[Tape recorded on 11 October 1974.]

Because I am often not able to accept invitations to talk about my poetry, I thought it would be a good idea to put some thoughts on tape, fairly rambling thoughts, which could be played on occasions when people were interested in either hearing the poetry or hearing me talk about it. I have of course commented at various times and in various places on my poetry, and there are many things that I will try not to repeat since they can be found elsewhere. What I will try to do is take a general look at the last collection, A Simple Lust, which includes most of my earlier work and try to say one or two things about it that are new.

Perhaps I should add that a good deal of poetry has appeared elsewhere which does not appear in A Simple Lust. Some of it I discarded as not worth reprinting there, some simply because at the time I was putting A Simple Lust together I could not find all the things that I thought I might include. I am thinking especially of things like the Sabotage poem which appears in the [Anne] Tibble collection, African-English Literature [1965] and a few things that appeared in the Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts published at Stanford, or things which appeared in African Arts published at the University of California [at Los Angeles].