E. Hughes

“Blackness tosses poetry at civilization as a means to become something other than nothing in the world. Through the body of poetry, Blackness fashions a body for its use, and that body, that poem, is also consequently damaged, broken, and marked by the intensity of being a self split into third-person consciousness. In Black poetry, what remains in the process
of these attempts at utterance is the disfigured and the disfiguring body, the mark of an eternal question, and an ambiguity of a dynamism that will never shore to language.”

—E. Hughes, from “On Black Poetry”