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 don't want to waste my readers' time ever. My readers are very important to me.
I am an artist through to my marrow, which might be a curse and not necessarily a good thing.
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.
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.
We all know what it means to be sung to. And poetry is very close to that.
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.
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.
Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.
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.
