Master. I do not have you the way I hate those I loved who went on and died too early for me to tell them. What I nurse for you is pity...

Know that today I am free. Know that since then I have fucked dead men for less. Know that today your blood thins in the fists of our children, lets them burn in the summertime, and keeps them working in the houses among women.

My kin may never know what lies trapped within the amber of their skins. My children may never know the silver faces of their father kept deep within change pockets, and this ignorance may be their small curse. I just pray you will always know why.

But Kevin resists calling any of his poetry documentation of slavery. "I didn't represent all of slavery. I could never represent all of slavery--on one can. But I can write about the legacies I know and cast light on the lager thing," he explains. "I think I can write about larger issues through the personal, and I don't think that's representation."

In poetry, there is an exactness of language which Kevin claims forbids extrapolation. "I think poets are very careful in their writing, "Kevin says. "It's not like you have Camille Paglia disease, where they can take you out of context." But Kevin is also aware of the cultural possibilites of poetry, and the legacy of the epic which will explain and contain all of a people's history. Epics have become something of a phantasm. Kevin says, "There's this attitude that some poem is going to come along and save our lives, that it will be the perfect poem. That can't happen." It can no longer happen because plurality has become preventative. As Kevin says, "I don't think any people are as monolithic as the news would have us think."

In his sophomore year at Harvard Kevin refounded Diaspora, which billed itself as "The Journal of Black Thought and Culture. "The first issue of Diasporawas impressive both in its scope and size. The magazine was 95 pages and contained student works as well as an interview with Angela Davis and a feature on new Black filmmakers. "You couldn't do 'Black Film' in an issue, because it just got huge--you couldn't fit it all," Kevin says.

"I think people were surprised by the diversity of voices in Diaspora.It was a big magazine," Kevin says. But he notes that people would have been less surprised in a school which was not so predominantly white. "It's a Black literary magazine. It's a strange beast at Harvard," he says. "[At Black colleges,] people can have a lot of different identies without being kicked out of the Black sphere." Kevin notes that in other categorical literatures, such as women's writing, "Diversity becomes a clearer issue."

But often, literature and demographics are antithetical. In literature, personal experience supercedes objective classification, and metaphor can create its own categories; the poet Sylvia Plath can write that she "may well be a Jew." But after 20 years of the Derek Bok Plan, demographics have become our university mascot. Kevin calls the new housing system "a nightmare." If the end goal of nonordered choice is a neat breakdown of quotas, Kevin questions the methods for calculating the figures. "Who do they look for in counting diversity? They can't see diversity in an artistic community or in a Black community," he says. "What did they read me as? A Black man? A poet?"

Kevin believes that non-order choice will weaken the fabric of the artistic community considerable. He says that under the new system, he would not have been able to do many things he once did at Adams, where he organized a house reading series called "Night People," and learned to use the Bow and Arrow Press. Before partial randomization, Kevin says, Adams House was "a more vital place. It makes sense that Seamus [Heaney] is in Adams House. It wouldn't make any sense for him to be in Kirkland. And it's no accident that Master Kiely was in the English Department. There was support of the arts. You got to pick your own niche, and there were tons of niches...."Whatever problems I had with Adams, those were my problems, and I got to choose them. It felt like a community."

Kevin's concern with community extends back to his first year here. By late September, he and I started The Fifth floor Journal, an umbrella arts organization for first-year students. He now says he sees the literary community collapsing in on itself. "I think there used to be more of a literary community. When we had The Fifth Floor Journal, that was a big influx into the literary community," he tells me. "Now it's just shrinking back to the AdvocateInevitably, it'll burst open again."

The uniqueness of Kevin's' sucesses lies in the channels he has chosen for his writing. As he says, "I was always looking for new ways to get stuff out, my stuff or other people's stuff." He says that many people expected him to be on the Advocate board, or a member of the Signet Society. But he was neither. "The Advocate publishes its own people," he says. "If you just look at the Advocate, you would think the literary community is very small. The problem is that the Advocatealso thinks it's very small." Though the Advocate published each poem he submitted to it, he says e knows that many of the other poems that the magazine rejected ware very good. "People came up to me complaining that their work hadn't been published in the Advocate. And I want to say, 'Why didn't you submit to the New Yorker?Maybe that was your mistake."

Kevin is assured by his successes in a way many young writers are not. He can be as cavalier about the literary establishment outside of Harvard as he is about the one inside. He sometimes preaches something close to literary revolution. "Don't we have to change [the establishment]?" he asks me. "Then don't worry about it. Even if we were all published in the New Yorker, would that be the point? You're missing the point if it's a new driver driving the same old truck. you can do alternative thing and have them be accepted, not necessarily by other people, but by yourself." Kevin was a member of Padan Aram poetry board, and he says, "That's where Padan Aram failed--it wanted to be another Advocate.. It doesn't really even exist anymore,"

What Kevin calls "the failure of Harvard to provide a community of writers" compelled him to join the Dark Room. He met Thomas Ellis in the Grolier Bookshop, and Ellis and Ellis introduced Kevin to the group after reading some of Kevin's poetry. Kevin states that mission of the Dark Room is to create a community "to help young writers while honoring our living ancestors." In connection with the Dark Room, Kevin has repeatedly travelled to New York where he read at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and mosaic-Books. "I can leave Harvard, but I can never leave the Dark Room," Kevin says. "If Harvard was its own island, things would have been harder."

Both the readings and the Dark Room meetings have been meaningful in shaping Kevin's ideas about his responsibilities as a poet. "I guess part of the job is bringing poetry to other people. That's what we do in the Dark Room," he tells me. "I guess part of it is to make it not seem like this strange or elitist or even mystical thing. I mean, I'm just a kid from Kansas."

Kevin says that he is aware that poetry has become something of an academic property. he admits that it has become the most esoteric of all the genres, and the least widely read. He sees this academic hierarchy as somewhat ironic, because 'it's the backward order of what people give money to. You don't become a poet to make big bucks. I can walk always down the street."