 Delany wanted something that was coherent but supple and self-critical.In the same interview he says that the story series is, in many ways, closer to the continuous modernist “longpoem,” such as Ezra Pound’s "Cantos" or Robert Duncan’s “Structure of Ryme” or “Passages,” Anne Waldman’s "Jovis", or Rachel Blau Du Plessis’s "Drafts".As Delany writes in his "Introduction" to Russ’s sword and sorcery series "The Adventures of Alyx" (clearly one of his major inspirations and influences), "Traditionally, sword-and-sorcery is written with a verbal palette knife—an adjective heavy, exclamatory diction that mingles myriad archaisms with other syntactical distortions meant to signal the antique