Nationalism Is A Type Of Insanity In

To Write Poetry Is To Be Very Alone, But You Always Have The Company Of Your Influences. But You Also Have The Company Of The Form Itself, Which Has A Kind Of Consciousness. I Mean, The Sonnet Will Simply Tell You, That's Too Many Syllables Or That's Too Many Lines Or That's The Wrong Place. So, Instead Of Being Alone, You're In Dialogue With The Form.

I Think Clarity Is The Real Risk In Poetry Because You Are Exposed. You're Out In The Open Field. You're Actually Saying Things That Are Comprehensible, And It's Easy To Criticize Something You Can Understand.

You Know How Sometimes You Just Have A Memory Of Looking Up And Seeing A Face Looking Over Your Crib And Then Remember Nothing Until Tenth Grade? - I Have One Of These Early Memories Where I'm In The Back Of My Parents' Car, A Place I Loved To Spend A Lot Of Time As An Only Child, Not Having To Fight With Venomous Siblings Over The Only Toy.

A Trouble With Poetry Is The Presence Of Presumptuousness In Poetry, 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. I Try To Presume That No One Is Interested In Me. And I Think Experience Bears That Out. No One's Interested In The Experiences Of A Stranger - Let's Put It That Way. And Then You Have Difficulty Combined With Presumptuousness, Which Is The Most Dire Trouble With Poetry.

Every Day Is For The Thief Is A Vivid, Episodic Evocation Of The Truism That You Can't Go Home Again; But That Doesn't Mean You're Not Free To Try. A Return To His Native Nigeria Plunges Cole's Charming Narrator Into A Tempest Of Chaos, Contradiction, And Kinship In A Place Both Endearingly Familiar And Unnervingly Strange. The Result Is A Tale That Engages And Disturbs.