I See Many Black Males Grasping For

I Excavate History. I Look At Lives Buried Under Too Much Silence. Periods Of Time, Like Slavery, Have To Be Revisited, Reimagined, So We Can Move Through Them.

There's A Sameness About American Poetry That I Don't Think Represents The Whole People. It Represents A Poetry Of The Moment, A Poetry Of Evasion, And I Have Problems With This. I Believe Poetry Has Always Been Political, Long Before Poets Had To Deal With The Page And White Space . . . It's Natural.

Poets Are Seen As The Caretakers Of Language, So Working With Words No Matter What The Form Is What We Do.

I Define Poetry As Celebration And Confrontation. When We Witness Something, Are We Responsible For What We Witness? That's An On-going Existential Question. Perhaps We Are And Perhaps There's A Kind Of Daring, A Kind Of Necessary Energetic Questioning. Because Often I Say It's Not What We Know, It's What We Can Risk Discovering.

I Close My Eyes And Can See Men Drawing Lines In The Dust. America Pushes Through The Membrane Of Mist And Smoke, And I'm A Small Boy Again In Bogalusa.