Hi, i'm erin

Yazz knows full well that Amma will always be anything but normal, and as

Instead, it’s art’s ambivalent approach to settle for the fact that money is a metaphor, and art is too—that both share the privileged space where concepts become real power.

But I don’t know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.

I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power. In books: truth, and daring, passion of all sorts. Clear and sweet and savory emotion did not run in a rippling stream in my personal world—more pity to it! But in stories and poems I found passion unfettered, and healthy. Not that such feelings were always or even commonly found in their clearest, most delectable states in all the books I read. Not at all! I saw what skill was needed, and persistence—how one must bend one’s spine, like a hoop, over the page—the long labor. I saw the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances—a passion for work.

I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.

And there was the passion which he invested in the poems. The metaphysical curiosity! The oracular tenderness with which he viewed the world—its roughness, its differences, the stars, the spider—nothing was outside the range of his interest.

I’m not a celebrity, I’m a worker. I’ve always worked. I was working before people read anything about me, and the day they stopped reading about me, I was doing even more work. And the idea that if you’re a mother, you’re not doing anything—it’s the hardest job there is, being a mother or father requires great sacrifice, discipline, selflessness, and to think that we weren’t doing anything while we were raising a son or daughter is appalling.

I am this maintenance worker, I am this artist — I mean this is early feminism, very rigid, I literally was divided in two. Half of my week I was the mother, and the other half the artist. But, I thought to myself, ‘this is ridiculous, I am the one.

I was doing work that's so common; yet there was no cultural language for this work. People would ask: "Do you do anything?" I had never worked so hard in my whole life as when I had a little baby. Ever. Trying to be a decent parent, trying to keep myself alive as an artist, trying to make some money. I was working like a maniac. But there were no words in the culture that gave value for the work I was doing.

My own body was expanding, which seemed not unrelated to what I was doing. I was the favorite student of a famous sculptor. The first time I came to class when it was obvious that I was pregnant, he took a look at me, and said: "Well, l guess now you can't be an artist." 

Attention is the beginning of devotion.