the world of the poem: Individual words have to do a lot of work.

The difficulty is how to write with clarity that offers people access to any given moment while holding them in the complexity inherent in any subject. So there’s a lot of jostling and weighing one word over another, in terms of what I can get from that individual word. And that’s the world of the poem. Individual words have to do a lot of work.

CLAUDIA RANKINE