“I liked the question Fady Joudah posed in his note about ‘Things You’ve Never Seen,’ recently featured in Poem-a-Day: ‘when is a poem more than the sum of our progressive, imperial selves?’ It made me think: can we get rid of socialization’s influence in us, or enough of it to allow us to determine the flavor of our own lives? My friend Omar Pérez said the job of the poet today is to have fun and to observe, and to have fun with what he observes, which I thought was great. Another friend, the Serbian philosopher Obrad Savić, once told me the highest task of poetry is myth. I agree. I imagine the task includes destruction as much as creation.”
—Jesús Castillo