What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.

My last defense / Is the present tense.

No man can give me any word but Wait.