Poetry is as contagious as poison ivy though less prevalent. Look at the response these days to the dramatic poems in Ntozake Shange's remarkable "Spell No. 7."… [The] sketches—lyrical, wry, painful and comically prosaic by turn—… invaded the audience. The place was alive with response, but it wasn't the ordinary applause or laughter of an audience that is pleased or moved. There was a kind of rumination, a repeating of lines, even a few tentative essays at embroidering them….

[Sometimes] the springy rhetoric and response of these poetic vignettes about how it feels to be black … have the liveliness and stem-winding buildup of first-rate preaching. But if there is any event that Miss Shange's best work approaches, it is something more familiar in other countries—particularly the Soviet Union—than in this one. I am thinking of those highly charged poetry recitals in which a Voznesensky would advance...