|
|
The Lives of Amiri Baraka
Hunter, Kim D.
http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4112Date Written: 2014-03-01 Publisher: Against the Current Year Published: 2014 Resource Type: Article A tribute to the life of author and poet Amiri Baraka who was active in the American Black Arts movement. Abstract: - Excerpt: Few could speak so plainly and poetically about oppression, and none could so easily connect the dots between the machinations of capital and misery in people's lives. The above lines from "A New Reality is better than a New Movie" could have been posted on a bus, in a Laundromat, or a pool hall back during the times they were written and grabbed an audience. People would have been clear on the political points being made. Baraka fulfilled poet Carl Sandburg's advice that poetry should be accessible to the working class. Music and sound were integral to Baraka's work. He loved and wrote about R&B and jazz throughout his long, multi-phased career which evokes that of Miles Davis. Both were also icons who were more popular than their art forms. Anyone who claims to be a scholar of American music in general or Black music in particular has to have read his Blues People: Negro Music in White America (first published 1963 under the author’s then name Leroi Jones -- ed.). This short, elegant, scholarly but accessible work lays low the myth of boundaries between "high" and mass culture. It is also a cultural and political manifesto on the roles and realities of African Americans in America and on the ways Black music reflects and influences both. Like many of those who arose from the Black Arts movement which he virtually founded, Baraka would use song and sound to enrich his readings. He took reading aloud to be the poetic equivalent of playing music from the page. As far he was concerned, poetry became real for most people the same way music did, when performed out loud in front of an audience. In that regard he never disappointed, falling somewhere between the populist theatrics of James Brown and the intensity of John Coltrane when it came to live reading. Subject Headings |