"Let me read you something: "Poetry does indeed have a very special place in this country. It arouses people and shapes their minds. No wonder the birth of our new intelligensia is accompanied by a craving for poetry never seen before. It's the golden treasury in which our values are preserved. It brings people back to life, awakens their conscience and stirs them to thought. Why this should happen I do not know, but it's a fact." That's from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam and she is writing of the Soviet Union. One could say this about our country, when one tries to conjecture why young blacks are writing poetry now. And one has to think then what a really marvellously tough thing the urge to write is. People find a way."