Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Hugely, yeah. I think, on the one hand, I was exposed to so little when I started writing poetry because I’m just old enough that the internet was much smaller for poetry then, and one had to rely on teachers and library stacks to figure out where one stood with this thing. As a weird little light-skin kid with very white teachers, that was mostly bad news for me. Then everything became reachable all the time and what I do now has been made possible by that, full stop. That’s one reason I’m always—with massive caveats, just like everyone else—grateful for the internet.
On the other hand, I think a natural shift has occurred over time, wherein I’ve moved from working to take myself seriously as a poet to working to take poetry serious as a practice. It’s a trope, no doubt, but: this stuff has kept me going, kept me alive. People taking you seriously has, on its own, next to no shelf life; I try (try) not to think about how the work will be received when I get to the reception part because the angst that can come with is has no life in it for me. So, now I work to make my days busy with the practice of this work keeping me alive. My understanding of taking that seriously, of being dead serious about how hard you have to keep pushing for that life to keep, has grown with that. It’s the way a sprint is enough to get you high at first, and by year 19 it’s running an ultra in the woods with a bad knee by headlamp in the middle of the night wondering when you’ll start vomiting. That growth is still changing poetry for me.
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