Advancing this pragmatism, he found a willing adversary among Black American colleagues, whom he criticized for defining themselves in terms of race and reducing Blake’s extensive experience to one of the victims. He called gangsta rap a “birth of the nation” with a backbeat, “Rev. Al Sharpton as” Buffon, “the nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as” mad, “Nobel laureate Tony Morrison as PT Barnum and Alex Haley, author of” Roots “. , “Opportunistic”.
On the contrary, he adored his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray, who looked beyond the conventions of race and ideology to see the contribution of black people as integral to the American experience with their light.
(Mr. Crouch said, ignoring the African-American expression: “I use Negro, black American, Afro-American. And I can eventually throw brown American. I don’t use African-American because my friends who are African.” But I use Afro-American, because it means it’s down but it’s not straight. “)
Mr Crouch said he mostly taught himself to pick up books in childhood and then draw innate song sensitivity, which he expressed in poetry as well as prose. He wrote about jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie:
“He rose from a strange fish position to a star surfer riding on a star-shaped, curved high curved water, he drowned in a state of miracles, but from time to time dripped with new wisdom, gesturing like everyone else followed him on thin boards of art and entertainment. That those who make their name in jazz must ride, on top of public-tasting roller coaster waves, turning all our blues into a turbulent sea where they are forever in danger. “
Mr. Crouch, although a graduate of two community colleges, attended, but due to his size as a writer, he found teaching positions at Clermont, California, east of Los Angeles, Pomona, Pitzer, and Clermont. As an influential poet and teacher of English and theater in the late 1960s and early 70s. (At Pomona, one of his students was George C. Wolfe, who became the artistic director of a public theater in New York.)
