“The beauty in his writing wasn’t just style or ornament but an unparalleled ability to see what was before him clearly and then lay that vision, with that same clarity, before the world.”īeautiful prose, for Coates, is necessarily honest prose. “The beauty of Baldwin’s prose that I connected to was not ancillary to the dream-breaking but central to it,” he writes. His model is James Baldwin for Coates, Baldwin’s writing is beautiful specifically because it is honest. For Coates, style and content are inextricably linkedĬoates thinks of the aesthetics of his sentences as being inseparable from their content. “It was a blues with a beat dirtier than anything I had ever heard anywhere in the world.” He didn’t, he concludes, capture such a voice in the profile, but as you read We Were Eight Years in Power, you’ll hear Coates incrementally refine and clarify his distinctive voice - steeped in poetry and hip-hop and the rhetoric of black liberation - into the formidable tool it’s become today. “I could hear what that voice sounded like in my head,” Coates writes of the voice he was aiming for as he profiled Michelle Obama. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
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