In episode #16 of Phoned-In, poet Amy King reads from I Want to Make You Safe.

Amy King was raised in what she described as a “backwoods” town in Georgia, as well as in Baltimore, until she moved to New York 11 years ago. On her blog and website she describes herself as a “Poet teacher and Activist.” The term is quite fitting since many of her poems are unmistakably political (e.g. “This Opera of Peace”). Many of the poems from I Want to Make You Safe, such as “Follow the Leader” and “The People of Things,” are rewarding upon a second read, while others still remain locked in King’s own imagination. Stanzas like, “We are all snow birds atop / the cherry blossoms of August / Springtime in Washington D.C. / passed too fast, nearly in the flash of Rose / brushing her teeth over the bedpan” make use of those imaginative leaps to make our emotional connection to the poem stronger (“Some Pink in Your Color”). King is also an English and Creative Writing Teacher at SUNY Nassau Community College. She also edits Esque Magazine with Ana Božičević.

Gigi Augsbach When you write, is a lot of it inspired by the classes you teach—by class exercises, students, etcetera?

Amy King More often, class assignments are born of my writing, and what I’m thinking about on any given day of the week. The students influence what I write insofar as any humans might, as well as what their presence says about how others construct “Amy King.”

That is, since I spend a chunk of time in classrooms (the hat makes the man) talking with people, aka “students,” and primarily querying how language works, from the minute to larger societal scales, resistance, it turns out, is futile (so said the Borg). I yam what I yam, or as Gertrude Stein wrote, “I am I because my little dog knows me.”

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