Poetry is this gorgeous, complex history rendered in verse and song, a blueprint that can lead you back into the world after you've walked into air.
Robin Coste Lewis
I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn't know that one could be a poet.
I think what I would really most like to write about is palm trees and bougainvillea and hummingbirds. I would like to go into the desert and write about salamanders and the Grand Canyon, but history keeps rupturing my experience because politics are everywhere.
I am an artist through to my marrow, which might be a curse and not necessarily a good thing.
I think that if someone told me I could have been a visual artist, I might have been a visual artist instead. And if I'd known I could have done art history, I would have done that. But I just didn't know.
Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.
We all know what it means to be sung to. And poetry is very close to that.
I don't want to waste my readers' time ever. My readers are very important to me.
Toni Morrison was a big influence on my work since I was a teenager, what she did with English. I joke that I think she speaks 20 Englishes simultaneously, that she knows how to do that.
Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.
