If You Can't Be Free,

We Tend To Be So Bombarded With Information, And We Move So Quickly, That There's A Tendency To Treat Everything On The Surface Level And Process Things Quickly. This Is Antithetical To The Kind Of Openness And Perception You Have To Have To Be Receptive To Poetry.poetry Seems To Exist In A Parallel Universe Outside Daily Life In America.

Instead Of Trying To Come Up And Pontificate On What Literature Is, You Need To Talk With Children, To Teachers, And Make Sure They Get Poetry In The Curriculum Early.

I Was Not Interested In Doing The Plot Of Oedipus In Blackface. I Did Wonder, What Would These People Have Been Like If They Hadn't Been In That Situation?... One Could Look At Oedipus, Or At My Character Augustus, As A Cynical Schemer Who Did Everything Because He Was Hungry For Power. But That's Just Too Easy. I'm More Interested In How Humans Can Embody Conflicting Goals And Emotions.

Anyone Can Tell You That How You're Raised As A Child Has A Great Deal To Do With How You Behave As An Adult And Whether You Have Complexes Or Whether You Need To Prove Yourself Or All That Kind Of Stuff And Yet The Mother In A Traditional Family Who Has Raised A Child Never Makes It In The History Books.

Being Poet Laureate Made Me Realize I Was Capable Of A Larger Voice. There Is A More Public Utterance I Can Make As A Poet.