Contents
Language in Our Blood / Radiclani Clytus
I. Essays
Red
Erasure
An Ode to Raccoon
Sorrow Songs and Flying Away: Religious Influence on Black Poetry
A Needful Thing
Crossroads
A Supreme Signifier: Etheridge Knight
The Devil’s Secretary
The Blue Machinery of Summer
The Blood Work of Language
Son of Pop: Floyd D. Tunson’s Neo-blues
Conundrum
Clarence Major’s Cosmopolitan Vision
Dark Waters
The Method of Ai
II. Interviews
Collaboration and the Wishbone
Three Shades of Past
Excursions
Getting a Shape
The Wolf/Interview
Celebration and Confrontation: Walt Whitman
III. Commentaries
Notes from a Lost Notebook
You Made Me
More Than a State of Mind
Eros, Words
A Letter to Poetry
Small Illuminations
How Poetry Helps People to Live Their Lives
Picking a Lock to the Mind-Jail in the City of Asylum
A Note from The Best American Erotic Poems
The Mission of American Poets and Writers Visiting the 2008 Kolkata Book Fair
Rewriting Dante