Liz’s Weekly Poetry Series: Amiri Baraka, 1934-2014
by lizard
Because he’s now dead, the poet Amiri Baraka will get some attention that most poets—even relatively famous ones—don’t get while alive.
In the span of 70 years, Baraka moved from Beat to Black Nationalist to Marxist and—some would say—an anti-semite. Here’s a little peek from the Poetry Foundation:
Baraka did not always identify with radical politics, nor did his writing always court controversy. During the 1950s Baraka lived in Greenwich Village, befriending Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The white avant-garde—primarily Ginsberg, O’Hara, and leader of the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson—and Baraka believed in poetry as a process of discovery rather than an exercise in fulfilling traditional expectations. Baraka, like the projectivist poets, believed that a poem’s form should follow the shape determined by the poet’s own breath and intensity of feeling. In 1958 Baraka founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press, important forums for new verse. He was married to his co-editor, Hettie Cohen, from 1960 to 1965. His first play, A Good Girl Is Hard to Find, was produced at Sterington House in Montclair, New Jersey, that same year. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Baraka’s first published collection of poems appeared in 1961. M.L. Rosenthal wrote in The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II that these poems show Baraka’s “natural gift for quick, vivid imagery and spontaneous humor.” Rosenthal also praised the “sardonic or sensuous or slangily knowledgeable passages” that fill the early poems. While the cadence of blues and many allusions to black culture are found in the poems, the subject of blackness does not predominate. Throughout, rather, the poet shows his integrated, Bohemian social roots. The book’s last line is “You are / as any other sad man here / american.”
With the rise of the civil rights movement Baraka’s works took on a more militant tone. His trip to Cuba in 1959 marked an important turning point in his life. His view of his role as a writer, the purpose of art, and the degree to which ethnic awareness deserved to be his subject changed dramatically. In Cuba he met writers and artists from third world countries whose political concerns included the fight against poverty, famine, and oppressive governments. In Home: Social Essays (1966), Baraka explains how he tried to defend himself against their accusations of self-indulgence, and was further challenged by Jaime Shelley, a Mexican poet, who said, “‘In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we’ve got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of.’” Soon Baraka began to identify with third world writers and to write poems and plays with strong political messages.
And here’s an excerpt from the poem that got him in hot water—Somebody Blew Up America:
Who the fake president Who the ruler Who the banker
Who? Who? Who?
Who own the mine Who twist your mind Who got bread Who need peace Who you think need war
Who own the oil Who do no toil Who own the soil Who is not a nigger Who is so great ain’t nobody bigger
Who own this city
Who own the air Who own the water
Who own your crib Who rob and steal and cheat and murder and make lies the truth Who call you uncouth
Who live in the biggest house Who do the biggest crime Who go on vacation anytime
Who killed the most niggers Who killed the most Jews Who killed the most Italians Who killed the most Irish Who killed the most Africans Who killed the most Japanese Who killed the most Latinos
Who? Who? Who?
Recent Comments
January 10, 2014 at 1:28 am
I knew him and Hettie back in ’58-’59. I lived in the same neighborhood, Chelsea. I even helped pack cartons of reams of paper into the apartment where he printed Yugen at home.
He is being described on NPR and in other places as becoming
radicalized. What needs to be understood is that as a Beat poet, he was already treated as a radical, as were all his peers.
They were seen as a threat to an orderly society. Their opposition to discrimination against all the disempowered and economically disenfranchised classes and ethnicities as an accepted institution was disturbing to the status quo. Beats questioned the powers that be, at the time and their voices attracted suppression.
I can’t remember seeing him as I moved to the East Village by 1960 and spent less time in his circle. By 1961 I moved to San Francisco and hung mainly with the West Coast Beats, though some others from the Village, such as Danny Propper, Jack Michelene and Steve Levine, and the “Wichita Vortex” members, also moved there.
The poem you’ve included is not meant primarily to be read to oneself, but spoken to others, to appreciate its power. This was wholly within the tradition of oral poets such as Langston Hughes.
January 10, 2014 at 7:40 am
evdebs, I would love to meet up sometime to hear more about your experiences. I’m going to send you an e-mail later today. thank you so much for commenting.
January 10, 2014 at 8:28 am
somebody blew up America
bodies fell like rain
Baraka wrote a poem
yesterday he died
debriefed by the shamans
poets take new positions
with bundled strings to tug
the next bud into blossom
who blew it up?
more important, why
lied into mind sickness
we remain reclined
to watch Saints chasing Seahawks?
and Patriots riding Colts?
Charge against the Broncos?
Panthers in San Francisco?
good-bye, dear Baraka
you who dared to blast
a poem at the shadows
knowing lies won’t last
January 10, 2014 at 9:25 am
Quote: “Who do no toil”.
Kinda answered his own question there.
January 10, 2014 at 9:48 am
On a related theme I present Timber Timbre.