so to have a poet laureate seems like the next right thing to do.”

IfeMichelle Gardin, founder and executive director of Kulturally Lit, explained that the idea for New Haven to have a poet laureate came to her at the Peabody Museum’s 2023 poetry slam in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A couple of the participants, she noted, were poet laureates of other cities. After the event, she looked up poet laureates in the state and found ​“there are all these little towns in Connecticut that have poet laureates” — but not New Haven. 

“New Haven is the arts hub. We need a poet laureate,” she thought. She emailed Adriane Jefferson, director of cultural affairs at the city’s Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism, with her idea. Jefferson tasked Gardin with the job of finding New Haven’s first. Gardin went through a selection process and Little came out on top.

Little ​“has been living as a poet” and ​“exemplifies the title of poet laureate in the way he encourages and creates space by hosting live slam poetry events that foster the talents of local poets,” Gardin said. ​“As a leader of the Connecticut slam team,” Little has been ​“representing our regional talent across the country.” Finally, he is an ​“engaged citizen”; as a nurse, he visits people in their homes and cares ​“for young people injured by the violence of life.”

“You give voice to so many people that may not have one,” Mayor Justin Elicker said to Little before presenting him with the proclamation officially making him New Haven’s first poet laureate. ​“You speak our values, and most important, the values of people that often aren’t heard. That is a huge responsibility, and you have stepped up to take on that responsibility, and for that, on behalf of the city, I am grateful for you.”

“This means so much to me on so many different levels,” Little said while officially accepting the position of poet laureate. ​“New Haven is my city, where I learned how to do so many things.” He learned how to ​“protect himself” to go out into the wider world. ​“It’s where I was educated,” and ​“where I learned how to be a poet” and how to ​“walk in what you’re talking about.” It’s where he raised his kids. He thanked his mother for ​“always being here,” his wife for supporting him in so many ways, and his daughters for teaching him ​“far more than they understand.” He thanked his ​“poetry family” for ​“showing me what a poet is … a poet is supposed to be unapologetic in what he says about what he feels.”

On the event of his inauguration, however, he found himself missing his dad, who died of cancer and ​“isn’t here to see this,” Little said. ​“The last thing he said to me before he passed was ​‘make sure you show the world how great you are.’ ” Since then, he said, ​“I made it my mission to take my art even more seriously, to work harder for the community, for the people, try to push forth education with poetry, be in any space where I can try to make a difference.”

To kick off the inaugural Elm City Flow open mic that followed — for which many people had signed up — he began with a poem about missing his father that dug deep, tapping raw emotions to fuel powerful words.

Then, with apologies if he didn’t quite remember all of it, he launched into the poem Dorsey had remembered him performing over 20 years ago, after which Dorsey amended his name. No apologies were necessary. He delivered it without flaw. It brought down the hall.