Q&A with Kwame Dawes

Ghanaian-Jamaican poet and author Kwame Dawes might just be literature's Commitments - the hardest-working writer in the world. Now a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, after doing the same job at the University of South Carolina for nearly two decades, and editor of literary journal Prairie Schooner, he is also the author of 16 award-winning volumes of poetry, plus numerous novels, non-fiction books and plays. Born in Ghana, he lived briefly in London before moving to Jamaica aged nine and staying there until his mid-20s. In Hong Kong for a residency at City University, he spoke to .

I'm driven by two basic things. One is deadlines. But also, I've come to trust that I'm processing several things in my head at the same time. I just know when something seems ready to be put down.

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The making of poetry is something of a freak show. The poet must understand empathy - the process of becoming but not totally becoming, identifying with someone but not being so wrapped up that they can't imagine a way out. As a young poet, I was worried that I was exploiting people and their lives - that they'd see themselves in my work and be offended. That was my hubris. I thought I was writing them, but I wasn't - I was writing poems. I have absolutely no ability to reproduce these people in poems. Poems have shape and form. Their lives do not. A poem is not what a person is.