Robert Hayden

To Let This Woman Love Me is an attempt to observe the firsthand pain of love and intimacy, which demands one's transformation, a kind of dying.

This poem responds to Joni Mitchell's song Both Sides Now in which she sings, "I really don't know love at all," and to Robert Hayden's question in the poem Those Winter Sundays, "What did I know? What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?" Similarly, this poem asks how will I overcome my own history, my own ruin? How will I allow another person to enter that sacred, secret space of devastation?

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It's part also of prayer, which is in all of my poems and have been in my poems from the beginning, and people who pray and, and even though that complexity of prayer.

And Hayden said, Robert Hayden, a poet who I've been very close to and a very strong impact on my work from the very beginning.

He's from Detroit and also went to the University of Michigan, where I went, and clearly one of the great poets o- of the, in American poetry.

And I actually was able to meet him when I was in Ann Arbor.

There's so many contemporary poets that I'm learning to love and appreciate.

The opportunity to be quilted by that black-eyed pea, that Nikki Giovanni, or to shake loose my skin like Sonia Sanchez, to rise above it all like Maya Angelou, to sit on a cold day and read Robert Hayden's work, to sit there for me, to be in Chicago, hanging out on Bronzeville, loving Gwendolyn Brooks and the way that she loved her city.

There are just so many young poets that I'm appreciating the way that they are handling the craft and locally, my poetic peers.

who are not surrendering, who are not turning back, who are allowing the rhythm of spoken word to have a relationship with the fine art and the literary art of the page.

The poems are always there, and the words that others have used to encapsulate feeling, knowing, understanding, ask questions that they have done so well in poetic form I always have that at my disposal.

The greatest of them now at this point in my life, now in, you know, late middle age, I find that Rukeyser, who is actually a more recent entry to the pantheon, but also perennials like Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden.

These words are guides for me, and as I keep turning them over and sharing them, I hope that and believe that in this compendium they can be guides to others.

Guides for you toward what?

Hmm.

Robert Hayden.

"What did I know? What did I know of loves austere and lonely offices?" So I had these lines in my head that helped me understand the world that I could go back to again and again.

But some of the lines I, I have and I, I riffed on very intentionally is, like, Bruce Springsteen.

Phyllis Wheatley created the bedrock upon which generations of Black writers would flourish.

Poets like Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Claudia Rankine are all part of her lineage.

Even rappers like Lauryn Hill or Kendrick Lamar can look at the impact of Phillis Wheatley on Black poetry and rhetoric as a part of their own origin story.

So whether you're bopping to the Fugees or Drake, thank Phillis Wheatley.