William Harris Reviews Amiri Baraka's S O S: Poems at Boston Review

At Boston Review, William Harris wonders why Amiri Baraka's writing became so hard to find in print, and his career so different from how it started. He reflects on these unfortunate realities while reviewing a new Grove Press-published (thank goodness!) collection of his poems: S O S: Poems 1961-2013. From Boston Review:

Amiri Baraka is one of the most invisible of visible poets. Readers see him but they don’t really see him. They see what they want or need to see. Interference from beyond the text—social or ideological static—too often gets in the way. And his poetry is simply hard to find: it is either out of print or available only from little presses which usually don’t make it into the big bookstores and mainstream imagination. The one Baraka book that is everywhere is Blues People (1963), which has never gone out of print. Its success suggests that the grand struggle of black people in America, told through the story of black music from spirituals to free jazz, is one of Baraka’s most effective and powerful narratives. It connects without being offensive or threatening. It is highly theoretical, a precursor to cultural studies and critical race theory, satisfying on both emotional and intellectual levels. But there is equal and analogous power to be found in the less well-known poems.

Baraka’s career began very differently. He won an Obie, the off-Broadway theater award, for his 1964 play Dutchman, and his early poetry was published by such major houses as Grove Press and Bobbs-Merrill. Other work came out with William Morrow, a publisher who stayed loyal to Nikki Giovanni, if not Baraka. Several theories try to explain Baraka’s disappearance from the mainstream—some point to anti-Semitism, some his political move to the left, and others the persistent and unconscious traditional aesthetics of many critics. Baraka’s alleged anti-Semitism is a complex issue played out in an explosive but not subtle public area, where name calling replaces serious discussion. And after the 1930s, being leftist has rarely helped the reputation of an American poet. As for the last point, a recent review of Baraka by New York Times critic Dwight Garner epitomizes the pervasive divisions that continue to skew so many “aesthetic” judgments. He writes: “There are two ways to rank writers, the poet John Berryman said, ‘in terms of gift and in terms of achievement’ . . . Baraka’s achievements . . . were only rarely equal to his talents. He went from beatnik to Black Nationalist to Marxist, and his political voice slowly ran over his poetic one.” How are we to judge the artistic achievement of a poet who is at once a New American poet, post-war avant-garde poet, a politically engaged poet, and a jazz poet—a poet for whom process, commitment, and context are more important than some static ideal of perfection? [...]

Continue at Boston Review.