Zitat des Tages von Juan Felipe Herrera:
Just like my parents immigrated from ranch to ranch picking crops, I have migrated from city to city.
I write while I'm walking, on little scraps of paper. If I have a melody going, I can feel it for days.
Yes, I am the first Latino poet laureate in the United States. But I'm also here for everyone and from everyone. My voice is made by everyone's voices.
If I can only be known as one thing, then, well, I guess it would be poet and performer and teacher.
I want our young Latinos and Latinas to write their hearts out and express their hearts out and let us all listen to each other.
I'm usually writing in English, and then I'll get the hankering to change channels. And usually I'll do that when I want to try a whole new set of keys, like musical keys.
I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'
By middle school, I said to myself that it's time I begin to speak. I joined the choir, not because I wanted to. I forced myself.
Sometimes you can do things with Spanish - like verbs and genders - easier than you can in English.
Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.
Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.
Migrants all over the world are pushed and pulled across borders by hunger, terror and climate change. It happened to my own family.
Marvin Bell always looked very closely at how lines could break, how you could put over one line into the second line. How you could stop the line two or three times within the line: You could make it stop.
I'm a political poet - let us say a 'human' poet, a poet that's concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that's what I'm going to use.
I want to take everything I have in me, weave it, merge it with the beauty that is in the Library of Congress, all the resources, the guidance of the staff and departments, and launch it with the heart-shaped dreams of the people.
I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.
