[Reader-list] Amiri Baraka + Adrienne Rich

[Vivek Narayanan]

Adrienne Rich writing on Amiri Baraka--
that makes a great poet + a great poet.

(and certainly one of the most illuminating combos I've read in a while)

http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/rich.php

What Country Is This?
Rereading LeRoi Jones’s The Dead Lecturer Adrienne Rich

A splinter of language flares into mind before sleep, in crawling 
traffic or some waiting room of defunct magazines. So a few years ago a 
phrase began stalking me: A political art, let it be / tenderness . . . 
words of a poem from The Dead Lecturer by LeRoi Jones (afterward to 
become Amiri Baraka). I found the book, the poem (“Short Speech to My 
Friends”), then pored through the pages, as after some long or lesser 
interval one reads poetry as if for the first time. I’d been taken, 
unsettled, by these poems in the late 1960s; read some of them with 
basic writing students at City College of New York and graduate students 
at Columbia. My Grove Press paperback, with the young poet’s photograph 
on the cover, has titles and pages scribbled inside the back and front 
covers, faint pencil lines along margins. A traveled book, like a 
creased and marked–up map.

I read The Dead Lecturer again partly for the feeling of a time and 
place, personal and historical: New York in the late 1960s, surges of 
public expectation and anger, war news, assassination news, political 
meetings, demonstrations, posters and leaflets; a time lived in the 
streets, in community centers, lecture halls and student cafeterias, 
storefronts and walk–ups, coffeehouses and jazz clubs; living room and 
open–air poetry readings from the East Village to the Upper West Side to 
Harlem. A time when factions might clash but there was motive and hope 
in social participation. I read it again realizing, forty years later, 
how Jones’s poetics had furthered my sense of possibilities when I was 
writing the poems of The Will to Change and Diving into the Wreck. But I 
return to The Dead Lecturer here for reasons beyond the personal.

Amiri Baraka’s distinguished, embattled history as poet, small–press 
editor, essayist, playwright, political activist, autobiographer, and 
public figure is not what I want to write about here—even if I thought I 
could do it justice. Paul Vangelisti, in his foreword to Transbluesency: 
The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961—1995, and Robert 
Creeley, in a December 1996/January 1997 Boston Review essay, provide 
valuable perspectives on a major poetic career. But I would urge any 
serious student of the human scene, certainly any poet, who has not 
recently, or ever, read The Dead Lecturer: borrow a copy from the public 
library, from a friend’s bookshelf, or get hold of it secondhand. 
(“Used,” “As New,” “Slightly Worn,” say the mail–order book catalogues. 
The copy in my hands, both used and new, in different senses.) Many of 
the poems are included in Transbluesency, but The Dead Lecturer itself 
is out of print.

And it is a book, not an assemblage of occasional poems: a soul–journey 
borne in conflictual music, faultless phrasing. Music, phrasing of human 
flesh longing for touch, mind fiercely working to decipher its 
predicament. Titles of poems are set sometimes in bold, sometimes 
italics, implying structures within the larger structure. Drawing both 
on black music and the technical innovations of American Modernism, 
Jones moves deeper into a new poetics, what the poet June Jordan would 
name “the intimate face of universal struggle.”

But intimacy is never simple, least of all in poems like these where 
“inept tenderness” (“A Poem for Neutrals”) searches for an ever–escaping 
mutuality. Or, in “Footnote to a Pretentious Book”:

Who am I to love
so deeply? As against
a heavy darkness, pressed
against my eyes. Wetting
my face, a constant trembling
rain.

A long life, to you. My friend. I
tell that to myself, slowly, sucking
my lip. A silence of motives / empties
the day of meaning.
What is intimate
enough? What is
beautiful?

It is slow unto meaning for
any life. If I am an animal, there
is proof of my living. The fawns
and calves
of my age. But it is steel that falls
as a thin mist into my consciousness. As a fine
ugly spray, I have made
some futile ethic
with.

“Changed my life?” As the dead man
pacing at the edge of the sea. As
the lips, closed
for so long, at the sight
of motionless
birds.
There is no one to entrust with
meaning. (These sails go by, these small
deadly animals.)
And meaning? These words?
Were there some blue expanse
of world. Some other
flesh, resting
at the roof
of the world
you could say of me,
that I was truly
simpleminded.

No lyric of romantic loneliness and melancholy here. The title suggests 
an addendum to some literary classic presumed to have changed a life, 
but the mode is largely interrogative: “It is slow unto meaning for / 
any life. . . . Who am I to love / so deeply? . . . What is intimate / 
enough? What is / beautiful? . . . And meaning? These words?” Images 
bind these questions, render them sensuous: darkness and rain, the 
sucked lip, the young animals, steel “that falls / as a thin mist . . . 
. a fine / ugly spray,” the immobility of “the dead man / pacing,” “the 
lips, closed / for so long,” “motionless / birds.” Together they conjure 
a landscape of withholding, longing and mistrust. The speaker is not, 
cannot be, “simpleminded.”

In “An Agony. As Now.” (possibly one of Jones’s most–quoted poems—at 
least the first few lines) contactlessness and self–barricading are 
evoked but cannot utter themselves. Nor can “love” decipher them from 
the outside. But this is not simply one person’s crisis. Robert Creeley 
rightly saw in it “life . . . in a literal body which the surrounding 
‘body’ of the society defines as hateful”—an unacceptable condition. It 
can be read as common existential anguish, but to ignore that surround 
of social hatred is to mistake the poem’s diagnostic power:

I am inside someone
who hates me. I look
out from his eyes. Smell
what fouled tunes come in
to his breath. Love his
wretched women.

Slits in the metal, for sun. Where
my eyes sit turning, at the cool air
the glance of light, or hard flesh
rubbed against me, a woman, a man,
without shadow, or voice, or meaning.

This is the enclosure (flesh,
where innocence is a weapon. An
abstraction. Touch. (Not mine.
Or yours, if you are the soul I had
and abandoned when I was blind and had
my enemies carry me as a dead man
(if he is beautiful, or pitied.

It can be pain. (As now, as all his
flesh hurts me.) It can be that. Or
pain. As when she ran from me into
that forest.
Or pain, the mind
silver spiraled whirled against the
sun, higher than even old men thought
God would be. Or pain. And the other.
The
yes. (Inside his books, his fingers. They
are withered yellow flowers and were
never
beautiful.) The yes. You will, lost soul, say
’beauty.’ Beauty, practiced, as the tree.
The
slow river. A white sun in its wet
sentences.

Or, the cold men in their gale. Ecstasy.
Flesh
or soul. The yes. (Their robes blown.
Their bowls
empty. They chant at my heels, not at
yours.) Flesh
or soul, as corrupt. Where the answer
moves too quickly.
Where the God is a self, after all.)

Cold air blown through narrow blind
eyes. Flesh,
white hot metal. Glows as the day with
its sun.
It is a human love, I live inside. A bony
skeleton
you recognize as words or simple feeling.

But it has no feeling. As the metal, is
hot, it is not,
given to love.

It burns the thing
inside it. And that thing
screams.

“Self–hatred” is too shallow a diagnosis for this condition.

Here is self–wrestling of a politicized human being, an 
artist/intellectual, writing among the white majority avant–garde at a 
moment when African revolutions and black American militance seemed to 
be converging in the electric field of possible liberations. 
Experiencing the American color line—that deceptively, murderously, 
ever–shifting, ever–intransigent construct—as neither “theme” nor 
abstraction, but as disfiguring all life, and in a time when 
“revolution” was still a political, not a merchandising term, Jones’s 
poems both compress and stretch the boundaries of the case. “A Poem for 
Willie Best” (a well–known black character actor) scathingly quotes the 
dominant cultural “line” on “the Negro”: “Lazy / Frightened / Thieving / 
Very potent sexually / Scars / Generally inferior / (but natural / 
rhythms.” (Such terms may have gone underground but still inhabit 
popular imaginations, via television and film, African–American 
political and celebrity figures notwithstanding.) In addition to Best, 
the poetry’s geography includes Billie Holiday (as “Crow Jane,” after 
Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” poems), the civil rights leader Robert F. Williams, 
the poets Edward Dorn (to whom the book is dedicated) and Robert Duncan 
(cited in two poems), Sartre, Paul Valéry (“as Dictator”), Marx. 
Lyrically tough as deepest blues, they do not romanticize the black 
populace as some revolutionary vanguard:

It cannot come
except you make it
from materials
it is not
caught from. (The philosophers
of need, of which
I am lately
one,
will tell you. “The People,”
(and not think themselves
liable
to the same
trembling flesh). I say now, “The People,
as some lesson repeated, now,
the lights are off, to myself,
as a lover, or at the cold wind.

Let my poems be a graph
of me. (And they keep
to the line, where flesh
drops off. You will go
blank at the middle. A
dead man.
But
die soon, Love. If
what you have for
yourself, does not
stretch to your body’s
end.
(Where, without
preface,
music trails, or your fingers
slip
from my arm

(“Balboa, The Entertainer”)

Out of the verse experiments of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, 
Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, Jones had come into association with 
younger white contemporaries like Edward Dorn, Diane Wakoski, Gary 
Snyder, Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, Carol Berg. (All of these and 
others were published in chapbooks under Jones’s editorship through his 
imprint, Totem Press, along with his first collection, Preface to a 
Twenty–Volume Suicide Note.) In The Dead Lecturer he takes what he needs 
for breath and measure, committed to the break with anglicized formalism 
he calls for in “The Myth of a Negro Literature,” his 1962 address to 
the American Society for African Culture:

No poetry has come out of England of major importance for forty years, 
yet there are would–be Negro poets who reject the gaudy excellence of 
20th century American poetry in favor of disemboweled Academic models of 
second–rate English poetry . . . . It would be better if such a poet 
listened to Bessie Smith sing Gimme a Pigfoot, or listened to the tragic 
verse of a Billie Holiday, than be content to imperfectly imitate the 
bad poetry of the ruined minds of Europe.

Yet the poems in The Dead Lecturer cannot be called derivative or said 
to belong to any single school, so imprinted are they with the intensity 
of Jones’s own personality, intellect, and location. It is the book of 
an artist contending first of all with himself, his sense of emotional 
dead ends, the limits of poetic community, the contradictions of his 
assimilation by that community, his embrace and rejection of it: 
searching what possible listening, what possible love or solidarity 
might exist out beyond those contradictions. It is the book of a young 
artist doing what some few manage or dare to do: question the 
foundations of the neighborhood in which he or she has come of age and 
received affirmation. Because Jones himself is implicated, this 
questioning is double–sided, and sides will be chosen.

“Short Speech to My Friends” moves to the crux of the matter. The voice 
in the first section of the poem rehearses utopian desire and opposes it 
against actual disjuncture:

A political art, let it be
tenderness, low strings the fingers
touch, or the width of autumn
climbing wider avenues, among the
virtue
and dignity of knowing what city
you’re in, who to talk to, what clothes
—even what buttons—to wear. I address

/ the society
the image, of
common utopia.
/ The perversity
of separation, isolation,
after so many years of trying to enter
their kingdoms,
now they suffer in tears, these others,
saxophones whining
through the wooden doors of their less
than gracious homes.
The poor have become our creators. The
black. The thoroughly
ignorant.

Let the combination of morality
and inhumanity
begin.

“Inhumanity”: dehumanization in the eyes of others, entrenched power 
that inflicts suffering without compunction, and the violence (mostly 
horizontal) embraced by those who feel no stake in the social compact. A 
“political art” cannot claim to imagine a “common utopia,” or evoke 
“tenderness” while enduring this dual inhumanity. But it must somehow 
bear tenderness for those who “after so many years of trying to enter 
their kingdoms, / now . . . suffer in tears.” (Or, in “Balboa, the 
Entertainer”: “But / die soon, Love. If / what you have for / yourself, 
does not / stretch to your body’s / end.”) The last three lines in this 
section of “Short Speech to My Friends” flash a signal toward The 
Wretched of the Earth (1961, translated in 1963), Frantz Fanon’s great 
study of colonialist violence, pathology, culture, and national 
consciousness. The poem’s structure spirals like a staircase, where “the 
society / the image, of / common utopia” turns sharply into “The 
perversity / of separation, isolation,” this turn signified by a 
full–stop and capital letter. And, since the poet is located between 
worlds, there is a necessary ambiguity to the pronouns, the “they” and 
the “our.”

The poem from which the book’s title is taken, “I Substitute for the 
Dead Lecturer,” carries Jones’s predicament to the edge:

What is most precious, because
it is lost. What is lost,
because it is most
precious.

They have turned, and say that I am
dying. That
I have thrown
my life
away. They
have left me alone, where
there is no one, nothing
save who I am. Not a note
nor a word.

Cold air batters
the poor (and their minds
turn open
like sores). What kindness
What wealth
can I offer? Except
what is, for me,
ugliest. What is
for me, shadows, shrieking
phantoms. Except
they have need
of life. Flesh
at least,
should be theirs.

The Lord has saved me
to do this. The Lord
has made me strong. I
am as I must have
myself. Against all
thought, all music, all
my soft loves.

For all these wan roads
I am pushed to follow, are
my own conceit. A simple muttering
elegance, slipped in my head
pressed on my soul, is my heart’s
worth. And I am frightened
that the flame of my sickness
will burn off my face. And leave
the bones, my stewed black skull,
an empty cage of failure.

What can the practice of the middle–class, avant–garde artist offer to a 
downpressed and (formally) uneducated people who need poetry, beauty, as 
much as, or more than, any? To a people who possess elaborate cultural 
traditions of language and music—of which Jones is well aware, even if 
they are disdained by his middle–class professors at Howard 
University—yet from whom, in his present life, he feels ruptured? Fellow 
artists, unable to feel or hear Jones’s shrieking phantoms, have left 
him alone with it all: “They have turned, and say that I am dying. That 
/ I have thrown / my life / away.” The voices are internal also: how to 
give flesh to shadows? This is the beset, conflicted art of one 
experiencing—allowing himself to experience—a split at the core: Who and 
what do I work for? What can I offer? What city am I living in? Who am I 
talking to?

There is no “universal” city but that defined by those who think they 
rightfully own the cities.

Such questions have engaged many other poets, in cultures outside North 
America, who believed that art must be a human resource in any genuine 
seismic shift, that it should belong to those who need it most. But 
rarely in North America has appeared so morally problematized, 
artistically self–critical a poetic document. Jones’s fusion of craft 
and emotional volatility can possess a furious eloquence reminiscent at 
times of Aimé Césaire.

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl broke expressive limits in 1955, beginning with 
the wreckage of intelligence (“I saw the best minds of my generation 
destroyed by madness”) through the desperation beneath numbed, 
Freudianized, complacent postwar America. Howl transposed despair and 
alienation from individual pathology onto that society itself. In this 
it is one of our great public poems. But much of Beat–influenced poetry, 
catching on to the expressive open–form Whitmanic model and the 
un–Whitmanic machismo, minus Howl’s social insights, easily devolved 
into self–indulgence, penile narcissism, and tantrum.

In The Dead Lecturer there is neither rant (unless strategically placed) 
nor self–aggrandizing neurotic angst. There are, however, many sliding 
screens. “Black Dada Nihilismus” I read as bitter verbal extremism, a 
send–up of “Dadaist” and nihilist jabber, turned against Eurocentrism. 
Here it is said of Sartre, “a white man” who had strenuously opposed the 
French presence in North Africa: “we beg him die / before he is killed.” 
The injunction to “Rape the white girls” hurls back the deadly lie of 
white lynching tradition; to “Rape their fathers” an expression of sheer 
political impotence. Masks and voice–overs are strategic to the poem.

In the poem “The politics of rich painters” Jones mocks the discourse of 
an art clique he perceives as inhabited by “faggots.” Gay men are made 
to stand in for the capitalist art world, its class entitlement and 
hypocrisy. They become the target for rank homophobia, which the poet 
has failed to disentangle from class (and racial) rage; the language 
wobbles unsteadily between the two. Minus the homophobic stereotyping 
this could have been a brilliant satirical poem on the posturing of rich 
aesthetes:

Whose death
will be Malraux’s? Or the names
Senghor, Price, Baldwin
whispered across the same dramatic
pancakes, to let each eyelash flutter
at the news of their horrible deaths. It is
a cheap game
to patronize the dead, unless their
deaths be accountable
to your own understanding. Which be
nothing nothing
if not bank statements and serene trips
to our ominous countryside . . .

The source of their art crumbles into
legitimate history.
The whimpering pigment of a decadent
economy

Published in 1964, The Dead Lecturer is not just a transitional book in 
a long, controversial career. It is a landmark in itself. After the 
assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Jones broke with his former 
affiliations (including his wife and daughters); moved to Harlem, then 
Newark; identified for a time as a Black Nationalist, then turned away 
from Nationalism to international socialism and Third World Marxism; and 
became Amiri Baraka. In these readings I have wished not to biographize 
the poems except as Jones gives leave within them; “Let my poems be a 
graph / of me.” Rather, I am drawn and held by the poet as social being, 
trying to pierce layers of inhumanity and bad faith, including his own, 
with language.

For me, perhaps for others, the legacy of LeRoi Jones from this early 
book is to have made a poetry so personally exposed yet so wide–lensed, 
asking questions at the crossroads of experimentalism and political 
upheaval—questions about art, community, poverty, audience, skin, self. 
His torquing of language is organic to the work; he does not assume that 
either self–revelation or experiments in language can suffice. The 
reflexive, un–self–critical use of “jews” and “fags” as familiar, 
still–poisonous code names for class enemies certainly disfigures the 
poet’s achievement, along with misogyny and its images craving the woman 
victim. Jones was writing within conditions that continue to disfigure 
the American—and human—scene of which he was, and is, though 
oppositionally, a part. Even the erratics of his art continue to be 
instructive on that society.

And still there is this painful, visionary music:

What comes, closest, is closest. Moving, there
is a wreck of spirit,
a heap of broken feeling. What
was only love
or in those cold rooms,
opinion. Still, it made
color. And filled me
as no one will. As, even
I cannot fill
myself . . .

And which one
is truly to rule here? And
what country is this?

(“Duncan spoke of a process”)