Like Running Trying To Live A Good

We Need Everybody And All That We Are. We Need To Know And Make Known The Complete, Constantly Unfolding, Complicated Heritage That Is Our Black Experience. We Should Absolutely Resist The Superstar, One At A Time Mentality That Threatens The Varied And Resilient, Flexible Wealth Of Our Black Future.

As A Poet And Writer, I Deeply Love And I Deeply Hate Words. I Love The Infinite Evidence And Change And Requirements And Possibilities Of Language; Every Human Use Of Words That Is Joyful, Or Honest Or New, Because Experience Is New... But As A Black Poet And Writer, I Hate Words That Cancel My Name And My History And The Freedom Of My Future: I Hate The Words That Condemn And Refuse The Language Of My People In America.

As I Think About Anyone Or Anything -- Whether History Or Literature Or My Father Or Political Organizations Or A Poem Or A Film -- As I Seek To Evaluate The Potentiality, The Life-supportive Commitment And Possibilities Of Anyone Or Any Thing, The Decisive Question Is Always Where Is The Love?

As A Poet And Writer, I Deeply Love And I Deeply Hate Words. I Love The Infinite Evidence And Change And Requirements And Possibilities Of Language.

I Wrote Those Poems For Myself, As A Way Of Being A Soldier Here In This Country. I Didn't Know The Poems Would Travel. I Didn't Go To Lebanon Until Two Years Ago, But People Told Me That Many Arabs Had Memorized These Poems And Translated Them Into Arabic.