I enjoy expressing myself in the poetic form but I'm not a poet per se. I'm no Maya Angelou, but I could tell you why the caged bird sings. I am in fact currently working on my life story; it's going to be a film for Richard Pryor's Company. Richard Pryor's a good friend of mine, put me in rehab, financed the whole thing, said thisniggasmofuggedupthanIam.

But my deepest difficulty when I was a teenager, an adolescent growing up, my deepest difficulty was that I couldn't dance, I didn't have a developed sense of rhythm, I didn't fit into that racial stereotype. I was a little too shy, self conscious, and I wasn't doing all those dances they were doing back then - The Twist, the Afro Twist, the Peppermint Twist - no uh uh I'm not doing none of those twists. They'd say c'mon Huey let's do the Camel Walk. I'm not trying to walk like a camel, one hump or two humps. It's difficult enough trying to walk like a man in this society, let alone getting down on the floor and doing the gator. Wilson Pickett talking about he's got A Land of a Thousand Dances. I'm not doing one of 'em. Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na, na na na na na. Not one.

So the way I'd play it off at these house parties, these dance parties, the way I'd play it off was everybody would start dancing and I'd start reciting poetry, and you know that caused some fights. They'd be trying to bust my head, trying to bust a rhyme. But poetry was the way that I first got on to the educational track because I was very fortunate in that I had my brother Melvin. He's four years older than I am, a great scholar. He was in college when I was in high school. And Melvin, god bless him, recognized that I was having certain educational difficulties, and he used to bribe me, 25 cents, a quarter, if I could memorize certain passages from classical poems and plays. He used me as a human blackboard; he had me doing Ozimandias, Shelley, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Elliot, The Bells, The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe. He had me doing the Shakespeare and all that and I was pretty good at it cause I could hear something once or twice and memorize it in that fashion.

Always had a good memory; and I was always a good bluffer, bluff my way through an earthquake hurricane. But my secret technique for memorizing these verses from the poems and plays? My secret technique? I'd lock myself in a room late at night, get myself one of these long playing records where they had the verses recorded onto it from the poetry and the plays, stick the needle in the groove and just listen to these records over and over. I'd try and follow along in the book but I couldn't cause I couldn't really read but I could listen to these records and memorize it in that fashion.