on poetry

“….Who in the hell wanted to write a sonnet or a villanelle? We knew what we wanted to write. We wanted to write like the Beat poets, and we knew we wanted to write like Langston Hughes, although he did some form like blues and ballads. But there we were. And I realized from that class that form will not deform you. If I wanted to call myself a poet, it was important that I knew what all these other forms were about.”
Sonia Sanchez
(b. September 9, 1934)

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