What would you tell them are the first steps that they need to be thinking about when they enter into the kind of a life path that you have taken?

First and foremost, the reward, it can never be external.

Whatever your driving force is, it must come from within because it will replenish itself because you're doing the work you're supposed to be doing.

You will not experience mission creep.

You will not find yourself off on some path not knowing how you got there and why you're committed to things that are of no value, consequence, or meaning whatsoever.

to you, your ancestors, whoever they may be, or the legacy you will leave behind.

So it must first be an internal driving force.

Part 5, Democracy Defenders.

How did you come to see poetry as community infrastructure rather than simply just solitary personal expression?

It must start with a feeling, right? So you have the history of the poets that have come before you or however you ground your work.

For me, I'm grounded in the Black Arts Movement.

And that's where I was born into the work in that regard.

And so that movement in itself was all about the work.

How are you taking your artistic ability and applying it to systems and structures and processes to ensure a change in the dynamics of humanity that is not working? And so without realizing it, It was my cornerstone.

It was the foundation of what I believed in because my first really intense artistic experience was at the Betty Shabazz Retreat Center in upstate New York with Third World Press and every... single poet you could imagine who was in that work.

Dayton.