“As poets we tend to not like the word “responsibility. I think it’s one of the major responsibilities of the poet.”

We prefer “freedom”, we want to be as free as we can, but freedom and responsibility can go together. We’re responsible because we’re writers, and we’ve been at this all our lives…

On the poet having both responsibility and freedom in “Interview with Juan Felipe Herrera” https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/archives/online-archives/current-issue-4/features/interview-with-juan-felipe-herrera/ (Gulf Stream, 2015)

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Juan Felipe Herrera 4
American writer 1948

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