Amiri Baraka Catching Up With Himself [by Vincent Katz]

One day, a year or so ago, Oliver said to me, in passing, “I need to read some Baraka.” When someone, especially someone close to me, says something like that, I leap into action. I leapt to my keyboard and ordered him The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris with input from the author. Published in 2009 by Basic Books, the Reader does not cover the last fifteen years of Baraka’s production, but, at close to 600 pages, it certainly covers the early years, from the late 1950s through 1999.

To supplement this, I recommend SOS: Poems 1961-2013, published by Grove Press in 2014. This volume, edited by Paul Vangelisti, shows the scope of Baraka’s poetic achievement and is especially surprising in its final section, titled “Fashion This,” which covers the years 1996-2013. Here, we see the poet at his most unguarded. Many of these poems have not been previously collected in book form. They maintain the same senses of urgency and outrage that animate Baraka’s poetry throughout, but they are tempered with a lightness, a delicacy at times, that can be shocking and disarming.

I’ve shied away from Readers as they focus on a consensus of what an author’s best work is, or someone’s assessment of that, leaving out much interesting peripheral work — but the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka reader feels essential. Partially that has to do with Baraka’s participation in the selection, but mainly it’s because the man was so prolific, something the Reader makes clear. He published poetry, music criticism, fiction, and was a successful playwright from his early days on. He was also a significant editor of literary journals — first of Yugen, with Hettie Jones, and then, with Diane di Prima, of The Floating Bear. Baraka always had a voice.

I’ve often wondered what it is that catapults a poet into a wider consciousness, and I believe much of it has to do with prose writing. While poetry remains a particular province, prose, if it is well-written and timely, can reach a much larger audience. In Baraka’s case, his two books on music, Blues People, published in 1963, and Black Music (1968) did precisely that. The first was composed as a study of the origins of jazz and has the subtitle The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It. The second book was composed of articles and reviews previously published in DownBeat, Kulchur, and as liner notes for such artists as John Coltrane and Sonny Murray.

Selections from these seminal studies are included in the Reader, along with a fantastic, often hilarious account of a trip to Cuba in 1960, originally published in Home: Social Essays (1966). There is much more in the Reader, including a selection of at-the-time unpublished works. One of these returns to Malcolm X, a seminal figure in Baraka’s movement from downtown bohemian to uptown Black Nationalist in the late 1960s. In the ‘70s, Baraka adopted an explicitly Marxist ideology, elaborating and expanding his views on race. In the Reader, this is referred to as his Third World Marxist Period. In one of the last pieces in the reader, “Malcolm as Ideology” (1995), Baraka critiques Spike Lee’s interpretation in his 1992 biopic.

I am powering through the Reader, and it has been a supreme education for me about a lot of things, mainly about Baraka himself. His framing of stories and his furious outbursts, the rage and neurosis he lays bare on the page, stem directly from the condition he eloquently describes, in many different genres and styles, throughout his life. He made the decision as an artist to leave all that visible on the page.

He didn’t sugar-coat, and he didn’t try to cover up the nastiness of some of his feelings. Ultimately, though, in his poetry especially, he comes to moments of pure bliss, when he seems to feel at home, to have located himself finally in his culture, and there he has written some of the most tender verse of our time. Much of it can be found in the final 130 pages of Vangelisti’s book, poems mostly unpublished during Baraka’s lifetime.

Here’s one:

“Note to AB”

I became a poet

Because every thing

Beautiful seemed

“poetic” to me.

I thought there were things

I didn’t understand

that wd make the world

poetry. I felt I knew

who I was but had to

Struggle, to catch up

w/ my self.

Now I do see me

sometimes, a few worlds

ahead, & I speed up, then,

put my head down,

Stretch my stride out

& dig

There me go, I scat &

sing, there me go.

Comments

[Tony Paris]

A very generous review of Baraka, whom I haven't been able to read since he defamed the Jews in his infamous 9/11 poem.

[Vincent Katz]

Tony, thank you for your comment. I too have difficulty with some of Baraka's statements, in poetry and prose. The most glaring of those was in the poem you refer to, "Somebody Blew Up America." I would only recommend, as in all other cases, reading (or re-reading) the original text in its entirety before deciding. Gerald Stern, one of the poets who nominated Baraka to be NJ Poet Laureate, said about the stanza in question, "I am sensitive to what appears to be the anti-Semitic utterance, which reflects that Jews knew in advance [about the Sept. 11 attacks]. I'm sensitive as a Jew. However, a man is allowed to be paranoid." And Robert Pinsky noted, "Poets are people; their works are human works. We all likely know, or can easily imagine, people capable of saying stupid, vicious things who also sometimes say beautiful or wise things... In other words, each of us, and each of our works, is to be judged on the merits. Moral viewpoint is among the merits, I think."

[Vincent Katz]

Also keep in mind, the stanza referred to "Israeli workers" not "Jews".

[Jill Newnham]

Robert Pinsky is a diplomat but I attended a talk in which he excoriated Baraka for that poem in no uncertain terms. Be that as it may, there are those who believe Baraka was a more interesting writer when he was Le Roi Jones. Do you have an opinion? My MFA adviser told me he and Frank O'Hara were good freinds, and that he is Roi in "Personism."

[Vincent Katz]

Jill, that is a good question. My short answer is no, I think Baraka is interesting throughout. I recommend getting hold of a copy of SOS: POEMS 1961-2013 and reading it all the way through. I think Baraka evolved as a poet, adapting different techniques and modes to changing situations. His gift as a verbal wizard remains throughout. That gift is also palpable in much of his prose writing. Check out the story "The Screamers" among others. And yes, he and O'Hara were very good friends: "[Personism] was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond)." He also features in O'Hara's "Personal Poem" in LUNCH POEMS.

[lally]

as a teenage poet in the late 1950s on the periphery of the beat scene, three of my favorite poets were diane di prima, ray bremser, and leroi jones (as he was known then), who was from Jersey, like me and wrote about locations and neighborhoods I knew well. I read and dug everything he wrote, especially his story collection TALES, and followed all his changes from air force vet (like me) to radical (like me) and continued to love his writing but not the antisemitic and homophobic language he was beginning to use in his talks...in my memory I challenged him about that at a public forum in DC in the early 1970s (where I was teaching his work, prose (BLUES PEOPLE and TALES), PLAYS, AND POERY) when I was equally if not more strident from my own evolving politics (feminism, gay liberation etc.)...I know I wrote about it, with arrogant assurance that my analysis was correct in noting the roots of his anti-gay and anti-jewish rhetoric in his need to distance himself from his having been lovers with frank o'hara (as I was told by their mutual friends) and from his marriage to hettie jones...I continued to reread his earlier work and still love most of it (especially TALES, still) but didn't want to keep up with his later work, until now and your post motivating me to check it out, so thank you for that vincent...

[Vincent Katz]

Thank you for the openness & generosity of this comment Michael & for allowing us to catch up with you for a minute!

[Robert Pinsky]

Thank you Jill Newnham for "diplomat" (I think!) and thank you Vincent Katz for the quotation. Less diplomatic is my poem "The Forgetting" in _Gulf Music_, where Baraka appears as "the guy"

https://bigthink.com/videos/robert-pinsky-reads-the-forgetting

[sarah gelder]

As per Vincent Katz's advice, I read the poem in its entirety, and I'm afraid that it falls in the "stupid and vicious" camp, to use Robert Pinsky's terms. Anti-semitism is a prejudice completely founded on paranoia, so Gerald Stern's comment ("a man is alllowed to be paranoid") makes sense only if the paranoia generates a brilliant novel, say. But a rant victimizing the Jews after 9/11 is not just bizarre but very harmful.

[Vincent Katz]

Robert and Sarah, thank you for your comments. "The Forgetting" is powerfully complex poem. Thank you for sharing that great recording of it. It mentions Pound and reminds us that he and Eliot, among others, suffered from the same problem Baraka did, and it affected their poetry, and consequently our reactions to it. In regard to "Somebody Blew Up America," I would again suggest that a reading of the entire poem reveals a querulous, maybe paranoid, mind, posing questions regarding any number of tragic abuses, including:

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured, assassinated, vanished

Many tormented questions are asked in this poem, including the passage that most offends people, which I would again note refers not to Jews but to Israeil workers and Sharon.

[Theodore Augustus Harris]

Hi Vincent
I really liked your review.

Amiri was hard on any group acting as fascist who marginalize people for profit and power.
And these people are so quick to call Amiri Anti-semitism never mention the lines below.

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured, assassinated, vanished

Thanks for pointing this out and for the people in this thread not to mention these lines makes think they are full of BS.

Theodore
OUR FLESH OF FLAMES: Collages by Theodore A. Harris and Captions by Amiri Baraka (Anvil Arts Press/Moonstone Press) re printed 2019
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/form-and-politics-theodore-a-harris-interviewed/

[Vincent Katz]

Hi Theodore, thank you so much for your very pertinent comment! And also for the link to your interview in BOMB with Kristin Prevallet. It's great to see your work there and to read about your collaborations with Amiri Baraka.

[Lucy Moonstone]

Great article! I really enjoyed reading your perspective on this significant controversial and arguably overrated and def overheated writer, the Al Sharpton of poetry, who was better before he changed his name, but he nevertheless gets a lot of attention, and why is that? Did you read his 9/11 poem?

[Lee Jonestown]

Great article! I found the information shared here to be highly valuable and informative. The content you created caught my attention. Thank you for shedding light on this topic and encouraging discussions.