Blues People and the Poetry of Amiri Baraka

In the downtown world of 1960s New York City, LeRoi Jones (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 (the Beats) to Charles Olson (Black Mountain), Frank O’Hara (New York School) and other Black writers (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 (painters, musicians, dancers, etc.). The poet’s eclecticism was most apparent in the Joneses’ (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.