On May 8th, 2025, we chatted with YPL Finalist Xander Shulman over the phone about music, mentor figures, and his interest in the local poetry scene. Xander goes to Santa Cruz High School.
First off, why do you write?
Well, I think a big, big part of why I like poetry is that I really like the rhythmic element of it because I'm a musician. That's why I find enjoyment in it, apart from typical essay writing or normally structured things. It's a lot more of a creative voice where I can manipulate things however I want to express myself, so I really like that.
I know your band is called Gma's Place. What type of music do you guys play, and how do you know your bandmates?
We play jazz, fusion, and funk. It's kind of whatever we want, but it originally started with jazz. We've kind of started branching out to more Asian fusion stuff.
I don't know if you know Casiopea, but that's the kind of stuff we play now. We're best friends. We've been playing for years. We've been in band a long time, so that's how we know each other. We click, and it's really been awesome.
That's how we've been able to find gigs and never really have issues within the band. We just work.
Do you think that connections with other musicians have contributed to your appreciation for art?
Definitely. Anyone could be a really amazing musician or any other kind of artist, and you just have no idea.
By going to Kuumbwa Jazz, or there are a bunch of amazing Cabrillo bands, I find myself often surprised by how many sick people there are in the community. That's part of why I wanted to get involved with the Youth Poet Laureate program. There has to be the same thing, but with poetry, and I just haven't really connected with it yet.
What do you think a reader needs to know or understand about you to understand where your writing is coming from?
Well, I find that a lot of the time my inspiration for writing a certain poem is my lack of understanding of something rather than my understanding of something. I feel like a lot of my poems, at least when I'm starting to write them, start as some question, or I open with a question, why something is the way it is.
That's why I'm taking [a] poem as an opportunity to ask the readers rather than to inform them, because at this point, I don't feel like I'm really ready to be telling people what's what and how it goes. In my bio, I said I write on modern uncertainties, but what I really meant by that is my uncertainties and how I interpret things.
What writers do you love or feel inspired by?
I really like Ocean Vuong, especially because he structures poems visually. A lot of them read like a river. I tried to do that with one of the poems on my application to the program, see what I can do with alignment on the page. I wasn't sure if I was doing it right, or if there is any right way to do it. I'm reading Diane Seuss as well right now.
Do you have anyone in your life who has really pushed or guided you in your writing?
Yeah. My bagpipe instructor. His name is Jay Salter.. That's been the biggest crossover between my music and my writing because he has helped me a lot with expressing myself properly and getting my voice out as well as I can in my music. Not just playing the notes and getting through the song, but really moving someone with what I'm playing.
When I was showing him my writing, I asked him, “What do you think we could fix here?” And he said, “I'm not going to tell you how to fix it or how to change it. Your voice is what you wanna maintain, but I'll tell you how I think you're getting in the way of your own writing”. When I'm starting a poem, I think, “What would Jay think?”
Is there any particular advice he's given you that has really stuck in your memory?
At certain moments, I need to clarify what I'm thinking.
But then, at other times, get rid of 'does' and 'a's. Remove extra words. Other times, I've had a sentence that is overly complex just for the sake of being complex, and it doesn't add anything. If I'm writing a sentence and thinking, “This is kinda weird”, does it add something, or is it just weird because it's weird? Does it actually do something for the poem? Does it propel it forward? That's probably the biggest thing.
What other passions propel you forward in life?
I do like physics. I want to be an engineering major, hopefully with a minor in poetry. I have done a lot of work with photography as well. Usually, when I go on a trip, I always bring my camera and see what I can do.
I used to be way more into editing the photos and trying to make them look cool, but now I like taking photos just for the photo, like what it looks like to me in real life.
What has your experience in leadership in a school poetry club been like?
It's been pretty lax, honestly. We haven't gone for anything serious. Now that I have the connection to the program, I think we will see what I can do. Especially if we have things going on with the Youth Poet Laureate program, I'll keep bringing it up to the club and see if people wanna come to workshops. But when I joined it, we mostly would introduce a poem, popcorn read it, and then talk about it. Sometimes we wrote.
When I took over the presidency, we kept doing that. So we bring poems. Sometimes we just have one long poem. Sometimes we have books, and we let people choose one from a book and read it out, or popcorn read.
We do different things, but mostly just small writing activities. No pressure.