Poetic Training

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Macbeth, Sonia Sanchez, and how poetry shaped him into the writer he is today.

By Ruth Graham

As the journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates has become a household name over the last year with his National Book Award-winning memoir Between the World and Me and his MacArthur Fellowship, he has often been compared to James Baldwin. That comparison—made by the likes of Toni Morrison—is thanks to Coates's intellectual dexterity, the elegance of his prose, and his uncompromising moral vision. But the two men have something else in common: poetry.

Coates started writing "bad poetry" (his words) in high school, but he took it up with more seriousness in college. When he arrived at Howard University, whose community he calls "the Mecca," he fell in with poets that included E. Ethelbert Miller, Elizabeth Alexander, Joel Dias-Porter, Terrance Hayes, and Yona Harvey. Coates became a journalist, of course, not a poet. But in Between the World and Me, he writes about how understanding poetry taught him to write: "Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away, and I was left with the cold steel truths of life."

Coates spoke with the Poetry Foundation from Paris, where he and his family are living through the end of the summer.

Read the full interview on the Poetry Foundation website.