For Amiri Baraka

Year 2019, Issue: 51, 23 - 28, 01.11.2019

Pierre Joris

Abstract

The literary, cultural, political importance of Amiri Baraka’s life
and work is there for all to see. I would like to briefly say why his work
has been important for my own vision of the world. Indeed, it was his
writing and example that helped set me straight about America when I
started seriously reading Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka after getting to the
U.S.A. in 1967—at exactly the date, I was to find out later, when he
was jailed in Newark.
Before that, growing up in Europe after WWII Europe, my
experience of African-American culture was a more or less unthoughtthrough romantic love-affair with an attractive, fascinating, strange,
sexy and also at times dangerous other. At 12, on holiday in Belgium,
away from perfectly white Luxembourg, my parents took me to a Nat
King Cole concert and a year later to a Louis and Ella concert; at 15, I
got mother to drive me into France to catch Ray Charles in Metz. On
AFN radio I listened to Fats Domino, the Platters, Chubby Checker,
etc. I bought Bessie Smith records. I fell in love with jazz and my first
published piece of writing in the high school catholic students’ paper
was a potted bio of Charlie Parker. In Paris as a medical student in
1965 I started to read Invisible Man and the poetry of Hughes and Bob
Kaufman. I got dissed at my first poetry reading there—for a bad poem
in honor of Langston Hughes—by Ted Joans, but saved by Jimmy
Baldwin who told Joans to stop; I drove with friends to Orly airport
to welcome various free jazz musicians come to play at the Huchette
clubs; I played pinball with Memphis Slim; I learned pages of dialogue
from Baldwin’s Another Country by heart, etc...

Keywords

American Literature, American Poetry, Amiri Baraka

References

• Baraka, Amiri. The Dead Lecturer. Grove P, 1964.
• ---. Ed Dorn and the Western World, Skanky Possum and Effing P, 2009. Reprinted in Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters, edited by Claudia Moreno Pisano, U of New Mexico P, 2014, pp. xiii-xxiv.
• Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, editors. Poems for the Millenium, vol 2. The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, U of California P, 1998.