by Kennedy McDaniel
Michelle Antoinette Nelson, otherwise known as Love the Poet, is a Baltimore-based poet, actor, musician, and artist. She is the founder and host of Be Free Fridays, a Punany Poet, the playwright and star of her own one-woman play, “God’s Country,” and the founder of Brown and Healthy, a global health initiative for people of color.
I met up with Love the Poet at the Dovecote Cafe to discuss poetry, activism, race, and Baltimore.
KM: How did you begin writing? What made you get into poetry?
LTP: I started when I was 11, so that was about 24 years ago now. My dad was a functioning alcoholic, and one of the things my middle school counselor realized was that there were a lot of us, students who had alcoholic parents. She started a group for us and said one of the things we needed to do was journal. So when I started to journal, everything came out in poems. I didn’t even know I could write a poem. I started writing just so I could emote and get through my parents separating. It was very therapeutic.
KM: What made you decide to take your writing to a professional level?
LTP: I went to Coppin State in 1999, and when I got there they had an event with two spoken word artists onstage, and I had never seen that before. I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, and I wasn’t used to arts that you would find in the city. When I saw them perform, I walked up to them afterwards and asked, “how do you do that?” I was already performing in middle school and high school talent shows, where I infused a little bit of poetry in my performances, but mainly I just used it as a way of getting things off my chest and getting A pluses on my reports. I’d add a little poem to it and the teacher would love it and I’d get a better grade. But when I saw them, I wanted to learn how to perform. I already knew how to write poems, but I wanted to perform them. So David Ross (otherwise known as Native Son) and Danielle Fuller, the two spoken word artists at the event, took me under their wing and helped me out. We ended up doing the very first Battle of the Schools, and I really started loving it. I was a residence hall assistant and I started doing a regular open mic on campus. When I graduated from college in ’03, i decided i wanted to do my art, and went full speed ahead.
KM: What is your creative process, and who do you write for?
LTP: At this point, my process is interesting. I do so many other things besides poetry - I’m a photographer, I play guitar. I started adding things as I got older. You always want to collaborate with others, but sometimes you just want to do it yourself. My process now, especially with writing, is really organic. If I feel it, I write it. It doesn’t happen often at this point. Or if I have a focused project, I can write for it. I can write for anything. If someone gives me a word, right now, I can write a poem in ten minutes. I’ve always had that ability, It’s just one of my little gifts. I can create from anything, and I teach that too. I actually analyze what my process is, how I get to where I get when I hear a word, and I teach that. There’s a process to writing poetry just like there’s a process to writing a thesis paper. I don’t believe writers block exists.There’s always something to glean inspiration from, you just have to know how to get it. Sometimes your gift flows through you at the beginning, but in order to excel and grow you have to identify the process and manipulate it in order to get better. I definitely have the ability to create whenever I want to, but I choose to allow it to cultivate from what’s happening in the news, or something in my spirit that I have to flesh out.
KM: I noticed that some of your work focuses on the intersection of religion and sexuality in the Black church. What role does religion play in your life and in your work?
LTP: I released my spoken word album The Chrysalis in 2008, and that was the beginning of that exploration. At this point, I’m not religious. I grew up a Seventh Day Adventist, but I don’t subscribe to any one faith now. Upon doing my own research and figuring out what religion is supposed to be and what it is now, it’s so divided and perverted and fixed to condition people. The more that I define and accept my sexuality and move in who I am, the more I’m able to interpret and decipher and discern what spoke to me in the realm of spirituality, and what works for me. I understand that there’s one truth. There have been 16 fallen and risen saviour. There’s obviously one truth that keeps repeating itself that we’re all supposed to know. But you have your denominations, which is a word you find in mathematics, in division, and it’s on purpose. You have these things that are institutional, that are ingrained in tradition, in the culture and control of people. I started to see that, not just in general, but with me and my family members who couldn’t see past it, or understand that me saying that I’m gay doesn’t make me different than the person I was yesterday, when you assumed I was gay. Because that’s the assumption that’s placed on everyone as soon as they are born, that they are this way, and that’s ridiculous. When the norm is assumed, you deal with people deflecting their fear of living free on you, when you decide to live free. Around that time, I was recruited for the Punany Poets, which is a sex education theatre poetry troupe that was on HBO’s Real Sex in 2001. I joined the troupe in 2009, and I'm currently the longest running traveling member. When I tour, I meet all types of people, all types of couples who have questions about sexuality and how to operate in their relationship. I started to realize that you get to make your rules, and no one can tell you how to operate within your own space. Because we’re afraid of how people view us, we don’t know how to live and be free within our own relationships, which can ruin them. The owner felt like her initial calling was to be a preacher. There’s a fine line between poetry and preaching and understanding where you come from as far as your message. She preaches openness and love and freedom. It’s kind of a church, a sanctuary of sorts. People come together for a word, and to feel like they’re not alone. To understand humans and to understand God, you have to accept sexuality. As adults, it is what it is. You can label it sinning or whatever you want, but a natural part of human life is sex and sexuality, and searching for your purpose. But what people don’t understand is you’ll never find your purpose if you’re not free. You can’t see it and you can’t grasp it because you’re taught to go to work everyday and work for someone else. So there’s several layers to what I’ve learned as an artist, and on my journey to being free. There’s a piece on Chrysalis called Introspect, and the whole thing was about rebirth and becoming a new person.
KM: So, what are the steps to becoming free as a person?
LTP: For you as a person, you’re 18, you’re already free. What I would suggest is, don’t allow the confines of what you expect adult life to look like to hinder your personal growth. If you live to be 100, you have 82 years left of your life. At 18, there’s no way you can possibly be who you’re supposed to be right now. You’re not even a quarter of the way there. Do not get bogged down by the expectations of the world, they don’t mean anything. I believe that we should have adulthood in stages. Right now, you’re an adult infant. When you’re 25, you’re getting to your adult teenagehood. 30, adult adolescence. When you reach 50, when you have 50 more years to go, you’re an adult adult. And you can go on like that for the rest of your life. The biggest thing is you can’t think that people are not going to have expectations of you when you have expectations of everyone else. The hardest place to get to is to not have any expectations. Because a lot of times, we trust people to do what we would do as opposed to what they would do. You meet somebody, you like them, but you trust that they’ll do what you will do when in reality you have no idea what they’ll do. Understand people for who they are, and if you don’t like what it is, don’t deal with it. You can decide to deal with something, or not deal with it. There’s a lot of freedom in the world, and you have the right to say no. Move in what resonates with you. Don’t stick around for the sake of sticking around. Also a step to being free: acknowledge the small voice in the back of your head that no once can hear. A pretty good grasp on personal freedom is listening to your little voice. And sometimes you’re little voice is mean to you. Reprogram it. if it’s dogging you out, retrain it so that you are in agreement with yourself.
KM: What is your relationship with Baltimore, and what role do you play in the community? What do you want to see for the future of Baltimore?
LTP: I love my city. I call it my city, I’ve been here since I was 18. I think my role has grown over the years. I run the longest running monthly open mic night event in the city, Be Free Fridays, and we just celebrated 10 years. I would venture to say I’m like a mama. We had Mama Kay, all these mamas when we were growing up, and now I find myself in the same role they were in. When people want to do a new event, they talk to me about what I think. Now that I’ve launched the Brown and Healthy movement, that’s positioned me uniquely in the city as far as innovation and activism. But I’m using the network I’ve built as a performance artist to build a movement all over. I don’t have a degree in art, i have a degree in criminal justice. But I’m asked to do a lot of speaking at different institutions, based on my journey an as artist. To sum it up, there’s just a lot of love in the city for what I’ve done and what I will continue to do. I think I have a great reputation here, and city loves me just as much as I love the city.
KM: What vision do you have for the future of Baltimore?
LTP: My vision of Baltimore looks a lot like what’s happening here at Dovecote Cafe. Dovecote Cafe is part of the future of the city. This place popped up not even a year ago in the Reservoir Hill area and has fostered such a great sense of community here, a place for us to sit and talk and have discourse and network with other likeminded brown people in the city and whoever wants to come into the doors. Especially after the Uprising, there’s a greater sense of what the artistic community can do as the glue of the city, because we are and always have been the glue of the city. The art is not a fix for the community, it’s a fixture. They built Station North as an Arts District based on the programming and what was already happening in the area. They built an infrastructure and capitalized off of an already successful, informal arts community. Through the arts, the city is healing, and it’s acknowledging that what happened was simple cause and effect. You do this for so long, this is going to happen. What happens with cause and effect is that you deal with it. Whoever needs to assume responsibility assumes it, and tries to prevent it from happening again. The future of the city hinges on how it decides to utilize artists.
KM: You recently went to Italy for two weeks. What was your experience as a Black person abroad?
LTP: It was interesting, I’m a black woman with a mohawk and a septum ring. I was very me and I got a lot of stares, a lot of pointing. Some people actually wanted to take pictures. I felt like a lot of people were intrigued by us as a group of free Black people. Most of the brown people there who weren’t tourists or visibly mixed were street vendors. I could care less about how people respond to me, I absolutely want to travel more. It’s more about the experience.
KM: What is the Brown and Healthy campaign, and what do you hope to accomplish with it? How does it relate to the rest of your work as an artist?
LTP: Everything is cyclical. Brown and Healthy is a global health and wellness initiative for people of color focusing on mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. I started using it as a hashtag for personal use in 2015. But then the social climate started to change. All these things happened, the Uprising, babies dying, police killings, and I thought, “what can I do for my community?” My friend made the logo, and I decided it was way bigger than me and I had to do something with it.I started doing programming, and we launched the apparel. From there, I have a staff of 6 people to help me with this umbrella movement. For example, if you’re a personal trainer of color, you can come to us and we can ultimately promote you and help you network. The tagline is ‘change the narrative, change the world.’ People all over the world are being force fed negative images of us, so the world sees us in a certain type of way. The campaign is used to definitively uplift us as a people. Saying that we matter is subjective. In middle school, I was taught that I shouldn’t care if I matter to anyone else, as long as I matter to myself. I don’t care if I matter to you or not, but I have a responsibility to matter to me. If I matter to me and I walk in here with a ‘Brown and Healthy’ shirt on, it’s positive, and no one can say anything combative of it. It’s something that we can declare for ourselves, that we exist. And we’re gonna work on our health, and eat right, and motivate our people to do the same thing. We just launched in December, and I want it to be an infectious global movement. Brown and Healthy has five components: a bi-monthly speaker series where mental and physical wellness professionals speak, kids programming, arts exhibition, TV, and radio. We’re engaging the narrative in every way a narrative can be engaged. We’ll be launching some contests and getting young people to get involved and spread the world, It’s going to be a huge undertaking. It fully embraces the artist in me. Right now we’re just working on the funding and making sure we can exist in a very real way.
KM: What are your thoughts on the #BlackLivesMatter movement? What do you think your role is in this movement, if any?
LTP: I’m not the biggest fan of the Black Lives Matter Movement. It served a purpose initially just to wake people up, but it kind of makes me cringe when a nonblack person says Black lives matter. I already know that. I don’t need your validation of my culture and my community to have a place here. It’s an uncomfortable thing. It gives people the onus to once again look for the master’s approval. Black people are the only people in the world to live amongst our captors peacefully. Telling people that we are demanding them to say that we matter gives them a place of superiority. There’s a difference between a person who is your ally and a person who is your accomplice. We need accomplices. Change the law, don’t just talk about how I matter. Do something about it, stop just saying that you like me and that I’m cool. What does it reflect when a kid gets gunned down in the street and a police officer still gets away with it? Police officers like to say that they report bad cops. Cool. But when we’re out in the streets, turn around and protect me with your riot gear. Put your money where your mouth is. I’m over the talking about it. Brown and Healthy is cool because if it resonates with you, it’s the kind of campaign that demands an active lifestyle. What Beyonce is doing, that’s action. You don’t have to agree with it or not, but you can’t deny that it’s action. And sometimes things have to happen to activate an activist. Initially, the Black Lives Matter Movement was good as a call to action, but actually do it. Just like everything else, we’re desensitized to all the violence that’s still occurring, and we just need to approach it in a different way.
KM: What’s next for Love the Poet? What are your future goals, and where do you see yourself in the next 10 years?
LTP: I’m going to be working more on music, my guitar, playing in some bands. I wanna do more of that. I’m back at performing, I kind of got thrown back into it. I want to absolutely do more of my music, I’m the director of Secret of the Pearl, a Punany Poet Show. God’s Country may reappear. And in ten years, Brown and Healthy will be all over the world, helping people in tremendous ways. I’m super dedicated to that, it’s the top of the list. Everything else is just fun. And my photography, because ultimately when I get older I probably won’t want to talk as much, so I’ll be able to relate through my images.
KM: What encouragement would you give to young aspiring artists?
LTP: For young artists, I say there’s a fine line between imitation and influence. So absolutely find inspiration, study artists that do what you like to do and study other artists that do what you don’t like to do and identify why you don’t like it. Understand what it is you are creating, and do your best to figure it out early. Be able to articulate your decisions and he decisions you don’t make. Be able to express what you’re doing, and people will vibe with it. There’s no right or wrong way to do anything, just know why you do it. Be sure to find your own voice. Build it. Understand that it’s going to grow and change, and flow with it.
Michelle Antoinette Nelson, otherwise known as Love the Poet, is a Baltimore-based poet, actor, musician, and artist. She is the founder and host of Be Free Fridays, a Punany Poet, the playwright and star of her own one-woman play, “God’s Country,” and the founder of Brown and Healthy, a global health initiative for people of color.
I met up with Love the Poet at the Dovecote Cafe to discuss poetry, activism, race, and Baltimore.
KM: How did you begin writing? What made you get into poetry?
LTP: I started when I was 11, so that was about 24 years ago now. My dad was a functioning alcoholic, and one of the things my middle school counselor realized was that there were a lot of us, students who had alcoholic parents. She started a group for us and said one of the things we needed to do was journal. So when I started to journal, everything came out in poems. I didn’t even know I could write a poem. I started writing just so I could emote and get through my parents separating. It was very therapeutic.
KM: What made you decide to take your writing to a professional level?
LTP: I went to Coppin State in 1999, and when I got there they had an event with two spoken word artists onstage, and I had never seen that before. I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, and I wasn’t used to arts that you would find in the city. When I saw them perform, I walked up to them afterwards and asked, “how do you do that?” I was already performing in middle school and high school talent shows, where I infused a little bit of poetry in my performances, but mainly I just used it as a way of getting things off my chest and getting A pluses on my reports. I’d add a little poem to it and the teacher would love it and I’d get a better grade. But when I saw them, I wanted to learn how to perform. I already knew how to write poems, but I wanted to perform them. So David Ross (otherwise known as Native Son) and Danielle Fuller, the two spoken word artists at the event, took me under their wing and helped me out. We ended up doing the very first Battle of the Schools, and I really started loving it. I was a residence hall assistant and I started doing a regular open mic on campus. When I graduated from college in ’03, i decided i wanted to do my art, and went full speed ahead.
KM: What is your creative process, and who do you write for?
LTP: At this point, my process is interesting. I do so many other things besides poetry - I’m a photographer, I play guitar. I started adding things as I got older. You always want to collaborate with others, but sometimes you just want to do it yourself. My process now, especially with writing, is really organic. If I feel it, I write it. It doesn’t happen often at this point. Or if I have a focused project, I can write for it. I can write for anything. If someone gives me a word, right now, I can write a poem in ten minutes. I’ve always had that ability, It’s just one of my little gifts. I can create from anything, and I teach that too. I actually analyze what my process is, how I get to where I get when I hear a word, and I teach that. There’s a process to writing poetry just like there’s a process to writing a thesis paper. I don’t believe writers block exists.There’s always something to glean inspiration from, you just have to know how to get it. Sometimes your gift flows through you at the beginning, but in order to excel and grow you have to identify the process and manipulate it in order to get better. I definitely have the ability to create whenever I want to, but I choose to allow it to cultivate from what’s happening in the news, or something in my spirit that I have to flesh out.
KM: I noticed that some of your work focuses on the intersection of religion and sexuality in the Black church. What role does religion play in your life and in your work?
LTP: I released my spoken word album The Chrysalis in 2008, and that was the beginning of that exploration. At this point, I’m not religious. I grew up a Seventh Day Adventist, but I don’t subscribe to any one faith now. Upon doing my own research and figuring out what religion is supposed to be and what it is now, it’s so divided and perverted and fixed to condition people. The more that I define and accept my sexuality and move in who I am, the more I’m able to interpret and decipher and discern what spoke to me in the realm of spirituality, and what works for me. I understand that there’s one truth. There have been 16 fallen and risen saviour. There’s obviously one truth that keeps repeating itself that we’re all supposed to know. But you have your denominations, which is a word you find in mathematics, in division, and it’s on purpose. You have these things that are institutional, that are ingrained in tradition, in the culture and control of people. I started to see that, not just in general, but with me and my family members who couldn’t see past it, or understand that me saying that I’m gay doesn’t make me different than the person I was yesterday, when you assumed I was gay. Because that’s the assumption that’s placed on everyone as soon as they are born, that they are this way, and that’s ridiculous. When the norm is assumed, you deal with people deflecting their fear of living free on you, when you decide to live free. Around that time, I was recruited for the Punany Poets, which is a sex education theatre poetry troupe that was on HBO’s Real Sex in 2001. I joined the troupe in 2009, and I'm currently the longest running traveling member. When I tour, I meet all types of people, all types of couples who have questions about sexuality and how to operate in their relationship. I started to realize that you get to make your rules, and no one can tell you how to operate within your own space. Because we’re afraid of how people view us, we don’t know how to live and be free within our own relationships, which can ruin them. The owner felt like her initial calling was to be a preacher. There’s a fine line between poetry and preaching and understanding where you come from as far as your message. She preaches openness and love and freedom. It’s kind of a church, a sanctuary of sorts. People come together for a word, and to feel like they’re not alone. To understand humans and to understand God, you have to accept sexuality. As adults, it is what it is. You can label it sinning or whatever you want, but a natural part of human life is sex and sexuality, and searching for your purpose. But what people don’t understand is you’ll never find your purpose if you’re not free. You can’t see it and you can’t grasp it because you’re taught to go to work everyday and work for someone else. So there’s several layers to what I’ve learned as an artist, and on my journey to being free. There’s a piece on Chrysalis called Introspect, and the whole thing was about rebirth and becoming a new person.
KM: So, what are the steps to becoming free as a person?
LTP: For you as a person, you’re 18, you’re already free. What I would suggest is, don’t allow the confines of what you expect adult life to look like to hinder your personal growth. If you live to be 100, you have 82 years left of your life. At 18, there’s no way you can possibly be who you’re supposed to be right now. You’re not even a quarter of the way there. Do not get bogged down by the expectations of the world, they don’t mean anything. I believe that we should have adulthood in stages. Right now, you’re an adult infant. When you’re 25, you’re getting to your adult teenagehood. 30, adult adolescence. When you reach 50, when you have 50 more years to go, you’re an adult adult. And you can go on like that for the rest of your life. The biggest thing is you can’t think that people are not going to have expectations of you when you have expectations of everyone else. The hardest place to get to is to not have any expectations. Because a lot of times, we trust people to do what we would do as opposed to what they would do. You meet somebody, you like them, but you trust that they’ll do what you will do when in reality you have no idea what they’ll do. Understand people for who they are, and if you don’t like what it is, don’t deal with it. You can decide to deal with something, or not deal with it. There’s a lot of freedom in the world, and you have the right to say no. Move in what resonates with you. Don’t stick around for the sake of sticking around. Also a step to being free: acknowledge the small voice in the back of your head that no once can hear. A pretty good grasp on personal freedom is listening to your little voice. And sometimes you’re little voice is mean to you. Reprogram it. if it’s dogging you out, retrain it so that you are in agreement with yourself.
KM: What is your relationship with Baltimore, and what role do you play in the community? What do you want to see for the future of Baltimore?
LTP: I love my city. I call it my city, I’ve been here since I was 18. I think my role has grown over the years. I run the longest running monthly open mic night event in the city, Be Free Fridays, and we just celebrated 10 years. I would venture to say I’m like a mama. We had Mama Kay, all these mamas when we were growing up, and now I find myself in the same role they were in. When people want to do a new event, they talk to me about what I think. Now that I’ve launched the Brown and Healthy movement, that’s positioned me uniquely in the city as far as innovation and activism. But I’m using the network I’ve built as a performance artist to build a movement all over. I don’t have a degree in art, i have a degree in criminal justice. But I’m asked to do a lot of speaking at different institutions, based on my journey an as artist. To sum it up, there’s just a lot of love in the city for what I’ve done and what I will continue to do. I think I have a great reputation here, and city loves me just as much as I love the city.
KM: What vision do you have for the future of Baltimore?
LTP: My vision of Baltimore looks a lot like what’s happening here at Dovecote Cafe. Dovecote Cafe is part of the future of the city. This place popped up not even a year ago in the Reservoir Hill area and has fostered such a great sense of community here, a place for us to sit and talk and have discourse and network with other likeminded brown people in the city and whoever wants to come into the doors. Especially after the Uprising, there’s a greater sense of what the artistic community can do as the glue of the city, because we are and always have been the glue of the city. The art is not a fix for the community, it’s a fixture. They built Station North as an Arts District based on the programming and what was already happening in the area. They built an infrastructure and capitalized off of an already successful, informal arts community. Through the arts, the city is healing, and it’s acknowledging that what happened was simple cause and effect. You do this for so long, this is going to happen. What happens with cause and effect is that you deal with it. Whoever needs to assume responsibility assumes it, and tries to prevent it from happening again. The future of the city hinges on how it decides to utilize artists.
KM: You recently went to Italy for two weeks. What was your experience as a Black person abroad?
LTP: It was interesting, I’m a black woman with a mohawk and a septum ring. I was very me and I got a lot of stares, a lot of pointing. Some people actually wanted to take pictures. I felt like a lot of people were intrigued by us as a group of free Black people. Most of the brown people there who weren’t tourists or visibly mixed were street vendors. I could care less about how people respond to me, I absolutely want to travel more. It’s more about the experience.
KM: What is the Brown and Healthy campaign, and what do you hope to accomplish with it? How does it relate to the rest of your work as an artist?
LTP: Everything is cyclical. Brown and Healthy is a global health and wellness initiative for people of color focusing on mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. I started using it as a hashtag for personal use in 2015. But then the social climate started to change. All these things happened, the Uprising, babies dying, police killings, and I thought, “what can I do for my community?” My friend made the logo, and I decided it was way bigger than me and I had to do something with it.I started doing programming, and we launched the apparel. From there, I have a staff of 6 people to help me with this umbrella movement. For example, if you’re a personal trainer of color, you can come to us and we can ultimately promote you and help you network. The tagline is ‘change the narrative, change the world.’ People all over the world are being force fed negative images of us, so the world sees us in a certain type of way. The campaign is used to definitively uplift us as a people. Saying that we matter is subjective. In middle school, I was taught that I shouldn’t care if I matter to anyone else, as long as I matter to myself. I don’t care if I matter to you or not, but I have a responsibility to matter to me. If I matter to me and I walk in here with a ‘Brown and Healthy’ shirt on, it’s positive, and no one can say anything combative of it. It’s something that we can declare for ourselves, that we exist. And we’re gonna work on our health, and eat right, and motivate our people to do the same thing. We just launched in December, and I want it to be an infectious global movement. Brown and Healthy has five components: a bi-monthly speaker series where mental and physical wellness professionals speak, kids programming, arts exhibition, TV, and radio. We’re engaging the narrative in every way a narrative can be engaged. We’ll be launching some contests and getting young people to get involved and spread the world, It’s going to be a huge undertaking. It fully embraces the artist in me. Right now we’re just working on the funding and making sure we can exist in a very real way.
KM: What are your thoughts on the #BlackLivesMatter movement? What do you think your role is in this movement, if any?
LTP: I’m not the biggest fan of the Black Lives Matter Movement. It served a purpose initially just to wake people up, but it kind of makes me cringe when a nonblack person says Black lives matter. I already know that. I don’t need your validation of my culture and my community to have a place here. It’s an uncomfortable thing. It gives people the onus to once again look for the master’s approval. Black people are the only people in the world to live amongst our captors peacefully. Telling people that we are demanding them to say that we matter gives them a place of superiority. There’s a difference between a person who is your ally and a person who is your accomplice. We need accomplices. Change the law, don’t just talk about how I matter. Do something about it, stop just saying that you like me and that I’m cool. What does it reflect when a kid gets gunned down in the street and a police officer still gets away with it? Police officers like to say that they report bad cops. Cool. But when we’re out in the streets, turn around and protect me with your riot gear. Put your money where your mouth is. I’m over the talking about it. Brown and Healthy is cool because if it resonates with you, it’s the kind of campaign that demands an active lifestyle. What Beyonce is doing, that’s action. You don’t have to agree with it or not, but you can’t deny that it’s action. And sometimes things have to happen to activate an activist. Initially, the Black Lives Matter Movement was good as a call to action, but actually do it. Just like everything else, we’re desensitized to all the violence that’s still occurring, and we just need to approach it in a different way.
KM: What’s next for Love the Poet? What are your future goals, and where do you see yourself in the next 10 years?
LTP: I’m going to be working more on music, my guitar, playing in some bands. I wanna do more of that. I’m back at performing, I kind of got thrown back into it. I want to absolutely do more of my music, I’m the director of Secret of the Pearl, a Punany Poet Show. God’s Country may reappear. And in ten years, Brown and Healthy will be all over the world, helping people in tremendous ways. I’m super dedicated to that, it’s the top of the list. Everything else is just fun. And my photography, because ultimately when I get older I probably won’t want to talk as much, so I’ll be able to relate through my images.
KM: What encouragement would you give to young aspiring artists?
LTP: For young artists, I say there’s a fine line between imitation and influence. So absolutely find inspiration, study artists that do what you like to do and study other artists that do what you don’t like to do and identify why you don’t like it. Understand what it is you are creating, and do your best to figure it out early. Be able to articulate your decisions and he decisions you don’t make. Be able to express what you’re doing, and people will vibe with it. There’s no right or wrong way to do anything, just know why you do it. Be sure to find your own voice. Build it. Understand that it’s going to grow and change, and flow with it.