An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.
“Did people think I sounded black? Totally, but that was a marketing tool as well, but also this is how I grew up and these are my influences.”
“Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.”