I've helped launch 49 careers - those that have been in PiL. To me, they are my babies; whatever they get up to, they know I love them. They've been living in my pockets, and they should show more gratitude.
People have told me, 'You shouldn't bring your daughter onto the podium, 'cause it's the workplace,' and things like that. But I'm not gonna really listen to that. I'm gonna do what I think is fun for me and my family, and everything'll be all right.
I remember when I was very young, I had a fever - a long rheumatic fever in bed for four months. And in the days, I stayed alone with the maid. I only had my father's books with me. They were fantasy books about ghosts, and also books by Edgar Allen Poe that made a forever impression on me.
It is a tremendous honor to be named poet laureate, but one that I find humbling as well, because it's the kind of thing that makes me feel like - even as it's been bestowed upon me - I must continue to live up to what it means... Being the younger laureate in the age of social media is a new challenge.
I've written on public matters, but I don't understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals... anybody who knew my work would know I'm not a contender.
In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.
In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.
Poetical appreciation is only newly bursting on me.
It's the poignancy and sadness in things that gets to me.
The kind of industrial wasteland that you see in so much of Europe has a tremendous poignancy to me, especially when it's run down and you see the collapse and failure of this system. And also how nature reclaims it.
Coming back in that AFC Championship Game against the Steelers, that was a poignant moment for me for a lot of reasons - the magnitude of the game and having not been able to play for quite a while and to be able to get on the field for that game. That one stands out.
Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.
It was a bizarre existence I led in my early twenties - that cliche of the comedian who goes out and entertains a roomful of people and then goes home to a lonely bedsit was unbelievably poignant for me because that was exactly what I was doing. I had periods of real loneliness.
I can play off the ball some, and that's fine with me as long as I can be out on the floor. But I am definitely more natural as a point guard than I am as a two guard.
I am something of a contrarian, I suppose. I feel less comfortable when everybody agrees with me. I say, 'I better reexamine my position!' I probably believe that the worst opinions in my court have been unanimous. Because there's nobody on the other side pointing out all the flaws.
What I have found that my comedy is doing - and what really drives me - is to sort of bring women together through pointing out why we act so crazy.
As you may possibly have noticed from time to time, I have tended to make a habit of sticking my head above the parapet and generally getting it shot off for pointing out what has always been blindingly obvious to me.
I found myself in the middle of a race riot when I was about 14 years old, and I found someone pointing a gun at me and telling me to run or they'd shoot me.
I don't want to have that one year too much, where people actually, behind my back, start smiling at me and pointing fingers at me and go, 'Ah, look, that's Jensie. No, he's not good anymore.'
With the exception of maybe Vegas or Miami once or twice, other than that, it's all the same to me. I can't hear anything in the club with the loud music, so you're in there, and you're like, 'I can't hear you because of the loud music.' I hate that, yelling back and forth. And I don't drink, so it's kind of pointless.
