The Paris Review - Fall 2016

INTERVIEWER
What appealed to you about that kind of clean, clear writing?
REED
It’s like Miles, man. Somebody said that Miles didn’t have the chops of
Coltrane, who was a scholar, but Miles and Louis Armstrong went for the
tone. You hear some of these guys playing like they’re getting paid by the
note. Miles was very disciplined, very smart. Spare. Kind of Blue is a minimalist
masterpiece. That was my style, too, right up to today.
INTERVIEWER
What was the black community like in Buffalo back then? Was there a literary
scene? Were other people reading Baldwin?
REED
Yes, our circle included Lucille Clifton, who had performed in Baldwin’s play
The Amen Corner when she was a student at Howard. She went on to win a
National Book Award. At the time, she was raising a family and writing on
the weekends. She was crazy about Emily Dickinson. I introduced her to her
husband, Fred Clifton, who, next to Malcolm X, was the brightest person
I’ve ever met. There was my late friend Carl Tillman, who was writing novels
in high school, and the classics professor Philip Wooby, who won a fellowship
to the American Academy in Rome, and Teddy Jackson, who introduced
me to the works of Camus and Sartre.
INTERVIEWER
You met Malcolm X in Buffalo in 1961?
REED
Yes, I worked with Joe Walker, a young man who put out the Buffalo Empire
Star, the city’s black paper. We had a radio program and interviewed
Malcolm when he came to town in 1961. The radio station thought we were
too friendly toward him and his point of view, so we got fired. Malcolm took
Joe to New York and Joe became an editor of Muhammad Speaks. When I
went to New York, I’d sometimes talk with Malcolm. I even wrote a terrible
poem about him called “Fanfare for an Avenging Angel.” It was so bad I
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