Word: poem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Most Way Home," Kevin dedicated one poem to his father and one poem to his mother, and each had to do with their individual childhood experiences. Writing about a family is a complex issue--it raises questions of public and private, of distance and of love--and I ask Kevin whether or not his parents live his poetry. "I don't think it's a matter of like of don't like, but more that they are involved in it. They are engaged by it, and often surprised," he says. "they tell me things, stories about their childhood and stuff...
...times, you become an authority you didn't want to become." He sees that expectation forced on Black artists in a range of media, from film to literature, and he says he sometimes find it stultifying. "How can I represent all of Black history in a poem?" he ask a me. "If you ask something of The Invisible Man That you don't ask a Bight Light, Big City, that's a problem...
Most of the poems in "Most Way Home " are shorter lyrics. Of the form, Kevin says, "What I'm interested in is what it can do in discrete moments." When he describes his thesis, he say, "It's not like a collection of my best poems. There's a movement." There is a movement." There is a movement through his family's Southern history, but it is a movement through a larger history as well. The material for a few of his poems are salve narrative and documents; the introductory poem of his thesis is an advertisement for two lost...
...take you out of context." But Kevin is also aware of the cultural possibilites of poetry, and the legacy of the epic which will explain and contain all of a people's history. Epics have become something of a phantasm. Kevin says, "There's this attitude that some poem is going to come along and save our lives, that it will be the perfect poem. That can't happen." It can no longer happen because plurality has become preventative. As Kevin says, "I don't think any people are as monolithic as the news would have us think...
Wilson had considered a career in writing, butthat dream was quickly--but temporarily--dashedwhen he submitted a poem to the Advocate duringhis first year...