MAKES:
Poems rocket off the page.
HAS:
Southern roots. Northern shoots. Tools to turn the blues different colors.
WANTS:
To sing lead vox in a parody R&B cover band.
Amateurs find art therapeutic because it allows them to “express themselves,” but poet Robert Lashley finds therapy in work itself. For him, high-sounding descriptions of a love lost or a tragedy endured don’t heal as much as crafting the correct metaphor does. Allowing yourself to “feel feelings” doesn’t move as much as shaping a wild rhythm does. In this way, though Lashley’s poems often emerge from personal traumas and daily observations of his neighborhood, drafting a poem is closer to refurbishing an alternator than it is to writing a diary entry.
He inherits his approach to poetry from his uncle Moe, who was born in 1920 in Mississippi. According to Lashley, Uncle Moe was a wonk. “He didn’t believe in ‘first thought, best thought.’ He believed in ‘hundredth thought, best thought.'” And he was a “rhapsodist,” Lashley said, “in the way that the Harlem Renaissance poets were rhapsodists”—they had to find the right music. “He would stutter, he would t-t-t-try to find the right words when things were too much.”
