Where Amiri Baraka began

When I heard about the death of Amiri Baraka this month, a throwaway line about him from my favorite jumped to mind. In a funny way, it captured a moment in American literature, the kind of place that New York was in the 50s and 60s and would never be again, when it was a watershed for thousands of ideas and schools of thought. The rest of Baraka's career is one path, but a pretty narrow one considering where he started.

To put Baraka's life and work into perspective, you probably couldn't do any better than Questlove, who wrote a perceptive appreciation of the man in the Times. He described the time the Roots worked with him on a project:

We were at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, and Mr. Baraka came in to add his vocals, which consisted of reading a poem he had written, “Something in the Way of Things (In Town).” I listened to the track again Friday, after he died, and I hear so many things hiding in the corners of the poem and his performance of it. There are traces of early poetry mentors like Charles Olson, there’s a little William S. Burroughs, there’s a reminder of how he opened the door for poetry to speech to recording long before the Last Poets or Gil Scott-Heron. There’s a devotion to making language mean something, even if — especially if — that something isn’t safe and preapproved.

Mr. Baraka got himself into trouble sometimes with the things he said, but then he got himself out, too, and it wasn’t his fault if you decided to pay attention only to the first part. He had an unshakable devotion to change, even if his ideas were imperfect. That was what kept him committed to refinement and improvement, both within and outside himself.

That's a remarkable swirl of influences and ideas. And I respect Questlove's effort to explain rather than glide over some of the more problematic parts of his bio. I'm not sold on it — you are responsible for your words, and deserve to be judged by them. Baraka's reprehensible Sept. 11 poem is a poisonous stew of paranoia, ignorance, and laziness. I'm a free speech absolutist, so I don't agree with the silencing hatred the poem met, but as a reader and a citizen… I mean, if you are going to behave like an anti-Semitic fool in public, I'll draw my own conclusions.

And I agree with all that about making language mean something. There are a lot of earnest, Dead Poets Society sort of things I could say. Embarrassing things like: poetry is a thing that brings us together as a community, it is the embodiment of a higher sort of communication that embraces emotions and instincts, as well as the genius of language with its music, beauty, and freedom. It always fails when it stoops to division and separation — which is why "Somebody Blew Up America?" is a kind of crime for just being a monumentally shitty poem.

I've always wanted to think that at some level he knew better. That he remembered when he was young perhaps touched with a little optimism to go along with his emerging talent.

That throwaway line I'm thinking about comes from Frank O'Hara and his (perhaps?) satirical manifesto, "Personism." His mock movement "was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person."

It's a very simple idea, two friends having lunch together, friends from wildly different backgrounds or race, class, and sexuality who were connected by their common lot as artists. That "by the way" is key: it could have been Roi, if circumstances had allowed, and it's no big deal one way or another. He was accepted for who he was, but he turned his back on it. And his work suffered badly because of it.