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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Editors' Choice One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books
Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka--"whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others" (New York Times)--was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. Selected by Paul Vangelisti, this volume comprises the fullest spectrum of Baraka's rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years.
Throughout Baraka's career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.
Author Notes
Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey. He went to college at New York University and Howard University. After serving in the Air Force for more than two years, he was dishonorably discharged for reading communist texts. He attended graduate school at Columbia University and became involved in the Beat scene. In 1958, he founded the poetry magazine Yugen. He changed his name after the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. He founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School and led the Black Arts Movement, an aesthetic sibling to the Black Panthers.
In 1964, Baraka's play, The Dutchman, won an Obie Award for Best American play and it was adapted into a film in 1967. His other plays include The Black Mass, The Toilet, and The Slave. His collections of poetry include Black Art, Black Magic, Home: Social Essays, and Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note. He received several awards during his lifetime including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York.
In 1980, he began teaching at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, retiring from its African Studies department in 1994. He also taught at Rutgers University, George Washington University, Yale University, San Francisco State University, Columbia University, and the New School for Social Research. In 2002, he was named New Jersey's second poet laureate, but soon afterward became the center of a controversy concerning his 9/11 poem Somebody Blew Up America. He died after weeks of failing health on January 9, 2014 at the age of 79.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Amiri Baraka was old for quite a long time. Amiri Baraka was young for quite a long time. Each of these statements is true, or, as is evident in this career-spanning volume, each is as contradictory as the late poet--a perennial wise man and wiseass--himself. The collection, if one skims it, yields Baraka's oft-noted inflections and influences: the reeling spontaneity of the Beats, the avant-garde scaffolding of the Black Mountain School, and, especially, the swaggering cadences of African-American vernacular. (I'd include the influence of Black Arts poetics had he not been the movement's chief chef and cultivator.) A closer examination reveals that Baraka was also very consistent over the collection's 52-year span-not just in his attention to black musical, cultural, and political lore but in his philosophical leanings. Religion is a recurring antagonism, and titles across the book highlight his heckling appraisals of dogma, doctrine, duplicity, and group thinkery: "Black Dada Nihilismus," "Heathens," "Why Is It Quiet in Some Churches." "We'll worship Jesus," he writes "when jesus get down/ when jesus get out his yellow Lincoln/ w/the built in cross stain glass/ window & box w/black peoples/ enemies." As that excerpt suggests, the book is also relentlessly irreverent. Baraka often seems akin to a voodoo doctor smiling as he needles American social order. No one is safe from his provocations, puns, and put-downs: not "Tom Ass Clarence" nor "Rush Limp Balls"; not whites, not blacks, not rich, not poor, and certainly not stupid. In "A Poem for Deep Thinkers," Baraka chastises writers petrified by craft: "the statue graveyard where Ralph/ Ellison sits biting his banjo/ strings retightening his instrument for the millionth time before/ playing the star spangled banjo." The poems live by every trickster-comedian's credo: "Say whatever you want so long as it's funny." Still, it is painful to acknowledge instances where the mockery is, as Baraka later apologetically admitted, "wrongheaded." We could add bilious, reckless, embarrassing. The aspersions are indefensible, but no serious reader would characterize Baraka's oeuvre as fundamentally malevolent. The early work reveals a poet exploring the psychology of being African-American, as well as of being a being being. "An Agony. As Now" begins, "I am inside someone/ who hates me. I look/ out from his eyes," and ends, "It is a human love, I live inside... It burns the thing/ inside it. And that thing/ screams." The contemplative musing of poems like "An Agony. As Now" and the wonderful "Footnote to a Pretentious Book" gives way to the public, polemical speech of cultural and political activism. The collection becomes, for better or/and worse, a signal of blunt urgency. Whether one views it as the work of a bully or prophet, Cassius or Cassandra, this is undeniably the work of the kind of poet we will not see again; Amiri Baraka was one of the last of the 20th century's literary lions. This momentous collection exhibits his abiding resistance to almost everything, but subversiveness. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Often controversial, always outspoken, Baraka (1934-2014) established himself as an influential writer and activist over a career spanning more than 50 years, producing a dozen books of poetry, numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, and several plays, including the incendiary Dutchman (1964). The poems selected for this commemorative collection reflect Baraka's evolving political and aesthetic affiliations, from early work that echoes the Beats and Black Mountain poets to his association with the civil rights and black arts movements and his adoption of radical Marxist and third-world liberation ideologies. From his earliest laments (African blues / does not know me) to his later exclamations (This is still slavery / Even with OBAMA, I'M STILL NOT FOOLED), Baraka touches upon, returns to, and ignites themes of racial strife and class struggle, refusing to placate detractors or tone down his outrage. The wide range of poetic forms and vocal registers is a testament to Baraka's passionate indignation, best appreciated within the context of his entire oeuvre. This is the definitive edition of Baraka's fiery and divisive poetry.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AMIRI BARAKA EULOGIZED James Baldwin on Dec. 8, 1987, by saying: "He was all the way live, all the way conscious, turned all the way up, receiving and broadcasting. . . . He always made us know we were dangerously intelligent and as courageous as the will to be free." This eulogy can aptly be turned back on Baraka himself, as "SOS: Poems 1961-2013" arrives a year after his own death. The sweeping collection, selected by Paul Vangelisti, begins with poems from Baraka's first collection, "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" (1961), and ends with unpublished work written up to 2013. Baraka began his career in the company of the Black Mountain School (Charles Olson, Robert Duncan), the Beats (Allen Ginsberg) and the New York School (Frank O'Hara), among others. He published "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" as LeRoi Jones, a downtown hipster dad of two daughters, married to the white and Jewish Hettie Jones. Many of his early poems are meditative lyrics in conversation with Ginsberg, Duncan, Gary Snyder and Olson, to name a few. The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 brought Jones's life as he knew it to a sudden close. He would leave his wife, children and poetic community; move uptown to Harlem; and eventually across the Hudson River back home to Newark, where he was born in 1934. Baraka's search for an ideological as well as geographical positioning saw him embrace black nationalism and become a founding member of the Black Arts movement, the cultural arm of the Black Power movement. He spearheaded the making of a revolutionary art that was recognizably black and oriented toward the working class. He wrote in "Short Speech to My Friends," "The poor have become our creators." By the end of the 1960s he changed his name to Amiri Baraka as he began fine-tuning his black poetic aesthetic : "We want a black poem. And a/Black World./Let the world be a Black Poem/And Let All Black People Speak This Poem/Silently/or LOUD." Inevitably, his outlook would become more global and international and he would turn to third-world Marxism. These were the years defined by the assassination of black leaders, and informed by protests and riots across the country. The volumes Baraka wrote during this politically turbulent and transitional period are represented in "SOS," which takes its title from a poem used as an epigraph: Calling black people Calling all black people, man woman child Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in Black People, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling you, calling all black people calling all black people, come in, black people, come on in. Baraka's poems criticized the black bourgeoisie, Nixon, "the owner Jews," the "superafrikan Mobutu," "boss nigger," Kissinger, "Tom Ass Clarence," "Spike Lie" and on and on - basically everyone in our global community whose motives and actions he questioned. His struggle to form a black poetics that could marry his activism, politics, history, culture and imagination represented his struggle to exist. He stood firm in his beliefs and demonstrated again and again in his poems the informed ability to hold complexity but not ambiguity. To know his fury was to understand both his limits and his genius. For readers familiar with "Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995)," published 20 years ago and also selected by Vangelisti, "SOS" can be considered an updated version. The omissions in "Transbluesency" - love poems to Hettie Jones, some wellknown and often anthologized Black Arts poems - remain intentional omissions in "SOS: Poems 1961-2013." In this sense the collection is selected with an emphasis not on culling the good from the bad but on presenting a certain narrative for Baraka, one not interested in his career in the archival sense. Additions to the 2015 volume include poems from the collection "Funk Lore" (1996) and the poems Vangelisti chose after Baraka's death. The "Funk Lore" poems maintain Baraka's agenda of speaking truth to power. The breath and line are now firmly influenced by the improvisational techniques of jazz and suggest the spoken word tradition that is a contemporary standard. There is a conscious attempt by Baraka to align himself less with the modernist tradition and more with the jazz-influenced poetics of Langston Hughes. Poems are dedicated to Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Voice and sound pull us through these performance pieces, challenging us to speak the poems aloud. In the ending of "JA ZZ: (The 'Say What?') IS IS JA LIVES," scat singing is born out of the standard techniques of the line. Alliteration and rhyme pull the words right out of a mouth : ... africanmemorywhisper blowing the blown the known what we knew what we blew blues loves us our spirit is ultraviolet The real prize of "SOS" is its final group of poems, labeled "Fashion This, 1996-2013." The section opens with the autobiographical "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. The use of the first person is intimate. The poem with subtle guile enacts Baraka's changing relationship to poetic traditions. Capitalization creates a contrasting relationship between "Beautiful" and "Struggle." Rather than catching up, he realized he had to dig in, which became its own form of understanding. Then the "poetic" is in the "scat &/sing," which is synonymous with moving forward. The controversial "Somebody Blew Up America" - a poem that cost him New Jersey's poet laureate position when its speculations were described as anti-Semitic - is also in this section, along with "ARAFAT WAS MURDERED!" Both engage the Israeli-Palestinian struggles from an anti-Zionist position. In this light, Vangelisti's framing of Baraka as the new Ezra Pound (he invokes M. L. Rosenthal's statement that "no American poet since Pound has come closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action") is provocative, given Pound's politics. "SOS" compiles the most complete representation of over a half-century of revolutionary and breathtaking work. Its final poem, "Ballad Air & Fire," is a stunningly beautiful lyric dedicated to Baraka's wife (now widow), Amina Baraka, nee Sylvia Robinson. The dedication "for Sylvia or Amina" suggests an inside joke, adding to the poem's air of intimacy. But even in this final personal moment the language opens out to its community of readers. The final two stanzas become an everlasting, poignant entrance into silence: to have been together and known you, and despite our pain to have grasped much of what joy exists accompanied by the ring and peal of your romantic laughter is what it was about, really. Life. Loving someone, and struggling CLAUDIA RANKINE'S latest poetry collection, "Citizen," was a finalist for the National Book Award, and is a finalist in two categories for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. In 1934, Everett Leroy Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) was born in Newark, NJ. About that same time, a group of scholars known as the New Critics were busy espousing notions that would dominate the next 30 years of poetic practice. Among these was the idea that poetry and politics should not mix-that art should occupy a mythical world, free of social considerations. Over a 50-year career, Baraka would obliterate that idea by masterfully mingling the personal and the political. His work does not shill for an ideology but is one of those rarest of things: poetry that combines a rigorous intellect, high-voltage aesthetics, and a revolutionary's need to confront his subject. This collection is not the poetry of greeting cards or elementary classrooms, and those who read for escape will find no relaxing excursions in its pages. But those who believe, as Baraka did, that art could surpass simple beauty and act as a force for social change will cherish this remarkable volume. VERDICT A major figure in contemporary poetry, Baraka's work will attract those who prefer their verse weaponized. Highly reommended.-Chris Pusateri, Jefferson Cty. P.L., Lakewood, CO (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
