Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet · Director of Creative Writing Program · Emory University
Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

As writers, it's our job to write what will become clichés. Not to write clichés, but to be original enough that we make something that people are still saying for hundreds of years to come. And if that's what you're doing, that's pretty powerful. When I'm writing a poem I'm making a world. And if I can stick to that, then I have to believe that once a poem is out in the world, another world has been made, another way of living, another way of thinking, another way of seeing things.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet · Director of Creative Writing Program · Emory University
Editor of How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill

As writers, it's our job to write what will become clichés. Not to write clichés, but to be original enough that we make something that people are still saying for hundreds of years to come. And if that's what you're doing, that's pretty powerful. When I'm writing a poem I'm making a world. And if I can stick to that, then I have to believe that once a poem is out in the world, another world has been made, another way of living, another way of thinking, another way of seeing things.