As young writers, what advice would I give you?
Well, I think the primary advice is to read.
And, not only read like serious literature,
I mean you read whatever interests you.
And like I told you, in high school,
Star Trek novels got me through a lot of tough times.
And comic books.
Whatever it really interests you,
Magnum, whatever it interests you, read.
Just be engaged with language.
And you'll be surprised, eventually,
you make a leap into like novels or short stories,
"literary quality" that you'll be surprised.
Because all the commercial fiction you read,
all the popular stuff, there's always
allusions, references to Shakespeare,
the Greek myths, even some Mesoamerican cultures.
There's always, in that so-called light literature,
there's always seeds that gesture,
are rooted in the greats, the great's work.
You'll find those out eventually as you
keep reading and reading.
And also-- As a poet, you're not only
a poet when you're at the desk in front of a page
or a screen or a laptop writing.
I think a poet is somebody who thinks about language.
Even like me in the city, in the subway, I carry a phrase.
Like lately I've been paper jazz, paper jazz.
I carry that with me and just repeat it.
I switch around the words, I play with it.
All day for a day or two, in a week.
And that's how I feel most like a poet
when I'm dwelling with language, a little snippet of language,
or just playing with it.
So, you're not only a poet, you know, when
you're at a desk or a laptop.
You could be a poet just thinking about language.
Tweeting about language, facebooking about language.
I really like to Facebook.
That's why I keep talking about Facebook.
He's on Facebook all the time.
No.
Something that I think is really important,
and I always go back to this, but I just
think you have to just be bold and don't
let anybody tell you what you should or shouldn't write.
I think that's the most important thing.
If you have something in you that's
bothering you, that you're wondering about,
that you've been thinking about, write it.
You don't have to show it to anybody.
You don't have to publish it.
You can do whatever you want with it.
But I think for me, that's an important thing is just
to make a decision right away that I'm
going to say whatever I want.
And I'm going to say it in any way that I need to say it.
I'm going to use whatever I need to do to tell it,
to tell that story.
But I think another thing is, and I
think call yourself a poet.
Call yourself a writer.
You know, I think it's important to take that step forward,
you know, because--
and this is, again, I think this is coming from that basketball
kind of mentality.
And I think be proud, be courageous in it and say yeah,
I'm a poet.
And as soon as you can say that to yourself,
you're going to start treating yourself like a poet.
Which means you're going to start reading,
you're going to start setting time aside to write,
you're going to start doing the things just
like if you say I'm a teacher.
You know there are certain things you have to do every day
to be a teacher.
If you're a bus driver, there are certain things
you have to do every day to be a bus driver, to be a mother,
to be any of those things.
So say it.
I'm a writer.
I'm a poet.
And that means, hey, you know, you're
the only one that can control the things you do.
So now once you say it, you're going
to start doing all the things that
are going to let you be a poet or a writer.
You're going to start reading, you're
going to start carrying a notebook around,
you're going to start making sure you've got a pen,
you're going to start actually keeping the scraps of paper you
write on.
You're going to start writing down
the funny things your grandparents said
or about the fight you had with your sister, you know.
You're going to start writing those things down.
And so I think those two things for me is just
say what you need to say.
Don't write what someone else is telling you to write,
write what you have to write.
Yeah.
Like with anything else.
And once you call yourself a writer a poet,
you realize it's labor intensive.
It's craft oriented.
I mean, just because you call yourself
a football player or a dancer doesn't
mean you can get on the field on a stage and perform, you know.
It's going to take practice, practice, practice.
I mean, that's what it is.
Practice.
And be aware that you're going to fail and fail so many times
until you finally find that space that you
feel really comfortable in.
I still fail all the time writing and drafting.
But we all do, every poet does, every writer does.
No matter how big or successful, they are
they're always failing on the page or the feel
like a failure.
But they keep trying because they're
interested and passionate about language.