It Means To Educate Myself Incessantly About

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.

I Am A Feminist, And What That Means To Me Is Much The Same As The Meaning Of The Fact That I Am Black: It Means That I Must Undertake To Love Myself And To Respect Myself As Though My Very Life Depends Upon Self-love And Self-respect.

To Believe Is To Become What You Believe.

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?

When We Heard About The Hippies, The Barely More Than Boys And Girls Who Decided To Try Something Different ... We Laughed At Them. We Condemned Them, Our Children, For Seeking A Different Future. We Hated Them For Their Flowers, For Their Love, And For Their Unmistakable Rejection Of Every Hideous, Mistaken Compromise That We Had Made Throughout Our Hollow, Money-bitten, Frightened, Adult Lives