I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

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.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

I am working never to be late again.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and occasions of love among and between peoples.

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.