Even when California’s newly appointed poet laureate Quincy Troupe is just speaking conversationally, his words tumble forth in such rhythms and cadences that you know he’s a poet.

Here, for instance, is how he explains that the language in his poems springs from the community he grew up in:

“I grew up as an American in an African-American community, and I grew up in an African-American church. And I grew up listening to music, and listening to people in barbershops talk, and people in beauty parlors. And listening to Black people on corners and in my house and in my community. Therefore, a lot of my work grows out of that: the use of language, the use of rhythm, the use of cadence, the use of forms, the use of metaphor, the use of images. The way I try to use images comes out of the way I grew up: listening to people use language and images.

“Everybody  grows up from something,” Troupe says. “That’s yours. That’s just as important as my growing up listening to what I listened to. But you have to have faith in it and know that it’s important. It’s up to you to share that language and those things with everyone else.”

Troupe became interested in writing poetry after the writer and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, surprisingly enough, suggested he do so. Troupe was in the army and stationed in France in the 1960s. He was writing what he now calls a “terrible novel” when a girlfriend introduced him to Sartre, a family friend. He told Sartre about the trouble he was having with his novel.

Sartre suggested Troupe write poetry to work on his writing; even though, he said, he hated poets. “I guess he was talking about the exercise of poetry being a wonderful thing,” says Troupe. “I never did ask him why he hated poets.”

After returning to the U.S., Troupe lived in his hometown of St. Louis and then in Watts, California, where he studied journalism, worked as a freelancer, and heard black poets like Ojenke (Alvin Saxon) and Bunchy Carter read their works.

“When I heard these poets, I knew that I had to go back to what I had known when I was growing up in St. Louis as an African-American,” he says. “That’s where I started to get really serious about it.”

Serious enough that his 14th book, Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems, was published last month by Coffee House Press. The word “transcircularities,” he explains, is one he made up to describe how people keep repeating the same mistakes, including starting wars that don’t solve any of their problems.

“These poems move around a lot and they come back to where they started. It’s a circular movement to idiocy,” says Troupe. “We don’t seem to learn anything about racism, or about plunder, or environmental issues. Man is just so greedy, and has been so greedy for so many years, and we can’t seem to cure ourselves of the problem. Of oppressing other people and other groups. The highway of history is just full of car wrecks. And that’s civilization as far as I’m concerned. Whether we’re black or white, we all make the same mistakes. We don’t seem to be learning.”

His first project as poet laureate is to start a “Literacy Through Poetry” program, which will be funded by major California corporations. Troupe says if you can excite children, they’ll read books and write their own poetry. He says that adults, too, like hearing live poetry, though they don’t always realize it. The program will bring poets, some bilingual, into schools and also into workplaces during lunchtime.

Other responsibilities during his two-year term as poet laureate include giving at least six public readings throughout the state.

Troupe, who teaches creative writing and American and Caribbean literature at UC San Diego, has published several volumes of poetry, a children’s book, a biography of Miles Davis, and a memoir, Miles and Me, about his friendship with the musician. Two of his books have won American Book Awards. He’s also written a screenplay of Miles and Me, which is being made into a movie.

The 62-year-old plans to retire from teaching within the next couple years and work full time on his diverse current projects, which include a novel, another memoir, and an autobiography of the basketball player Earl Monroe. A children’s book, based on the life of Stevie Wonder, comes out from Jump Up at the Sun/Disney-Hyperion in 2004.

“Every morning you wake up you have to challenge yourself in order to write,” says Troupe. “Which means you have to consistently write different kinds of work: sometimes political, sometimes funny, sometimes this form and that form. I consistently try to challenge myself.”