#divedapper

I don’t think I’m interested in making people empathize with the Palestinian cause, because, I don’t know, I was talking with a bunch of Palestinians about how white people want to come up and hug us after we read our poems. And I’m just so uninterested in that. There’s no white person on Earth that could empathize with a Palestinian living in Palestine. I want my poems to make you angry, to make you protest, to talk to your family members, who don’t know or do know and actively repress it. What does your alleged empathy do for Palestine writ large?

Reading a poem is always great, but teaching a poem gives you an entirely new relationship to it in my experience.

I think that the older I get, the more I try hard to be myself. When I first started writing, I did what a lot of younger writers do, I mimicked other writers, whether dead or alive because I lacked confidence not only for my writing but for myself as a person. It wasn’t until maybe my third book that I started to realize that maybe I should just be myself, however that manifests itself.

I just think it’s important that we accept the fact that we’re writers. I think we should accept the fact that we’re artists. Obviously we don’t have any choice in that matter. All of us are clearly very smart people. There are other things we could be doing that would be much more financially advantageous. So we can accept the fact that we’re artists as a burden, or we can accept it as the best thing that could possibly ever happen to anyone. And if we can accept that as the best thing that could possibly ever happen to anyone, that changes what we use in our poems and how we use it. And it changes how we look at what we use and how we use it.

I don’t think any other art can get at how we move back and forth between fear and faith in the way poetry does.

I’ve become over time less interested in being a documentarian and more interested in creating alternative spaces in which working people can document their lives. Instead of going and riding with taxi drivers and writing a poem about that, I’m interested in a new space where taxi drivers can write poems.

Poetry has so many different powers, I believe—it can educate us, make us feel sympathy or empathy, empower us. It can allow us to reckon with our traumas that perhaps, you know, we’ve suppressed. It can revitalize lost languages, and suffering or oppressed cultures. It could allow us to see the world from a different perspective. And you know, the ultimate hope, especially in political poetry, is to be disturbed towards action.