When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.
I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part.
Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.
I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.
No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
Several elementary school teachers had described me as a 'future authoress or poetess.' Mother took me to meet Chicago's leading black librarian, who published a poem of mine in the magazine she edited for Negro children.
In my relationship with a young guy I was going with in a band - his name was Sylvester, and I think he had another little girl on the side - I told him, 'If you lose me, you're going to lose a good thing.' And I went home and put that poem to music.