Quotes About Identity

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

I was born in the Bay Area because my dad was a semi-professional photographer and poet who was really into John Coltrane. He's had many lives. My dad's a capitalist to his bone, but he's also a human to his bone.

I'm no parasite. I'm a poet who will bring honor and glory to his country.

You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.

I'm a poet first and foremost, before the modelling.

I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.

If I can only be known as one thing, then, well, I guess it would be poet and performer and teacher.

It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.

All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.

Once I stop being a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I will not stop being a Russian poet.

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died after stabbing himself in the foot.

In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.

I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me.

I'm not literary, and I'm not academic, and I don't think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.

It wasn't until I was named Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. in high school though that I officially began calling myself a poet. I just always loved writing, period.

What I wish I had, is that I wish I was a little more Greek, in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.

I try for a poetic language that says, This is who we are, where we have been, where we are. This is where we must go. And this is what we must do.