Interviews

As far as maintaining wonder—I think looking closely at anything does that. You know, you look at a dandelion closely for a little while, notice the million flowers in the one, and suddenly—you know.

Memory is so faulty anyway. Mistakes that I made for that work were like, Listen, these are not facts. Stuff happened, and other people think that Katrina was a natural disaster. Katrina was not necessarily just a natural disaster. Katrina was a political disaster. Katrina was man made, because institutions let certain populations go. Not many people will see it that way.

I think the why of what I’m proposing could not be more opposite to the life hack mentality. I’ve warned people before about my book that not only is it not a self-help book but you might be more confused when you finish it.

The part that sounds weird to non-writers is that—What is this about observing people who only exist in your mind? But that’s how civilians think. To people who do what we do, that doesn’t sound weird at all. That’s the whole job: observing people who aren’t real.

Ideology for me is a loaded word that comes out of a New Critical language of received ideas that are not often interrogated. So I would hope that the essays work in pushing against ideology in the sense that an essay is irreducible from personal experience. In some ways, the more you are able to focus on one’s personal experience of a thing the more resistant you will be to ideology or reductive thinking of a thing.

And so, I’m a daughter of Toni Morrison, though not bloodline; but kinship-wise, and culturally, we are akin. I have a responsibility—to not necessarily say what she has said about being a daughter but to recognize my place in that continuum and welcome other daughters of all cultures into that—because who celebrates that except your family?

Don’t ever do anything that doesn’t have integrity . . . Authenticity as close as you can get it, as close as you can get it and never fudge it. Never blur it. Don’t try and make it pretty. Integrity: that’s the word.

I think that we have to go forward and say, “I’m not going to wait for patriarchal structures to catch up to women poets.” We just have to go forward, and if they are not going to read us in the way that we deserve to be read, then it’s not worth our time in arguing.