“Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically ...” — Margo Jefferson Quote

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

I think, for a while, there was a kind of debate about whether you could bring back Negro and reclaim it, and then it was black versus African American; now I have noticed in conversation that black people will use all three terms depending on context. I don't advocate one term.

Ralph Ellison's essays were models for me when I began my life as a critic. Slipping cultural yokes and violating aesthetic boundaries, he made criticism high-stakes work, especially for a black critic.

My mind is stuffed with quotes. Lines, couplets, paragraphs, stanzas; Bessie Smith, Stevie Smith, Tin Pan Alley, rock and roll. They tease or lead or hurl me into a dream space of jostling languages that I need to bask in each day in order to write.

It’s funny, for all it took was a broken heart and that alone was enough, enough for her to do everything she ever dreamed of.

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'

I am not a slow learner