The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of people. He could have done this only through love- by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.
The people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is not responsible to them. That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strenght and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all batlles by insisting on the human riddle, to beat witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, tranfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people- all people!- who searched in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.
Where the people can sing, the poet can live- and it is worth saying it the other way around, too; Where the poet can sing, the people can live. When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far from the slaughter of innocents.
(James Baldwin)
All Poetry on this page is written by Kenneth E. Foster Jr.
Kenneth Foster's Poetry Books
Prison/ Political
Spiritual
Love