This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened and suggest why. ... I may have fooled around with a few facts. But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could have ... and so there is not so much art in this as to make it irrelevant.

Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times .... Bos…

What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest.

Why Baroque? Because it is set in the Baroque, and it IS baroque. Why Cycle? Because I am trying to avoid the T-word ('trilogy'). In my mind this work is somet…

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic an…

Both of them were artists with highly developed personas, and hence unreliable witnesses to their own pasts.

He did not write about this war and that revolution, but about war and revolution in general, the state of mind and emotion, not facts.