If I’m feeling desperate, I’ll go out image-hunting. I’ll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.
I think I’m a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I’m not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn’t work and why.
I think rap music is rap music. I mean, are there heavy writing aspects of it? Absolutely. In a sense, is it poetry? Yeah. I’ve heard that so much, growing up in a house with poetry. But I think people like to use that as a shortcut for who’s good and who’s not. It’s like the word ‘lyrical’ – ‘lyrical’ is the worst word in the entire world.
A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it’s laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe – we are happiest when we are creating.
The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.
My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that’s what was expected of me.
Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself – less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive – less prose, more poetry.
When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship – ‘Ode to Friendship.’ Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.
I got scouted for modeling on the street. I’m such a tomboy – still am. I just never thought about modeling before, but I thought, ‘Ooh, interesting, similar world, perhaps it’s a way into something.’ Then, I was on my third photo shoot ever, and Adam Leech from ‘Downtown Abbey’ saw me reading poetry and asked me to recite some.
I read a lot of poetry, and I love what it does with language. I love music, too, and I think there’s probably no coincidence there, that the rhythm of the words is almost as important as the words themselves, and when you can get the two working together, which usually takes me about 20 goes, I feel a huge satisfaction.
All of our lives are enriched by our culture, from blockbuster films, best-selling video games, independent music, and internationally-renowned museums and art collections, to theatre, opera, ballet, literary festivals and performance poetry.
I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band – just for fun – when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
This career essentially chased me down while I was on the spoken-word scene in New York. I kept hearing that my delivery of my poetry – which was very personal and cathartic at the time- was very moving to folks. People thought that I was an actress because of my delivery, when I was just dropping into the work and really pouring out my soul.
The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that – sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.
My junior high school teacher, Bennie Williams, was really more than a music teacher. She taught us poetry. She helped us put on school shows. She did all these kinds of things to help us stand in each other’s shoes, and it was a really powerful time. That’s when I discovered that I could sing.
In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn’t not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being’s vital essence – a not wholly irrational belief.
I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.
The techniques of contemporary poetry are probably the techniques of your daily life. I don’t know a single person who goes into the grocery store and thinks in complete sentences. We often think in fragments, we think in little lists, we think in non-sequiturs, we think in feelings that may not match up with each other.
I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have ‘trained’ or ‘practised’ enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
I stay up on current events. I read ‘The New Yorker’ and ‘The Economist.’ I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. I studied literature in college, so I also continue to read poetry, literature, and novels.
That’s another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, ‘Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?’ And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.
