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

I was always casting about for role models as a kid and the Star Trek was always available via reruns and also full of possibilities.

The day after the president Trump election, I remember feeling like it was 1984 again.

I learned a new language for it all in the 90s. Which in some ways isn’t bad.

The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount.

One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.

But fortunately there are also really excellent human beings all over the place, too. So it’s about perception and balance sometimes I think.

The contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.

I was fortunate enough to get a job at my alma mater, which brought me back to Indiana after being gone for twenty years.

One of the things I took from the show was emotional possibility.

I was a poor, geeky black kid in Indianapolis. There is nothing mythological about that.

You should check out William Shatner’s album The Transformed Man.

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.

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.