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

Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

My last defense / Is the present tense.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

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.