I often start with a question as big and unwieldy as why do we have children – or what are we investing in when we love and raise our children; it’s … - Gregory Pardlo

I don’t think it’s a responsibility, but I certainly think it’s something poetry can do, and I think that poetry has a unique ability to do it because of its self-referential nature and its self-conscious nature. And I mean that in the sense that, in prose, we’re not often as conscious of the language and the operation of language itself. Our focus in on the content, on what is denotatively produced. In poetry we are trained, or at least readers of poetry are trained, to attend to or account for the structures of language as well as what that language conveys.

And I think for any kid, you know, looking up to - any boy, certainly, looking up to his father - and, you know, I'm granting that there are some aspects of masculinity that I'm not entirely down with anymore, you know, as an adult, but as a kid, I bought into the narratives of masculinity very much.…

I’m interested in coaching, modeling, and teaching various writing practices and less in discovering talent. I want students to develop their own unique writing practices rather than impose my aesthetic values from the top down…