News at Eleven: "You will always find at least one person

in every audience who is there for a reason," [Patricia] Smith says. "And it might be a line that's inconsequential in a poem of yours that will get them to sit up and go, 'You know, I've felt that way; I just didn't know there was a way to express it.'" In this moment of connection between speaker and listener, these audience members realize "they have a second throat that they're not using," Smith says. "Poetry is a responsibility and not just an art . . . You are responsible for how your words are going to reach other people . . . You need to know that they will have an effect."

from Blast: The words we've been waiting for

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