Juan Felipe Herrera

By middle school, I said to myself that it's time I begin to speak. I joined the choir, not because I wanted to. I forced myself.

The more we engage in society, the more firsts we have, then there will be a moment when we have no more firsts. Or maybe there will always be new firsts.

Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

A pen is different from the pad, the key, moving your fingers across a screen. I like both. I like to work on sketchbooks, big old white sketch paper. I like how that feels, and I like to put different media on it. Then there's the phone, smartphone, iPad: It's the new page, and it's not the same page anymore.

Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.