I first became acquainted with the idea of poetry ancestors when I read a 2015 lecture by Joy Harjo. When she talked about ancestors of poems and poetry…
My maternal grandmother, Willie Lee Lipscomb, was a poet. She wrote no books she was not an academic; she worked with her hands and her body and made a way as a single parent to my mother and my aunts. I mean that she was a poet in the way she lived her life, in the inimitable balm of her laugh, in the way her words have lived on. My mother told me that she advised her children in this way: “Don’t start what you can’t hold out.” I think about all the things my grandmother held out, and, following her example, what my mother has held out: families reared and kept together, God poured through all of us, an appreciation for the value of a story well told. In our family, we do what we do in love and with Spirit guiding us.
Author Sandra Cisneros awarded by Chicago Literary Hall of Fame chicagotribune.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from chicagotribune.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.