I wanted to play for the Lakers. When I was growing up, Magic Johnson was an idol to Los Angeles. I met him once. I was 15, he was signing autographs. Yeah, just wanted to be the Magic, man. I went to basketball camp every summer, I played basketball through high school, and then that was it. I didn’t have the size, the physicality — just wasn’t good enough. One of the advantages of having a dream, it taught me how to strive. Basketball camp was a chance to get away and meet kids from other parts of the state and know that there’s a world outside of my own. A lot of the things I picked up from that specific dream transferred over to what I do now.

I was always writing. My mother was a big reader so there were books all around. I used to rap. I had aspirations. By the time I was 17, I was getting played on local college radio stations.

In college, I wanted to be an essayist, so I gave up the rap as an aspiration. It wasn’t until I was almost 30 years old that I started really reading and studying poetry, and I found a way for me to kind of bring all my various selves together in a way that felt whole. If I’m writing a poem about a certain event that took place during my adolescence and I’m going over the poem to make sure the lines are singing, I’m having to spend a lot of time with that event. I think the truth telling makes one more honest, and you can live a more authentic life.

I would tell people I got my bachelor of arts at Barnes and Noble’s University. I’d go and buy books, I’d go to libraries, check out books, and really just read anything I could get my hands on. I started to study form and structure because I thought I needed a stronger foundation. I studied sonnets and Haiku and sestinas. They taught me something that I don’t think I could have learned any other way. I still impress upon my students the importance of a strong foundation.

Take the Kobe Bryants, the Brandon Ingrams, the Michael Jordans. Their technique has been shaped by long years of practice on the basics. Once they have those down, then they can then jazz it up and improvise. But it takes a strong foundation. I believe that as a teacher and as a poet still.

I spent the better part of a decade and a half writing raps, listening to rap. When I came to poetry in my late 20s, I felt very insecure. I didn’t realize at the time that I had that training: learning metaphor, simile, assonance, rhyme, meter, all these things. I didn’t have a vocabulary for it, but I’d been spending time with this: language as music and music as language.

Writing poetry is a huge privilege. You know, you hear it said a lot that poets don’t make any money, which is not altogether true. You won’t get rich from writing poems, but it has other rewards. I met most of my friends, I met my wife, my community through being a poet. It’s allowed me to travel and see countries that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. I think it’s my responsibility to really try to honor those who came before me.

Having written a good poem brings me joy. Being able to do what I love for a living brings me joy. But the work is hard. The rewards that you get from the world don’t sustain anyone. For me, to try to become worthy of being part of something so vast and ancient is a great motivator. Nothing around you tells you that this is something important to do. The motivation comes from elsewhere.

I feel joyful knowing that I’m part of something that came way before me and hopefully will come way after me. Ideally, one will be recognized and respected by one’s peers during the lifetime and the work will go on, you know? But I think that more important than the recognition or whether you’re appreciated after death, is really having given yourself over to this thing. Rilke says, “When I go toward you, it is with my whole life.” Having something to dedicate your whole life to, your whole being, and lose yourself in — that’s everything.

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