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Amiri Baraka 1934 -

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands

Amiri Baraka - Short Biography

Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA, is the author of over 40
books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, a poet icon and
revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and
political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.

With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman,
John Coltrane, Theophilus Monk, and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and
world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renown as the founder of the Black Arts
Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint
for a new American theater aesthetics. The movement and his published and
performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues
People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963) practically seeded “the cultural corollary
to black nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu.

Other titles range from Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), to The
Music (1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz and Blues
authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina, and his boldly sortied essays, The
Essence of Reparations (2003).

The Essence of Reparations is Baraka’s first published collection of essays in book form
radically exploring what is sure to become a twenty-first century watershed movement
of Black peoples to the interrelated issues of racism, national oppression, colonialism,
neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation, which he has long
been addressing creatively and critically. It has been said that Amiri Baraka is
committed to social justice like no other American writer. He has taught at Yale,
Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems is Baraka’s first collection of poems
published in the Caribbean and includes the title poem that has headlined him in the
media in ways rare to poets and authors. The recital of the poem “that mattered”
engaged the poet warrior in a battle royal with the very governor of New Jersey and
with a legion of detractors demanding his resignation as the state’s Poet Laureate
because of Somebody Blew Up America’s provocatively poetic inquiry (in a few lines
of the poem) about who knew beforehand about the New York City World Trade
Center bombings in 2001.

The poem’s own detonation caused the author’s photo and words to be splashed
across the pages of New York’s Amsterdam News and the New York Times and to
be featured on CNN--to name a few US city, state and national and international media.

Baraka lives in Newark with his wife and author Amina Baraka; they have five children
and head up the word-music ensemble, Blue Ark: The Word Ship and co-direct
Kimako’s Blues People, the “artspace” housed in their theater basement for some
fifteen years.

His awards and honors include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters
award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller
Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the
State university of New York at Stony Brook, and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

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Something in the Way of Things

African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land. A country
in black & white, newspapers
blown down pavements
of the world. Does
not feel
what I am.

Strength

in the dream, an oblique
suckling of nerve, the wind
throws up sand, eyes
are something locked in
hate, of hate, of hate, to
walk abroad, they conduct
their deaths apart
from my own. Those
heads, I call
my "people."

(And who are they. People. To concern

myslef, ugly man. Who
you, to concern
the white flat stomachs
of maidens, inside houses
dying. Black. Peeled moon
light on my fingers
move under
her clothes. Where
is her husband. Black
words throw up sand
to eyes, fingers of
their private dead. Whose
soul, eyes, in sand. My color
is not theirs. Lighter, white man
talk. They shy away. My own
dead souls, my, so called
people. Africa
is a foreign place. You are
as any other sad man here
american.