In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.
I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
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.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.
The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.
There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.