The subject matter of fiction – seek elsewhere (continue) the argument of politics + art goes back a long time. Many would like to believe the issue was settled long ago in favor of ‘pure’ art, uncorrupted by ‘propaganda.’ And it has been settled to everyone’s satisfaction…except that of the oppressed, the Mongrel, the defiled(*?). In the still of the night one can hear their not quite stifled, not yet stifled cries for justice. While many writers and academics turn inwardly and miss those sounds, there are those who maintain a vigil late into the night, standing guard over justice and art. 

The subject matter of fiction is life, whether raw or prettied-up, ascending to the writer’s taste. Literature comes out of the writer’s life experience, the writer’s milieu. It is the product of the writer’s social attitudes, sympathies, and loyalties. And all this is political, no matter how much some writers may choose to deny it, no matter how much they may protest that politics bore them or is distasteful or ugly, and no matter how much they may protest that politics is totally irrelevant to their art or craft. We must teach our children that all of life is political, whether we will it so or not.

Black literature is a two and a half century freedom trek. And every stubborn ride, every sordid mile, every singing mile must be told. Every mile of their story…And there’s room for more.

Having been separated from its great cultural heritage, its languages, its economic foundation, its sense of belonging. The African American people have managed, out of a jumble of the most disparate of elements, out of the most questionable elements–some shreds of their ancient African heritage, some bone-dry (lexicons/lectures*?) of the culture of their alien oppressors–have managed to fuse nests of such strength as have withstood the gales of white terror, the squalls of buffeting minds of dire poverty and educational deprivation and the treacherous currents of ridicule and denigration. They have taken weak and brittle materials, and through the magic of their spirit, worked wonders, transformationally stripped of their religious traditions. They have transmuted a dour Christianity into the exaltation of the Black Church. Stripped of the chains of the languages of their former lords, they have taken the plodding Anglo-Saxon and infused it with gold and vitality.

Forbidden the keys to knowledge of pain, of death, they have been forced to sharpen their powers of transubstantiation , their native wit, to create a vast body of work unseen.

Not only write the truth about people but have selected people to write about, of whom one wants to know the truth. I don’t write about people without scruples, compassion, or any kind of humanity.

What is the truth?

The truth is that life is a struggle. And in this struggle, the artist takes a position–consciously or not–on one or the other side of the life-affirming. On one or the other side of all that which ascents & assists the dignity of the people and that is what life is about: human beings in constant motion for a life befitting human beings, in constant struggle against those who would deny them their humanity, in constant struggle against that within themselves that holds back their victory, which is the music of centuries of ignorance and brutalization.

The antithesis of poetry is an instruction manual. A poem is the most highly charged of categories in literature. Words are means for a practical end. Image, metaphor, sound, and texture are all a part of poems. Poems use words as ends. Poems have rhythms, patterns.

Good prose has the texture of imagery.

Images reinforce each other. The element of sound is important in poetry. The poet works with sound almost like a musician works with notes.

The total meaning of a poem is always more than the sum of its concepts.

Poetry is my mind at rest on a sure and singing truth. It is not wasteful.

With increasing frequency in the last two decades I have had occasions to feel the all-consuming desire to afford myself the luxury of expressing an outrageous and outraging contempt for the societal boundaries which constrict, circumscribe, and do one bang-up job of smothering the creative human impulse.

        Outrageous because the language would be far from polite, hence evoking the outrage at those to whom it would justly be directed: everybody who ever presented the creative artists with the following questions (and I mention but a few): Who appointed you? How long did it take you? What is this book all about? To answer the last first, I should just like to get my hands on the artists who dignify the last in submission to the instruction so often administered by the would-be purveyors of knowledge as to the hows and whats of the creative arts. At the simplest level of existence where one is engaged for the most part in non-combative enterprises. One does not go out the same door wherein one went contrary to the instruction of Kahil Gibran. It is for this reason I cannot take the attitude of despair as long as breath remains in perceiving body. For the creative artists this phenomena is so many more times so.