Magic, coin-collecting, pencil drawing, and pastel painting.

This just off the top of my head. Will ad to and refine this as we go along.

Brother John; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon;
Blood on the Sun; The Samurai Trilogy; Portrait of Jennie; Raisin in the Sun; Moby Dick; Patton; The Gallant Hours; etc., etc.

Bach's Fugue and Toccata in D Minor; Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth Symphonies; Beethoven's Fur Elise; Brubeck's Take Five; Marvin Gaye's What's Going On; Stevie Wonder's My Cherie Amour; Sade's Smooth Operator; Gilberto's Girl From Ipanema; James Brown's Funky Good Time, Minnie Riperton's Loving You, Shaka Chan's Sweet Thing, etc., etc.

The Holy Bible, KJV; Pyschocybernetics by Maxwell Maltz; Handle With Prayer by Charles Stanley; Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin; The Pearl, by John Steinbeck. Autobiography of Malcolm X with Alex Haley; Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys by Jawanza Kinjufu.
Some of my favorite poets are Rudy Bee Graham, ee cummings, Waring Cuney, David The Psalmist, Emily Dickerson, etc.

Weblink in an email from poetry.com.

African-American, Christian, writer, health enthusiast, and community activist. Harlemite.

POETRY SPEAKS FOR ITSELF

by Al St. James

Marvelous poetry has been a joy for me,
like the best music, like the absolutely unforgettable songs.

The spoken, written, performed, recorded and sung words of poetry stay with us. They live in and through us.

They have been, not so much a background, as they are the inner theme songs of our very lives, and times.

Poetry elevates the miraculous potential of talk, to the beauty and the power of profound communion.

The good, the better, and the best poetry make up the very bible of human speech.