Lorenzo Thomas
The brouhaha surrounding my comments regarding Amiri Baraka on Monday has been instructive. It sent me back to an interview the late Lorenzo Thomas gave to The New Journal back in 2001. Although he was somebody whom I never knew nearly as well as I wanted to, Lorenzo was someone whose judgment I trusted for some 30 years – even when I didn’t agree with him, Thomas never led me astray, but forced me to think through my own position far more carefully than I might have otherwise.
It was Thomas, for example, who first steered me toward the great work that is Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The poems of Stanford’s I’d seen in print previously were the short lyrics he’d written in college, an attempt to rein in the wild spirit of the swamp surrealist. If those were the only poems of Stanford’s you’d seen, you never would have suspected that he’d authored one of the great longpoems of the 20th century – and certainly the finest 20th century poem by a teenager. I believe that Thomas first published his review of Battlefield in Doug Messerli’s Las-Bas, and it’s been reprinted several times since. Along with Stanford’s publisher, C.D. Wright, Thomas can take a share of the credit in bringing readers to one of the great rural white poets of our time.
In the interview in The New Journal, Thomas talks about the influence of Baraka in terms that may make most of the participants in Monday’s comments stream shudder, which is precisely why these terms deserve more serious consideration. Lorenzo is discussing the influence of the
On the other hand, it is also true that my own poems are influenced as much by Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery as by Amiri Baraka and Calvin Hernton. In fact, John and Amiri are the two most influential American poets - in terms of style - of the last quarter of the 20th century. Hundreds of writers have learned from them; and, of course, different people may be attuned to learning different things from them. In my case, I think what I learned from Ashbery reinforced what I learned from Wallace Stevens and both Ashbery and Baraka reinforced what I found interesting about the colloquial language that I found in Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg. And, of course, it is a fact that Hughes learned something from Sandburg, too. I guess that is how poetic influence connects you to tradition. But in this sense I am not suggesting that tradition is a readymade thing.
Baraka, Thomas notes, “was the only African American writer included in [the Donald Allen] anthology - which … says something about American literary history. But, ” and this where I always find Thomas so illuminating, “there was another important anthology published around the same time: Beyond the Blues, edited by Rosey Pool. That book, published in
It’s a provocative position & Thomas doesn’t have all of his facts exactly right – Tom Dent is not included in the book. But this 1962 volume, published as a mass market paperback by The Hand and Flower Press of Lympne Kent, does contain 56 poets, including LeRoi Jones (as Baraka was then known) and Ted Joans, one poet who could easily have been incorporated into the Allen anthology¹. At just 188 pages, Beyond the Blues doesn’t give its contributors a lot of room to stretch – Jones & Joans are represented by two short poems apiece. In the Allen, Jones has seven.
Interestingly, neither of the two poems – “The End of Man is His Beauty” & “A Poem for Democrats” – is reprinted in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, the 1979 Morrow Quill collection. Three of the seven from the Allen anthology – “Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note,” “In Memory of Radio,” & “The Turncoat” – made it into Selected Poetry. Transbluesency, Baraka’s 1995 selected published by Marsilio, includes two of the pieces that made it from the Allen into Selected Poetry, dropping “The Turncoat,” but adding two additional poems from the seven in the Allen, “Way Out West” & “To a Publisher . . . cutout.” Further, one of the two pieces in Beyond the Blues is reprinted in Transbluesency, “A Poem for Democrats.” This heavier representation from Jones’ earlier works in general in Transbluesency might be explained, at least in part, by the presence of an outside editor, Paul Vangelisti.
The Transbluesency selection suggests a reading in which a major member of the New American Poets rejects his old approach to verse, abandoning his slave name to boot, in favor of a black nationalist populism that has continued in Amiri Baraka’s poetry to this day. As I tried to suggest Monday, I think that’s a white reading of Baraka’s career, and thus fundamentally a misreading. While Baraka was unquestionably one of the great talents of the New Americans, the titles listed in the previous paragraph reverberate with echoes of his influences, including Frank O’Hara (“In Memory…” & even “Preface…”), Charles Olson (“The End of Man…”), John Wieners (“A Poem for …” a model title that Baraka will go on to use over & over, substituting only the last word or phrase), and Edward Dorn (“Way Out West”). Talented as LeRoi Jones undoubtedly was, he was also one of the most derivative of the New American poets (equaled perhaps only by Ron Loewinsohn’s channeling of William Carlos Williams).
In the talk in Mixed Blood, Baraka himself suggests a reading in which the transition is less of a rejection – tho he admittedly uses the word “split” himself – than it is a matter of personal growth. Just as Ed Dorn found it untenable to be Olson writ small beyond, say, North Atlantic Turbine, Jones/Baraka found it impossible to be the living embodiment of the entire Allen anthology & found out who he was when he finally moved beyond echoing his friends & elders. A pretty normal story for any young poet, actually.
Interestingly, Rosey Pool, the editor of Beyond the Blues, was given to foregrounding black populism. A Dutch national who had once been the teacher of Anne Frank, Pool discovered African American literature while writing on then contemporary American poetry while in college and, as the book jacket for Beyond the Blues puts it in classic 1950’s blurb-speak, “This was the beginning of a life-long interest in the poetic self-expression of
Both of Jones’ poems can be read in such populist terms, even as the biographical paragraph that precedes them includes the following quote:
Ambitions? To write beautiful poems full of mystical sociology and abstract politics.
Hardly the agenda we associate with the mature Baraka. Indeed, if we look at the first of the two poems in Blues, “The End of Man is His Beauty,” the Olsonian lyricist we discover is hardly a mature poet at all:
And silence
which proves but
a referent
to my disorder.
Your world shakes
cities die
beneath your shape.
The single shadow
at
like a live tree
whose leaves
are like clouds
Weightless soul
at whose love faith moves
as a dark and
withered day.
They speak of singing who
have never heard song; of living
whose deaths are legends
for their kind.
A scream
gathered in wet fingers
at the top of its stalk.
— They have passed
and gone
whom you thought your lovers
In this perfect quiet, my friend,
their shapes
are not unlike
night’s
The clichés in this piece are comically preposterous. “They speak of singing who / have never heard song,” is my favorite, sort of a literary Ed Wood moment. It’s worth noting this precisely to get beyond the idea that Baraka never used a cliché until he began to focus on writing within a black nationalist frame of reference. I would, in fact, argue rather the opposite. The heavy use of popcult references in Baraka’s later poetry represents a grounding of this same impulse in something much closer to the actual lives of his primary audience. Instead of simply figuring a certain self-important pose as it does here, cliché in Baraka’s later work serves a purpose.
One of its functions – maybe even the most important – is to divide the audience. Those readers who are trained to cringe at a passage like the following –
Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the
And all the good people iced,
tortured , assassinated, vanished
Who got rich from
Who cut off peoples hands in the
Who invented Aids Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"
Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek who WHO W H O/
– are concerned with depth, specificity & personal insight, all elements manifestly rejected by a poem like “Somebody Blew Up America.” So here is Lorenzo Thomas, who could write the
John [Ashbery] and Amiri [Baraka] are the two most influential American poets - in terms of style - of the last quarter of the 20th century.
I might disagree with Thomas’ assertion here – I would argue that Robert Creeley, Judy Grahn & Jack Spicer have had equally profound roles in shaping the verse we have today – but I don’t think that I – or you – can discount the claim being made. Part of which is that it’s NOT the early Olsonian LeRoi Jones whom Thomas thinks is so influential, but precisely the generator of such consciously flattened discourses as “Somebody Blew Up….” This has serious consequences for thinking through what poetry is, where it’s centered in society & how it constitutes meaning & discourse. And I don’t see how you can confront those issues by reading Baraka as the New American who went wrong.
¹ Tho Steve Jonas & Bob Kaufman, who likewise might have been in the Allen anthology with only the slightest shift in editorial focus, are omitted from Beyond the Blues as well.
