Blues People and the Poetry of Amiri Baraka

Authors : M G STEPHENS

Pages : 29-42

View : 9 | Download : 14

Publication Date : 2019-11-01

Article Type : Other Papers

Abstract :In the downtown world of 1960s New York City, LeRoi Jones insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(later Amiri Baraka); was primarily a poet. He was associated with various avant-garde groups, a diverse assortment of nonacademic outsider writers from Allen Ginsberg insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(the Beats); to Charles Olson insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(Black Mountain);, Frank O’Hara insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(New York School); and other Black writers insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(Umbra and Ishmael Reed);, and an unclassifiable group of poets, such as Paul Blackburn and Diane DiPrima, who seemed to fit in everywhere and nowhere at once. Besides his poetry, Jones wrote regularly about jazz and had a burgeoning playwriting career. He was a key figure socially in the Lower East Side and the Village, his home often a gathering place for writers and artists insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(painters, musicians, dancers, etc.);. The poet’s eclecticism was most apparent in the Joneses’ insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(LeRoi and his then wife Hettie’s); incredibly catholic magazine Yugen. I still think that Yugen #7 is the best magazine I’ve ever read. That issue included work by Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch, George Stanley, Frank O’Hara, Gregory Corso, Stuart Z. Perkoff, John Ashbery, Philip Whalen, Larry Eigner, Max Finstein, Joel Oppenheimer, Diane DiPrima, Charles Olson, Edward Marshall, Allen Ginsberg, and LeRoi Jones himself. The cover was by the artist Norman Bluhm, who figures in a later short story of Amiri Baraka’s called “Norman’s Date.” To put that list of people in perspective, today it is a who’s who of prominent writers; in 1961, the year Yugen, no. 7 was published, none of the writers was known outside these small alternative literary circles.
Keywords : Amiri Baraka, American Literature, American Poetry