#amiri baraka

[forever70s]

Amiri Baraka, Mayor Richard G. Hatcher, and Rev. Jesse Jackson in Gary, Indiana at the National Black Political Convention (1972)

#jesse jackson #richard g hatcher #activist #politician #1972 #black history month #writer #amiri baraka

[oldshowbiz]

Black Journal (1969) with guests LeRoi Jones, Jim Brown, and Kathleen Cleaver.

#black power #Civil Rights Era #amiri baraka #black panthers #jim brown

[davidhudson]

Amiri Baraka, October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014

#amiri baraka #poetry #literature

[garadinervi]

Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Freundlich Books, New York, NY, 1984 (1997 Lawrence Hill Books edition here) [Between the Covers, Gloucester City, NJ]

#graphic design #typography #poetry #book #cover #book cover #amiri baraka #freundlich books #lawrence hill books #1980s #1990s

[kitchen-light]

What is the artist’s job? To make war. The artist’s job is unrelenting war on evil.

Amiri Baraka, from a 2004 lecture "On Art & Politics" Link here & here

#amiri baraka #quotes #essays #words #found* #art #on poetry #on writing

[sivavakkiyar]

“She questioned me endlessly about American life, American politics, American youth – although I was jokingly cautioned against using the word American to mean the U.S. or North America. “Everyone in this car is American,” she said. “You from the North, we from the South.” I explained as best I could about the Eisenhowers, the Nixons, the DuPonts, but she made even my condemnations seem mild. “Everyone in the world,” she said, with her finger, “has to be communist or anti-communist. And if they’re anti-communist, no matter what kind of foul person they are, you people accept them as your allies. Do you really think that hopeless little island in the middle of the sea is China? That is irrational. You people are irrational!”

I tried to defend myself, “Look, why jump on me? I understand what you’re saying. I’m in complete agreement with you. I’m a poet … what can I do? I write, that’s all, I’m not even interested in politics.”

She jumped on me with both feet as did a group of Mexican poets later in Habana. She called me a “cowardly bourgeois individualist.” The poets, or at least one young wild-eyed Mexican poet, Jaime Shelley, almost left me in tears, stomping his foot on the floor, screaming: “You want to cultivate your soul? 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.”

—-amiri baraka

#amiri baraka #classic #theory #sure why not

[black-whole]

Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like Rivers - Black Poets Read their work

2 x CD, Compilation, 2000

#poetry recording #poetry #recording #poets #CD #audre lorde #amiri baraka #nikki giovanni #tracie morris #langston hughes #WEb Dubois #Claude Mckay #James Weldon #Sterling A Brown #gwendolyn brooks #robert hayden #May aAngelou #Derek Walcott #The last poets #Lucille Clifton #Al Young #Sonia Sachez #Ishamel Reed #Wole Soyinka #Wanda Coleman #Gil Scott Heron #Rita Dove #Allison Joseph #Public Enemy

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

#short story collection #short story collections #confirmation: an anthology of african american women #various authors #amiri baraka #leroi jones #amina baraka #african american literature #black literature #american literature #english language literature #20th century literature #have you read this short fiction? #book polls #completed polls

[readyforevolution]

Writer and music critic Amiri Baraka, who was born on this date in 1934, with poet, screenwriter and activist Maya Angelou in 1991 in Harlem during an event at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Chester Higgins, Jr./The New York Times

#amiribaraka #mayaangelou #schomburgcenter #langstonhughes #harlem #photography #photojournalism #jazzstage

#blacktumblr #amiri baraka #maya angelou #black history

[manwalksintobar]

if we’ve gotta live underground and everybody’s got cancer/ will poetry be enuf?  // Eisa Davis to Ntozake Shange

         dear ntozake,

I got sacks of mercury under the skin beneath my eyes either cried too much or i’m abt to the cool war’s burnin up my retina again does poetry start where life ends? i know i’m supposed to be cool: i wear corrective lenses that feature high definition tragedy. baby in the dumpster       ethnic cleansing assassinations       multinational mergers i’m supposed to shake my head write a poem believe in ripples. but i ain’t cool. i emit inhuman noises i imagine terrorist acts as i flick my imaginary ash onto the imaginary tray i imagine going insane with a purpose and writing it down feels sorta unnecessary does poetry end where life begins? berkeley girl       black girl        red diaper baby born of the blood of the struggle but with reaganomics and prince pickin up steam in ‘81 nothing came between me and my calvins 10 yrs old       unpressed hair       playin beethoven readin madeleine l’engle       got scared in my pants when i heard this girl testifying ‘TOUSSAINT’ in the black repertory group youth ensemble i was just sittin in a rockin chair pretendin to be 82 and talkin like I knew all bout langston’s ‘rivers’

i wasn’t as good as her and i definitely wadn’t cool so i gave up drama and decided to bake soufflés zake you wda beat me up in the playground if we’da grown up together and you did eighth grade       ‘he dropped em’ at the regional oratorical competition i saw another fly honey rip it this time it’s ‘a nite with beau willie brown’ i was bleedin on the ground i became yours no more soufflés i jacked for colored girls right off my mama’s shelf my mama fania who was sweatin with you and raymond sawyer and ed mock and halifu osumare dancin on the grass       back in the day in you i found a groove never knew i had one like that did that monologue over and over alone in my room my bunk bed the proscenium arch 13 yrs old       screamin and cryin abt my kids gettin dropped out a window didn't know a damn thing about rivers but i knew abt my heart fallin        five stories you were never abbreviated or lower case to me you just pimped that irony that global badass mackadocious funkology you not only had hígado you had ben-wa balls in yr pussy

betsey brown on my godmother's couch nappy edges in mendocino at the mouth of big river spell #7 after the earthquake in silverlake the love space demands had to be in brooklyn yr poems are invitations to live in yr body love letters yr admirers dream they coulda written themselves no one cd find a category that was yr size blackety black but never blacker than thou you teased me into sassiness when i had none to speak of made profane into sacred but never formed a church sanctified women's lives whether we were reading nietzsche or a box of kotex we were magical and regular you many-tongued st louis woman of barnard and barcelona you left us the residue of yr lust left us to wander life as freely as sassafrass cypress and indigo and even the unedumacated could get yr virtuosity cuz you always fried it up in grease you built an aqueduct from lorraine hansberry's groundwater and it bubbled straight to george c wolfe you never read what the critics said and you scrunched up the flesh between yr eyebrows like everybody else in my family

but zake is poetry enuf?

i beg the question cuz you grew me up you    and adrienne kennedy     and anna deavere smith and all my mothers you blew out the candles on my 26th so when there's mercury under the skin beneath my eyes and the world ain't so cool do you write a poem or a will?

like leroi jones said     if bessie smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music so do we all write like amiri baraka does or do we all get our nat turner on?

i beg the question cuz i wanna get my life right do some real work and i really don't want to kill any white folk i mean     can we talk abt this maybe it's just my red diaper that's itchin but i still got that will to uplift the race sans bootstraps or talented tenths or paper bag tests this time we uplift the human race and i know the rainbow might be but is poetry enuf?

it's a naive question but i'm old enuf to ask them once in a while if we do finally unload the canon clean it out stock up on some more colorful balls ain't we only gettin the ones that are available at a store near you? doesn't the market end up setting the new standards anyway? is poetry enuf if it ain't sellin? if ain't nobody readin it? can poetry keep a man     who can't read from droppin his kids out a window?

and how can i call a ceasefire to this cool war in stanzas of eights when we've declared poetry a no fly zone? we have learned to protect it and its potential politics like a mother shoot down anyone who might overdetermine a poem's meaning (while we poets divebomb everyone else's politics with impunity like we're the United States or something)

if poetry is just poetry we save it from the conservatives but doesn't that mean it's of no use to the progressives?

is poetry enuf? cuz that's all i'm doin. makin up stories    on stage     on the page keepin the beat and that's all my friends are doin and that's what a lot of folks my age are doin

but if we've gone and burnt up everything in the sky if there's nothin else to eat but landfill stroganoff if we've gotta live underground and everybody's got cancer will poetry be enuf?

my aunt angela says i can do my thang and keep swinging left hooks to oppression if i stay up stay into it stay involved just one form of praxis will do. it's just my guilt that thinks i need twenty-two what's enuf?

shouldn't i (or somebody) be our secular bodhisattva become a real power player but skip the talk show can't we stabilize, rekindle collectives and cooperatives and collaborations therapeutic communities that double as creative juggernauts a publishing house     a theatre where the plays cost less than the movies get the neighborhood coven back together take dance breaks in the cubicles sing until the flourescent lights burst into snow i ask you because you changed me zake you changed thousands of women and i know poetry can't be enuf if you drunk

i ain't tryin ta walk off wid alla yr stuff and i got nuttin but love for ya so that's why i gotta know i'm sittin on my bed encircled by every book you've ever published they're open like fans marking pages with the flint of genius all i want is for this circle to grow so tell me:

is this where poetry and life are twins? i felt so crumpled up when i started writing you poetry seemed so useless and dingy next to all the bright red bad news but now that the poem is over i feel wide open like an infant of the spring just tell me how to feed this light to my responsibilities and poetry just might be enuf           love           eisa

#poetry #Eisa Davis #Ntozake Shange #is poetry enuf? #American poetry #feminist poetry #feminism #for colored girls #Amiri Baraka #Leroi Jones #Black American poetry #Bessie Smith #Angela Davis #mothers & daughters #girls & women #politics #poems of protest #poems of rage #growing up #despair #loving the world anyway #letter #advice #letters to a young poet #radical art

[afrosonics]

Long live the death of bourgeois clowns. 

#amiri baraka #revolutionary

[oldshowbiz]

Dutchman and the Slave by LeRoi Jones ruled obscene in Boston

#boston #black power #beat generation #amiri baraka #censorship

[afrotumble]

Amiri Baraka "Somebody Blew Up America"

#amiri baraka #somebody blew up america #Youtube

[garadinervi]

Carl Van Vechten (photograph), Amiri Baraka, New York, NY, January 3, 1962 [Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters, Series IV. Photographs. Color Slides. Portraits, Box 226, Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT]

#photography #amiri baraka #carl van vechten #yale university library #beinecke rare book and manuscript library #1960s

[lisamarie-vee]

#amiri baraka #leroi jones #book cover

[sivavakkiyar]

Amiri Baraka

#the first poem I ever loved #tw: suicide #amiri Baraka #poetry #I remember suddenly realizing woah poetry can do this? #I thought it was all about flowers and love #took me a while to love the flowers and love stuff too