'So when I came to New York I was prepared then to be an intellectual. You know what I’m saying, oh, now I know things. But the only thing you don’t know is what you'll have to face. You don’t know the nature of the struggle that you have to get it. So I arrived and I was standing in San Juan one afternoon crying because I was reading a poem in the New Yorker and I said, I can never write a poem like that-about bird baths, trips to Connecticut, the 508 out of New York to Connecticut, I could never write like that. So I said, there must be something I can do with my life. I know what, I can write my own poetry. I can write it as it comes out of me, as messed up as that is, as broke down, as urbanly challenged, as ethnically squashed, that will be my poetry. And I will be so arrogant as to claim it and to say, this is my poetry, right here.'
Amiri Baraka, 'Pulling it down or The good manners of vampires', from the anthology Beats at Naropa, publisher: Coffee House Press