Great Regulars: All the protest that we were just talking about

fits into the book because a big part of the struggle with me in writing this book was that, after September 11th, after Katrina--and I live in New Orleans now--after terrible things happen: what good is a writer, a poet? Poetry seems kind of trivial. Some people will argue, I have friends who are poets and they'll argue that, well, "It's still a refuse, it's still a place you can go for hope and things like that": poetry, you can still get that out of it. And I suppose that's true. But I always felt that certain things in the news, non-fiction, or real experiences were always stronger than poems themselves to a certain degree. So in the book there's a lot of struggle with being a poet in a time when things are supercharged politically and there's lots of terrible things going on in the world.

from Belinda Subraman Presents: Mark Yakich and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine

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