By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Benicia has a new poet laureate.

Lois Requist has officially been chosen as the successor to Ronna Leon, whose term expired Saturday.

“I’ve worked with Ronna, she walked and talked with me and influenced me to apply,” Requist said Monday following the announcement of her selection.

The city’s fourth poet laureate, Requist follows Joel Fallon, Robert Shelby and Leon. Her two-year term involves “a few official city duties,” including a “poet’s picnic” in August and a formal reading in the fall.

“But beyond that,” she said, “there’s an awful lot that is up to the poet. The city can ask you to come to functions. I think that the actual hard definition is pretty minimal. It is what you make it.”

Leon, Requist acknowledged, made quite a bit of it, giving the new poet laureate “big shoes to fill.”

“I really like the things that she did, and I would like to continue most of those things.” (See The Herald’s recent profile of Ronna Leon BY CLICKING HERE.)

One of the first things Requist plans to do is speak with the poetry community itself, to see what it would like to undertake.

“I think poetry belongs in the community. It’s not some staid thing that people do apart from the rest of the community. I’d like to see it come to The Rellik, I’d like to see it come to art galleries, I want to work with Bookshop Benicia,” she said.

“You really need somebody who is working to promote poetry in the community, and in all parts of the community, whether it’s school children or adults or seniors.

“I like it to be exposed to the community.”

Requist, a founding member of Benicia Literary Arts, also hopes that nonprofit and the First Tuesday Poetry Group will work more closely in future, as they did in collaborating on the publication of the poet group’s fourth anthology, “Sign of the Times,” which Requist edited. It was published in April.

“Those two have already done things together, and I’d really like to see that happen more,” she said. Both groups are involved, for example, in trying to organize a “LitQuake”-type event in Benicia in October.

“They’re natural allies, interested in the literary arts. I want to work with as many organizations in town as I can.”

Requist herself is not strictly a poet. She has worked in many forms, including fiction, nonfiction and journalism. “I’m a writer of all kinds of things. I like that mixture,” she said.

Still, the influence of poetry affects her other writings, such as in her 2010 book, “RVing Solo Across America … without a cat, dog, man or gun.”

“If you’ve written poetry, I think that your descriptions are probably more poetic, even when you’re writing non fiction or fiction,” she said. “Poetry teaches you an economy of words. I probably use that too, because I like things that are sharp and clear.”

Requist hopes to use her new position to provide exposure to as many types of poetry to as many people as she can, perhaps with more readings or classes.

“Even if it’s just a matter of reading it or writing it. I’d be open to hearing from people who are interested in those type of things.”

Among other ideas, Requist said she has spoken with Elaine Eisner, chair of Benicia’s Arts and Culture Commission, about incorporating poetry into the city film festival scheduled for next March. “What form that will take, and how that will happen, I don’t know yet,” she said.

“It’s not a matter of what I have to do, but I want to do as much as I can. I just want people to enjoy poetry, and I want to help them do that in any way I can.”