My poetry springs from an oral and spiritual tradition with similarity to jazz/ blues music development. My early influences were recordings where poets join jazz ensembles, e.g., Langston Hughes or Kenneth Patchen reading with Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop, or Jack Kerouac’s work with a pianist and sax players. The late Ted Joans, one 1950s originator of Beat poetry, trained me in 1986-87 to improve my interactivity with musicians.