His work stresses the importance of providing for Blacks medical and psychiatric assistance. There are no reviews yet. A poetic voyage in five parts that charts the ebbs and flows of the African-American movement. Categories: Amiri Baraka , Poetry , Sale.
Additional information Reviews 0 Additional information Weight 4. Reviews There are no reviews yet. Add to cart. During his Marxist period, it became clearer and clearer to Baraka that black music, produced by a struggling people, embodies the revolutionary impulse in its very fiber and structure.
From the militant pounding of work songs to the melody-transforming rapid notes of bebop to the form-destroying atonal rhythms of free jazz, this music asserts its own voice and demands freedom from all forms of white oppression. It contains the history of the African American in the New World:. Is this blues laughter—the kind of laughter that keeps you from crying?
At the upper right corner of the first page of each section of this poem, Baraka notes what black music should accompany it. The selection ends with this dark quip:. The Wise One. In his early books Baraka worked for beauty but, as an honest poet, he let the ugliness of the world intrude. Especially during his Black Nationalist period, his language and subject matter became brutal, brutalized, as the music of the age also became harsh and violent. We certainly find that individual love expressed in his late love poems to his wife, Amina.
SOS: Poems ends with these poems and others largely unpublished in book form and therefore new to most readers. The happy news is that Baraka continued to produce wonderful and lively poetry until the end.
Though powerful and well crafted, it is marred by unnuanced indictments of power and Internet gossip. But let the reader decide on its truth and power: what is fantasy and what is reality? What sweet music. Maybe people are no longer afraid that Baraka is going to talk back to them, bite their heads off. I wonder if people will see Baraka more clearly now. But seeing him, understanding him, requires more than having the texts easily available.
Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. To think of Baraka in terms of jazz figures, the people who he has emulated, is helpful. The young militant Baraka followed the avenging angel John Coltrane; the mature Baraka molded himself after the angular, haunting, metaphysical Thelonious Monk. He is indigestible, or at least hard to digest.
To come to terms with him—his in-your-face language, strong feelings, and radical ideas—is not easy; that is part of his greatness. Paul Vangelisti and Grove Press have done American literature a service by making a major poet easily available.
Let us hope that a scholarly edition of collected poems, carefully edited with notes, critical apparatus, and introductions, is in our near future. Confronting the many challenges of COVID—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster.
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