"My entry into writing poems was through spoken word — through Youth Speaks Seattle," Dujie Tahat says. "The voice in my poetry is me, it's my voice, and so it needs to fit in my mouth."

Tahat, the Seattle Review of Books Poet in Residence for December, is trying to answer the thoroughly unfair question that I had just lobbed at him: basically, why are you so good at reading your own work?

I'd read Tahat's writing months before I saw him read his own work. (Full disclosure: Tahat and I worked together for over a year at Civic Ventures, where we collaborated on a number of political and economics messaging projects.) His writing is confessional and striking and lyrical, but seeing him read his own work is a revelation: he's an electric performer, one who knows how to keep a crowd hanging by their fingertips to every syllable.

"I think I was always relatively comfortable in front of crowds," Tahat begins again, "but I didn't necessarily pay attention to the craft." He practiced and watched other poets read and eventually he had a breakthrough: "A lot of people think of performing as a projection, right? I think of it as an opportunity to listen for a really long time."

Tahat's love affair with poetry goes back to childhood. "I always loved to write lyrically, and I always loved to write from the first-person perspective," he says. "My dad is Jordanian and my mom's Filipino, and I grew up in Japan. I learned a lot through moving and learning new languages." When Tahat's family finally moved to Yakima, he found himself an immigrant on the outside of the city's "half-Hispanic, half-white" racial makeup.

"There's always been a tension in my life," Tahat says. He says he's learned how to code-switch. "Even when I got to college, I was a biophysics major for a couple of years, and I worked as a corporate business consultant for several years."

Many of those early life choices came from a "rigorous need to check the boxes and do all the things that a good immigrant child does to make money and be successful." Until recently, he believed that need "seemed at odds with this impulse to write poems," an impulse that "I didn't really know how to articulate."

Last year, Tahat decided to put himself through a kind of literary MFA program of his own making. "I set a goal for myself to get 100 rejections" from literary magazines and programs, he says. He succeeded at that goal, but over the course of all those submissions, something wonderful happened: "I ended up with twenty-something acceptances."

Last year, Tahat was selected as a Jack Straw writer, which taught him even more about performing poetry, and he's currently a Made at Hugo fellow, which provides him with a peer group to work on a larger project over the course of a year. So you could say his MFA program is going pretty well. "My goal this year is not to get another hundred rejections," Tahat says, "but I'm certainly still interested in learning more."

As part of his quest to learn more, Tahat recently began co-hosting a podcast called The Poet Salon with Seattle writers Gabrielle Bates and Luther Hughes. Each episode is an enthusiastic conversation with a poet about their work, over alcoholic beverages created just for the poet. The first episode, with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, is a generous and supportive conversation between poets who geek out over poetry.

Does he think of himself as a Seattle poet? "I guess I think of myself as a Washington state poet," he clarifies, then laughs. "It's sort of a silly distinction, maybe. But I grew up in Yakima, I went to college in Walla Walla, and then I moved here. Seattle definitely feels like home to me, but I think that in terms of my poems reflecting where I come from and what my experience has been, my experience is living in Washington state."

Even if Tahat isn't comfortable calling himself a Seattle poet, he's definitely representative of a new generation of younger Seattle poets — poets like Troy Osaki and Azura Tyabji who came up through the spoken-word scene and are now forging their own written tradition.

"People are reading and writing more poetry because we have created spaces outside of the more formal institutions," Tahat says. "To me, that's where the energy is. That's where the attention is. That's where you find poems that are more alive, more interesting."

So what can we expect from Tahat in the next year? "I'm writing a bunch of poems about code-switching," he says, though he's not sure if that's a whole project or just "a current theme" in his work. "My project for the Hugo House was originally about the census, but now it's a little bit broader. It's an erasure of the Constitution."

Tahat has been doing a lot of reading about erasures, and he's made several passes at finding a poem embedded inside the Constitution. "Over time I ended up doing several iterations, and my relationship to erasure changed the course of that process," he says.

But even as he continues to work on new projects, Tahat says the main goal is "how to grow in a more focused way. I think I'm certainly still a very baby poet, and I'm still sort of formulating and directing myself" toward the poet he knows he can be. "I'm pointing myself in that particular direction," he says."