The poet is a creator of social values.
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[P]oetry is a subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it as those who make it.
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The power that the poet has to create, preserve, or destroy social values depends greatly on the quality of his/her social visibility and the functionary opportunity to poetry to impact lives.
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But from the very beginning two types of poetry developed. One can be called the poetry of ethos because it was meant to convey personal experience, feelings of love, despair, joy, frustration arising from a very private encounter; the other, functionary poetry, dealt with themes in the social domain, religion, God, country, social institutions, war, marriage, and death in the distinct context of that society’s perception.
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How I tell the truth is a part of the truth itself.
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What I learned in deciding “how” to write was simply that most folks tend to think that you’re lying or jiving them if you have to spice things up just to get a point across. I decided along with a number of other Black poets to tell the truth in poetry by using the language, dialect, idioms, of the folks we believed our audience to be.
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The most fundamental truth to be told in any art form, as far as Blacks are concerned, is that America is killing us. But we continue to live and love and struggle and win.
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I still believe that the age for which we write is the age evolving out of the dregs of the twentieth century into a more human age. Therefore I recognize that my writing must serve a dual purpose. It must be a clarion call to the values of change while it also speaks to the beauty of a non-exploitative age.
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I cannot tell the truth about anything unless I confess to being a student…. The more I learn, the clearer my view of the world becomes. To gain that clarity, my first lesson was that one’s ego always compromised how something was viewed. I had to wash my ego in the needs/aspirations of my people. Selflessness is key for conveying the need to end greed and oppression. I try to achieve this state as I write.
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I keep writing because I realize that until Black people’s social reality is free of oppression and exploitation, I will not be free to write as one who’s not oppressed or exploited.
