This poem emerged when my frustration and anger at environmental rollbacks coming out of Washington, D.C., collided with what I was learning about the ways that fine particulate matter from fossil fuel burning affects our bodies, especially our brains, and the unconscionable coal extraction technique called mountaintop removal—that it occurs at all is a solid example of systemic evil. Trying to bend language around this, I broke it.
Kelly Lenox on "Doing Violence to the Language: Mountaintop Removal" |
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| "I was writing these kind of terrible little college poems before I started taking Africana Studies classes and was, like, 'Oh, there's something to write about. And there's a lineage of people writing about it.'"
via PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER |
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"I was in college in a small school in Central Pennsylvania and must have ended up in the large lecture hall to hear Maya Angelou by accident, if not for an assignment....The experience sent me off into the stacks to read for myself some of the poems I had heard Angelou read. Rereading I realized I could begin to rehear the music I had heard in person; following the lines, as I read out-loud, I felt my own voice approximate the same sounds. This was thrilling and utterly new.” |
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