To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.
Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?
There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.
But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.
It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.
The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.
We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.
One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!
CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.
I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.
