Poet Emmett Wheatfall retired from his day job at the end of 2019, narrowly avoiding the rapidly changing workplace culture that often demanded mental compartmentalization amid an unprecedented pandemic. “I had time to burn the candle late at night, trying to write…the pandemic just dominated our minds, and as I thought about it, I would get a phrase. In other words, Wheatfall has spent a lot of time thinking about the role of poetry in our current political climate. “When I hear young people, especially in the poetry world, talking about revolution, I try to remind them that it’s great to be passionate about change,” he said. “I remembered the phrase ‘with extreme prejudice’ as a military kind of terminology, which denotes that once you’ve been given the license to prosecute with extreme prejudice, that means you’re going to wipe everything out, everybody.

Source: New York Times June 13, 2022 17:47 UTC