Word: poem
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...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...
...member of the Signet Society. But he was neither. "The Advocate publishes its own people," he says. "If you just look at the Advocate, you would think the literary community is very small. The problem is that the Advocatealso thinks it's very small." Though the Advocate published each poem he submitted to it, he says e knows that many of the other poems that the magazine rejected ware very good. "People came up to me complaining that their work hadn't been published in the Advocate. And I want to say, 'Why didn't you submit...
...once read to a crowd of 1200 people in Memorial Hall at the 1990 Cultural Rhythms Festival. And while he was in San Fransisco, he read at two local cafes. He enjoy the audience feedback, when he actually gets it." But I hate when people s me what a poem's about. I usually just say, 'What do you think it's about?" he says. "Really, I don't know if I could tell you what it's about, or it might not even be about that anymore... There are as many rights as there are people. There are only...