Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy.
Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books.
I was like the family clown. The middle child entertaining. I was a lousy student, but interestingly, the nuns always let me write plays or do drawings, endless special projects.
Who doesn't want to be famous? I am famous. I'm dying to be on TV.
A vote should be generative, not like business as usual, which is what voting feels like for most of us.
If you have a dog, and you're a person whose moods are constantly changing, there's a moment when you look at the dog, and you feel bad for them because they're attached to you, and so it's funny for the dog to vocalize those things in some ways.
I've had a lifelong waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling when something good happens.
Weirdly, the past starts to be about something else. It becomes about style in a way that it wasn't about, and I don't mean writing style, but cultural style.
Lyndon Johnson, I know for a fact, was a great president. And I don't mean by that he was a great man.
Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us.
I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life.
I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.
I've grown to love Barack Obama. Hillary is no Bernie Sanders. But she's a politician, and she understands Congress. And I think with that kind of twisted beauty, she could lead our country.
To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it.
The poet is like the earth's shadow. The sun moves, and the poet writes something down.
Evolution is not an even process. There are surges, and there are micromoments. Certainly a career as an artist is that way.
As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.
I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.
The thing about not being historically a mainstream writer is that everyone feels like you're theirs: you're their friend.
