![]() ![]() I attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and during my sophomore year enrolled in a class called "Blues, Soul and Black Identity," taught by the literary critic Stephen Henderson. ![]() In fact, poetry was not even a possibility.Īs the sixties ended, my parents found enough money to send me off to college. I had made no decision to become a writer there was no urgency behind expressing myself. I think my coming of age could be measured by my strong desire to find someone who could feed me "tea and oranges / that come all the way from China." I hummed Cohen's work while writing a few poems that were influenced more by Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs than by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. I purchased Cohen's book because I was haunted by the reference to Jesus being a sailor.Ĭohen's poem was very sensual to a young person like me. I know that his poem "Suzanne Takes You Down" was a favorite of mine, sung by Judy Collins when my high school friends and I looked over our shoulders at the Vietnam War, racial turmoil, and all those other things we associated with the adult world. Maybe it was the old 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village. I don't recall where I purchased Leonard Cohen's Selected Poems 1956-1968. ![]()
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