"Poetry Kept Me Alive"

"Poetry is a way of keeping alive and keeping emotionally vivid .... you need to keep feeling ... without it you forget you are a human being ..." prisoner

"I was a very young angry child ... I marched for civil rights as a child... I got angry and militant... I got in trouble - not being able to read and write - I got locked up ... then Martin Luther King Jr. died and got angrier - they took away my reading in prison ... I got more angry and I did not stop until someone gave me back my book... I started reading and writing... I later formed a writers club"