I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences…

- Linton Kwesi Johnson

I wrote two poems about the 81 uprisings: Di Great Insohreckshan and Mekin Histri. I wrote those two poems from the perspective of those who had take…

- Linton Kwesi Johnson

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.

- Linton Kwesi Johnson

I don't go to see bands any more because I've got tinnitus, so I have to avoid loud music. You get used to it, but when it's quiet you hear a constan…

- Linton Kwesi Johnson

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.

- Linton Kwesi Johnson

I have never, ever sought validation from the arbiters of British poetic taste.

- Linton Kwesi Johnson

Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican p…

- Linton Kwesi Johnson

....the popular music of Jamaica, the music of the people, is an essentially experiential music, not merely in the sense that the people experience t…

- Linton Kwesi Johnson

That the language of the poetry of Jamaican music is rastafarian or biblical language cannot simply be put down to the colonizer and his satanic miss…

- Linton Kwesi Johnson