Robin Coste Lewis

“I think that if someone told me I could have been a visual artist, I might have been a visual artist instead. And if I'd known I could have done art history, I would have done that. But I just didn't know.”

“Long before we created libraries, or even books, poetry was the way we humans remembered who we were, a primary means of documenting and contemplating our lives.”

“I am an artist through to my marrow, which might be a curse and not necessarily a good thing.”

“Poetry is this gorgeous, complex history rendered in verse and song, a blueprint that can lead you back into the world after you've walked into air.”

“Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.”

“I don't want to waste my readers' time ever. My readers are very important to me.”

“I think what I would really most like to write about is palm trees and bougainvillea and hummingbirds. I would like to go into the desert and write about salamanders and the Grand Canyon, but history keeps rupturing my experience because politics are everywhere.”

“We all know what it means to be sung to. And poetry is very close to that.”

“I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn't know that one could be a poet.”

“Toni Morrison was a big influence on my work since I was a teenager, what she did with English. I joke that I think she speaks 20 Englishes simultaneously, that she knows how to do that.”