“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.”

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.

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.

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.

The sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader’s part in the poet’s autobiographical life, in the poet’s memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.

What I was talking about was, of course, very autobiographical – ’68 was the moment when all the young people were incredibly excited, because when we were going to sleep, we knew we would wake up not tomorrow, but in the future.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

[Oscar Wilde’s Salome screenplay] is not autobiographical in a sense where you go to my house and see my kids and stuff like that, but that’s why I guess it’s semi-autobiographical.