It was funny, when I went to a publishing company to say I wanted to do a poetry book, they were really disheartened. They really wanted like a biography or something. And um, I kind of had to do a package deal where I do a sort of autobiographical book if they let me put out a book of poetry. I really believe in poetry. I think, you know, if you wanna look at the history of the human heart, you need to look to the poets. History books show you where battles were fought, how they marched, what they fought with, what the war was fought over, but it really doesn't tell you about the, the heart of the soldier. You need to read the love letters to really understand why people were really fighting. And for me, that’s what poetry does. I think it's a really essential part of the human history. And its, you know, my favorite poets like Pablo Neruda, a lot of the Russian poets. Uh, you really understand the political culture, the religious climate in a way that you just can't by reading a, a history book. It’s really impassioned. I just, you know, I've always been fascinated by words. I've always loved words. I've always been really moved by writing.um It's really a fascinating process to try and take a, a mindless, wordless feeling and try and concrete it into words without it deadening. That's a hard job, and I've always found it to be a great challenge. And I thought that, you know, writing for me as a kid helped me so much. You know, I had kind of a strange, hard childhood. And writing kept me, I think, from doing drugs and going crazy. You know, it really kept track of myself. It was like my own little babysitter. You know, I'd go, wow, I’m really thinking dark thoughts. Or, wow, I’m getting out there. Or, wow, I'm, you know, whatever. And so I thought it’d just be valuable for kids to get into poetry because the poetry we're taught in schools is great. Poe's great, but he's not who I’d want to start somebody out on poetry. It's too obtuse. You can't really understand it. It has nothing to do with people's lives. And so I put together a book of poetry that was like some of my earliest poems that weren't necessarily great poems, but just 'cause I wanted kids to look at writing as something that's approachable instead of just, you know, this poetry being something that, you know, you can't do. And it's for kind of these weird intellectuals that write about stuff you can't understand, you know. Uh, this is called "You Tell Me." I wrote this around the same time as I wrote "Hands," uhm, so I guess it has a pretty similar sentiment.
