“When I need to reach that pool of possibility within, I get something cold to drink and sit next to an open window—no matter the season. Listening to instrumental acid jazz from the late 60s and 70s gets me in a good zone—Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay Suite, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Pharaoh Sanders, and many others
(I can’t listen to singers or vocalists because I surrender to their soaring). The melodies and chord progressions soothe and challenge me at once—the moody, surprising forays and improvisations that the musicians make encourage me to riff off the scale of what I aim to write, freeing me up to travel wherever I’m moved to go stylistically, psychically, emotionally. Poet Lucille Clifton often said, ‘Something in me knows how to write poetry better than I do.’ I’m very clear that whatever I’m writing is always a collaboration between the self that forgot we were out of toilet paper on the way home last night, and the self that recalls blood memories from generations ago in dreams. As the years pass, I’m learning to trust this alchemy.”
—Kamilah Aisha Moon, author of She Has a Name (Four Way Books, 2013)