American - Writer | 1972 - 10
The people who talk about the middle class aren't upholding their interests in the legislature.
Alissa Quart
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I was just a bright, driven kid.
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Giftedness gives you this amazing tool kit for handling self-discipline and gives you an area of knowledge, but then it also gives you this weird set of aspirations.
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A lot of the things that bore adults don't bore children, and people forget that. In some ways, boredom is a projection of adults because we can't remember what childhood was like.
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I'm not one of these anti-TV people.
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Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice. It gives expression not just to our rites but also to our problems and even our values; these poems are not about rustic vacations.
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Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.
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There are caste systems in American cities: Many are marginalized to the edges of urban centers due to real estate costs; price tags seem to lurk around human encounters; there's a cult of overwork in the middle class; workers at your local manicurist, your local fast casual restaurant, are exploited.
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My husband was 50; I was in my late 30s. We had lived adulthoods that did not include infants, except as metaphors. And then, like so many in today's America, we had a baby in later life.
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Unnatural constructs - cities and medical pain management - have always seemed pretty good to me.
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I saw my gender - and myself - as something of a construct. Like anyone who read one too many women studies' books in the 1990s, I aspired to both 'do' and undo my sex.
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There is a set of emotions around money and new technology and advertising and that sort of thing, and there is this kind of changing, transforming way we go through the world happening. The lyrical eye, the perspective of poetry, can get to something like this when other forms of writing can't.
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