It holds 10 men and women. I go there, I perform for, I make friends with men and women who spend all of their days locked up. Mass incarceration is a salient, if not the most urgent issue that the United States is dealing with. As far as my involvement goes, my art and my purpose in this world are to take my poetry and use it to change things. You have been hosting creative workshops here, as part of the Maitisong Festival. Do you have a decontextualized approach to teaching?
So everybody has these small pencils is in uniform-jumpsuits in this vomit green colour. You are not allowed to become a functional member of society. I teach young women, and I teach grown men. What we do is we find the good parts in their stories, and find ways of articulating it, so that when they get out, society can be able to listen to them so they have something to offer to the world.
What I will say is that every writer has a certain type of ritual. Mine is different from a lot of writers such as Toni Morrison. She gets up every morning at 6am, puts on a full face of makeup gets dressed to the nines and takes an elevator and goes to the basement and create stories. That is her routine. Mine is not that, I kind of digest my day and create over time.
I do think that that is wrong and should I want to be a writer for the rest of my life, I should get a more serious routine going- outside of smoking weed. During your workshops in order to make everybody comfortable with sharing their poetry you mentioned how we all have secrets….
That or the fear of revealing too much limits the extent to which they express themselves. I think art is about getting to the core of who you are. What makes it difficult to perform? You have a white mother and a black father; you grew up in Harlem, New York. Where have these explorations brought you to? Race is one of the most influential and omnipresent constructs on planet earth. Either is fine until one, which is the ignorance, pushes you into violence.
No matter how many poems I write, I will never solve my racial identity crisis. Poetry does give an opportunity to work through that in an artistic lens. It also gives me an opportunity to put it down on page for people to criticize. There are more stanzas in that poem than there are the minutes it took to write the thing. That does not represent what race means in my own mind. Do I feel different here with you all?
Do I feel like there is something that is something potentially preventing me from being a true part of the community? Yes, absolutely. What I think the poems are healthy for is that they give a holistic account of various points in my life. So that history, those realities are a part of my experience for sure. I have been a keen diarist for the greater part of my life although for reasons that would take this interview on a completely different trajectory, I have stopped.
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