vow of silence

For us, Bob Kaufman, was an avatar of sorts—an incarnation of poetry, or perhaps more accurately, it’s most useful, impure form, complete with a sense of music and line that can be hard to find….He was so dedicated to poetry that he didn’t write it down; he was so much a poet that he committed a vow of silence for ten years, from Kennedy’s assassination to the end of the Vietnam War.

—Kevin Young, “Broken Giraffe: Bob Kaufman, the Song, and the Silence,” The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012)

clean lines

To me writing haiku is a good exercise. I dig and respect them because they create an image—paint a picture—so precisely. They draw pictures in very clean lines. You say what you want to say symbolically. I work with haiku a lot in my attempt to handle the language—the word. I don’t see haiku as black form, but, then, you utilize whatever modes or vehicles are available to you.

—Etheridge Knight, interview by Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo 19:4 (Fall 1996).