From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax.
Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.
As much as we love each other, there is some growing difficulty in my adult relationship with my father. Because we're both writers, we're having a very intimate conversation in a very public forum.
'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.
