“This poem began as an emulation of Siqueiros’s compositional style and, in the process, became an ekphrastic aubade about my old neighborhood.”

Because before that I wasn’t thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever.

It was in the air somehow. That ownership of bigotry. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.

It’s financial of course, but it’s also the lifestyle choices. The more money people have the further away from each other they often want to be.

It made me want to change the kinds of poems I was writing, but I’m terrible at writing overtly political poems.

I wanted to be like Spock because he was unflappable.

I never thought I would type that I learned how to emote in poems from watching Star Trek but there it is.

Bones was a grouch but he was sympathetic. The show worked like a boy band in that way… it had characters who embodied different psychic or emotional positions and that allowed me to see a great range of things

That was one of things that surprised me so much when I was writing the poems.

I had to find a way to be more honest about what happened. And it wasn’t fun to write, even though the poems aren’t 100% autobiographical.

They are 100% the product of the circumstances that led me home.

By that I mean, honest and not trying to amplify some mythological version of myself.

I mean getting people to think about what language actually means before they use it is a good thing.

There is no way I would have written these poems had I not come back.

I wanted to be like Kirk because he had magnetism and the ladies loved him.

But it’s become very clear the past nine years that some Americans truly resent thinking before they speak.

It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.

This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.

When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously.

And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.

Rock ‘n roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm.

Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.