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In an interview, the Brownsville rapper Ka states, “You make art because you can’t help it.”

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I write because I can’t help it.

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Writing is the most effective method I’ve found by which I can engage with and relate to the world. This method is often more successful at relating to the world and others in it than my actual person. That’s something I heard the visual artist Laylah Ali say.

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Writing is how I talk to you about how I live and survive in this world. I consider it a privilege and honor if someone reads or hears the work and says “I feel you on that” or if they discover something in it that even I didn’t see at first. On the flip side, I’ve had someone read or hear the work and say to me “You know, I’d like to see you do more of this other thing instead” (that “other thing” being ?) and my response to that is “Well that’s cool if you feel that way, but that’s not what I’m on right now.” You write your stuff, I write my stuff. Maybe that puts us “on the brink” but I don’t see anyone falling yet.

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Perloff’s status quo that needs defying is not the status quo of everyone. Her poetry wars are not the only relevant poetry wars. (Poetry war—seriously? Seriously.) When her poetry war is not arguing euphemistically and exaggeratedly about the “threat” posed by “identity” and “area studies” to literature with a capital L, it is a war of aesthetics. And when it suits her purposes to separate the product from the producers, she does so, without acknowledging that the producers themselves might constitute the “avant-garde” defying the status quo more-so than the product they make. In military terms, the avant-garde is usually cut down first. Clearing a path for those that follow, yes, but at cost to themselves. Considering how Dove winds up under Perloff’s bus, it is possible Perloff overlooks precisely the defiance she champions.

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I’m not going to say anything about what a poet should do because I sure as hell don’t want anyone to tell me what I should do as a poet.

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Is accessibility about being read? About being heard? By whom? The nation or a small coterie of friends?

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Accessibility has direction to it—which way is the door swinging? Are you coming in, or going out?

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I think poetry is fundamentally about people. Sometimes one person, sometimes many. You might reach more people who you don’t actually know (if that’s what being accessible means to you) by standing on the corner speaking a poem through a paper towel tube than publishing by so-called traditional means.

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For me, the imperative of making poetry and making it accessible means getting face to face with people. Maybe those people are Poetry School graduates, Poetry School dropouts, or the men I approached on a lunch break on a corner in downtown Pittsburgh back in the mid-2000s asking if I could read them a poem and if we could talk about it. I read them “Shafro” (by Terrance Hayes) and we talked about it. One of them liked it, the other one not so much.