Yeah, so he's asking a lot of deep things there.
So, he's asking should there be--
should everybody be able to express their poetry?
Should we have more ways of expressing it?
I mean I think kind of what you're talking about
is poetry is very small.
You know, like on my reservation if you say you're a poet,
they don't really pay much attention--
they don't really care.
People are trying to make a living,
they're trying to put food on the table,
they have work to do, they have kids to raise.
And so, poetry seems so so minimal there.
But I mean I think it's important, even like here
at your school to have two--
we're not 45-year-old white academic poets up here
that have in the past been taught,
that's all we've been taught, a certain type of poetry.
But just to see that every one of you has a voice,
and that's poetry.
And I think I hope that's one of the things you guys take away
is that you can say it any way you want.
You can say it with rhythm like spoken word.
You can say it in form, you can say it in rhyme.
You can say it in a narrative story about your grandfather.
You can say it in a political way, where you're embracing
and kind of butting your head up against some of the things
that are going on in our communities right now.
And so you can say it any way.
And the most important thing is that you
start writing it first.
You start telling your stories, you know,
because the more people we have telling it,
then the more ears we're going to have hearing it.
And so poetry does seem small.
And it seems like it might not make such a big difference,
you know.
And this is something a mentor said to me,
it's not brain surgery, you know.
You're not going to save the world with poetry.
But for the length of your poem, you're
going to stop somebody for that small amount of time.
And you're going to make them see something different.
You're going to make them think in a slower way.
And you're going to make them take your poem
and it's going to connect with something in there.
And there's going to be a dialogue that happens.
And when they walk away, if you've
written a poem that really you've put yourself into,
they're going to walk away a little bit changed.
Even if they forget what it was you told them and they have
this new idea in their head, you know, and they'll leave with.
So, you know, poetry we're not going
to reach everybody right away right at first, you know.
It is small, it's not fiction.
You don't make a lot of money off of it, you know.
But it's an important thing.
You know, poetry is memorable interesting language.
And so that means it does not only exist on the page
or in a textbook.
The commercials you hear are memorable, interesting.
The tweets you receive or send out, your Facebook friend
statuses are very interesting and memorable.
That is poetry too.
I mean it does not only exist on the page or in a book.
We are continuously surrounded by
interesting, memorable, a.k.a. poetry,
language, poetic language.
The key is to be looking for it to have
an ear and eye for a phrase that sounds
beautifully musical to you.
And like oh, and to write it down or just think about it,
dwell with it.
I mean, you are surrounded by poetry all the time.
You just have to be used to start pulling it out
of the air, out of Facebook, out of Twitter.
Out of the blogs, everything.
Even in newspaper articles I always find a phrase or two
like oh, that's very beautiful.