I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
A lot of people refuse to do things...
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy.
Once you know who you are, you don’t have to worry anymore.
And like an unfaithful mate, once a car has let you down you never sort of trust it again.
I am a huge fan of the Black woman. I never hesitate to recommend her when times are bad or things go wrong.
The ability to take pride in your own work is one of the hallmarks of sanity.
To become a poet, the most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it’s so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.
Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.
I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office; that’s a different sense of who you are. I’m just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people; I do not lead the people.
Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message – beats, lyrics, singers, bass players – anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.
No one needs to teach you to be mean; we need to be taught to be kind.
I am honest; I try to be truthful. I like people and wish us well. We are not always deserving of our own best wishes.
To write poems, I think it’s important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.
If you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you how wonderful you are, you’ll never get anything done. Women need to get over being women. I’m tired of that socialization of women; that we are always supposed to be sitting around pleasing somebody.
Young people coming up who are having difficulty with their so-called celebrity need to get back into their lives. It’s your life and you can’t let the fact that you do something pretty good take away the joy of it.
History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.
Black Americans should be given credit for finding probably the perfect weapon; the weapon of the song. And that song continues. Most holocausts don’t, so they have this bitterness left over. The phenomenon of the world, as far as Black Americans are considered, is that we are not a bitter people.
We all have our muses. My grandmother and my mother are the people I write for. I’ll never have to worry about who buys my work, or who likes it, and who doesn’t. The people who I want to be proud of me already are.
Poems don’t have to rhyme. Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.
Poetry is like air. It’s one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.