To watch your home change in front of you is surprising. But at the same time, going someplace like Mississippi, makes me appreciate even this.
Even with all of its changing, Brooklyn's architecture still feels like home, the language feels like home. It's changing so quickly that it's surprising. It's surprising still, when someone looks kind of askance to see me walking towards them.
For me as a writer, it was understanding that we're so far behind in our way of dealing with death. We put someone in the ground, we bury them or we burn them, and then we're supposed to just move on and kind of get over it.
I always say I write because I have lots of questions, not because I have any answers.
When you think of how a child experiences a series of events, it feels, for so long, like she's looking at everything from behind this glass and it's obscured.
We live inside our parents' backstory.
I have met women who don't have close women friends, and I've always been like, "How could that possibly be?"
Don't trust women, my mother said to me. Even the ugly ones will take what you thought was yours.
I don't know how women stop being friends with other women.
Where I grew up, it was all people who were black and Latino, people who look like me. Now I live in a neighborhood where very, very few people look like me.
One place exists as their interpretation of it. For the people living and thriving inside of it, it's another place.
I pay a lot of attention to whitespace. I pay a lot of attention to the rhythm of words together.
Everything I write, I read out loud. It has to sound a certain way. It has to look a certain way on the page.
I feel like so much of what I'm doing is making a road where there is no road and inviting people on that road with me. It's scary. It's scary, but I can't listen to the voices that are saying form is the only way, or that there is only this kind of form or that kind of form.
I've learned about marrying poetry and prose and making both accessible.
I've learned a lot as a writer about poetry.
I think I had gotten messages really young that poetry wasn't for me, that it was for, basically, some dead white men. My experience and my intellect was on the outside of understanding that. I think that's what's so destructive.
That's what writing is. It's moving past your fear.
I'm still afraid. I'm still afraid every day.
As a poet who has the tools for interpreting the poem differently, you can begin to deconstruct it. But the human being who's like, "I know about conversation, I know about language, I know about hard times," will approach the poem differently.
What you say is what matters.
We do inherently know that poetry is about the way we speak. It's about where we pause, where we drop our words in the middle of a sentence. It's about the rhythm and the cadence of the way we speak. It's about putting that down at the end of the day.
I think that happens for a lot of people, they have this idea that there's only one type of way to write poetry and that you have to have this information. You have to know about meter, you have to know about form, you have to know about iambic pentameter, and all of that.
When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.
I think writers are the history keepers, right? We're the ones who are bearing witness to what's going on in the world. And I feel like it's our job to put that down on paper, and put it out into the world, so that it can be remembered.
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