I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine. I wish to raise a Black m...
I sit before the typewriter and nothing comes. If feels as if underlining these assaults, lining them up one after the other and looking at them squarely might give them an unbearable power. Yet, I kn...
I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It mean...
Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
The difference between poetry and rhetoricis being ready to kill
In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light...
I want to write rage but all that comes is sadness. We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile. I am an anachronism, a sport, like the bee that was never meant to fly....
I heard my old friend Clem’s voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see...
I am tired of writing memorials to black menwhom I was on the brink of knowingweary like fig treesweighted like a crepe myrtlewith all the black substance poured into earthbefore earth is ready to bea...
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we c...