The Paris Review - Fall 2016

I’m swimming. Water, it does something. And I move through different
genres—that’s how I avoid writer’s block. So I’ll write a poem or draw a cartoon
or work on a novel. Or I’ll write an essay. I get to reach a lot of people
on Facebook.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve always advocated a democratic approach to literature—that good
writing can be found anywhere, that it’s common and unsurprising. In your
Neo-Hoodoo manifesto, from Conjure way back in 1972, you wrote, “Neo-
HooDoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest.”
REED
Yeah, though I’ve discovered that Richard Wright said it first. The other day
I was visiting this high school, and this Chicano girl gets up there and reads
a poem that blew me away. And there was another student—I’m introducing
her to The Paris Review because she’s just extraordinary. And these kids, even
if they never write a poem again, I’ve put their work alongside canonized
poets in anthologies like From Totems to Hip-Hop. I went to the National
Council of Teachers of English, I read a poem by a student, then read a poem
by a canonized poet and asked them to choose which was which. Fifty percent
said the student was the canonized poet. In Totems to Hip-Hop, there’s a
poem by Cynthia Gomez called “San José”—it came from a workshop I did
where I asked students to write a city poem modeled after Carl Sandburg’s
“Chicago.” The BBC called a couple years ago and asked for that poem. I
wonder what happened to her. Even if she never wrote another poem, she
wrote that. Just like Langston Hughes wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
when he was a teenager, and most amazing of all, Billy Strayhorn started
Lush Life when he was sixteen. I mean, the lyrics on there are amazing! So,
that’s why I got very humble. Because I came from Buffalo and I thought
poetry was an elite thing. Then I came to New York and I met the poet
Walter Lowenfels. He was in his seventies at the time and he was listening
to Coltrane, and I met Langston Hughes, who was one of the hippest
people I ever met. Both of them were great poets, but also just accessible to
everybody. Langston was instrumental in getting my first novel published.
They’re the ones who led me to believe that poetry, that writing, can come
from anywhere.
62