Bobby LeFebre is Colorado’s voice for this moment. And in this moment, “It’s not enough to be non-racist,” he says. “You have to be anti-racist. There’s a call to action in that.”
LeFebre, born and raised in Denver’s Northside, is not like any Colorado Poet Laureate to come before him. And not (only) because he is the first person of color to hold that title. Because no one before him has held Coloradans as morally accountable as Lefebre is right now, every day, with his pen and his voice.
“If you’re still defending the police in this moment, you have to ask yourself why,” LeFebre said, referring to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And to the death of Elijah McClain in Aurora. And to the deaths of at least 135 unarmed Black people who have been shot to death by police nationwide since 2015.
“Black men are hunted and murdered by the police in a way that is so common that it is really a pandemic in itself,” LeFebre said.
Tough talk from a tough, beguiling poet, playwright and activist. LeFebre is not afraid to hold mirrors to faces or feet to fire. He’s not afraid to speak his mind or to use words as weapons. “And I’m not afraid of violence,“ he says more literally, should a situation call for it. “I think fear,” he added, “is crippling.”
His four-year appointment as Colorado’s ninth poet laureate in 2019 was history begetting history. That’s when Jared Polis, Colorado’s first gay governor, named LeFebre both the state’s first poet laureate of color and, at age 37, its youngest. “Bobby embodies the spirit of a ‘Colorado for All,’ where everyone is included,” Polis said at the time.
LeFebre loves a good barrier-busting but, he added, “I am also intelligent enough to know I am not the first person of color who has been qualified to hold the office in the 100-year history of this post.” The century-long gap, he believes, “is an important reminder that we’re not exempt from racism and marginalization in the arts and culture here in Colorado.”
LeFebre’s job as poet laureate – and it is a full-time job – is to travel the state “building bridges of understanding” with pretty much any community that asks for his time. He could not have known what was coming in 2020, but his gift with words has come to be an essential salve for a population struggling with isolation, anger and hopelessness. Lefebre has been a source of catharsis, comfort and tough love in response to the pandemic, the racial unrest, the political divide and the recent election.
In the days following the statewide shutdown, LeFebre came out with a series of poems that seduced readers with his silky turns of phrase, reassuring them of the power of human contact in a time of isolation: “Today, my love, let the crackle of the world burning outside our door be the music we slow-dance to.” He has heartened artists with a promise of creative resilience: “Together in this sudden strangeness, radical imagination will run wild.” As the distance between us has grown cavernous, he has reassured us that we’re still here. “Making art. Making love. Making moves. Making do.” While still making plain what we all lament but know to be true: “The ‘normal’ we are longing to return to,” he wrote, “is a bus that will never come.” Instead, he wonders: “How can we shape a new world we’ve never experienced, but long for?”
But after Floyd’s death, LeFebre watched what happened in Minneapolis, in Seattle, in Denver and elsewhere. And to those who saw thousands of white allies take to the street as a sign that America is perhaps finally ready to reconcile with its racist past, he delivered a little truth bomb: It’s going to take much more than rocks. Or a well-intentioned yard sign.
“It’s going to take white people who say, ‘Well, my people never owned a slave,’ to admit, ‘But I have benefited from a system of white supremacy that has allowed me to exist in this space without the concern or the worries or the trauma that other people have who are non-white in this country,’ ” he said.
“Unless we can collectively agree that this nation was founded upon the genocide of Indigenous people, the enslavement of African people and the marginalization of anyone who’s not white hetero sis, we run the risk of starting the process of reconciliation in a way that’s disingenuous,” he added. “Unless we destroy and deconstruct those things, it’s really superficial, and it’s not rooted in actual change.”
For white supremacy, as he viscerally wrote in one of his poems, “is the blood, not just the body.”
LeFebre told me all of this in an interview I conducted for an upcoming video documentary project for the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company called “CO2020,” which will be available for online viewing April 5-18. It will explore the seismic events of the past year through community interviews by a team of six writers. It will include LeFebre reading from a particularly visceral poem he wrote after the death of 17-year-old violinist Elijah McClain ripped his heart out. In it, LeFebre equates the neck of McClain’s wooden violin to Floyd’s corporeal neck being slowly suffocated by a police officer. It reads, in part:
Elijah was not a simple man.
He was Black and kind and more.
Many pieces.
A soul.
A body.
A neck.
Carotid holds compress the arteries in the neck resulting in unconsciousness.
Lefebre considers himself a romantic, but that notion has been sorely tested this past year. “I would love to see this nation healed and reconciled and everyone on the same page about what has happened and what is possible,” he said. “But I don’t think we’re ever going to get there.”
In the distance,
the flames are still flickering, the bullets are still flying,
and soon, my love, we will smell the smoke.
‘CO2020’
•Presented by the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company
•Dates: Available for viewing April 5-18
•Form: Video documentary
•At a glance: A team of six writers interviewed more than 50 health-care workers, local politicians, faith and community leaders, activists, police officers, artists, parents, educators and students about the events of last year
Information: Pre-ordering starts March 22 at betc.org
‘Amplify: Curated by Bobby LeFebre’
•Presented by the Arvada Center, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd.
•Date: April 19, 7 p.m.
•Form: Live event series providing a platform for largely marginalized artists. •In-person and live-streaming options available.
•Information and ordering: arvadacenter.org