Amiri Baraka Research

Amiri Baraka

As I watched the film in class, the mention of Amiri Baraka led me to research not just who he was, but also how he did his work. In order to research these topics I have to know a little about the life of Baraka. Baraka, born Everett LeRoi Jones, grew up in the city of Newark, New Jersey. He would later change his name in 1967 to his current name. He came from a life that was far from perfect, his mother a social worker and his father a postal worker made enough money to get by. Despite his condition, he went on to study philosophy and religion at Rutgers, Columbia, and Harvard and later enlisted in the US Air Force. I next looked into what connects him to the subject of Polis is This, Charles Olsen. The connection lies in his poetry and more importantly in the time period in which he completed some of his most famous works of art. It has been documented that after Baraka’s move to Greenwich Village where he learned about the influence of Jazz. It is believed that this was his first real encounter he had with the Beat era poets and writers such as Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Looking deeper into what Baraka is about I tried looking for some famous quotes from his career including this controversial one that also expands upon his writing style, "Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank. … The average ofay [white person] thinks of the black man as potentially raping every white lady in sight. Which is true, in the sense that the black man should want to rob the white man of everything he has. But for most whites the guilt of the robbery is the guilt of rape. That is, they know in their deepest hearts that they should be robbed, and the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped."
Baraka’s literary style is very moving and at their peak influential. His stanzas are on average only about five to six lines each with little to no rhyming scheme and a heavy use of punctuation. I learned that there is a way to effectively use the punctuation and emphasize not just the mood, but in relation the overall message of a work of writing. As of late, Baraka’s works consist of a politically themed message and more directly the post 9/11 world and the political landscape since then. It was documented in the film, that Olson also carried these same messages in his works that he wrote towards the end of his career and before his death, though his writings delved into the postmodern thought process. These covered events such as the San Francisco Renaissance and the height of beat popularity.
Baraka’s influence was finally achieved after the death of Malcolm X, when he became a nationalist where he traveled back to Harlem and then to his roots where he re-started his life. It was this kind of life-changing experience that empowered his best works which were also collected in series and sold as collective works that usually influenced one after another. At the end of his career, he became even more prominent than he was during what some consider his peak of creativity. As like Olson, it was his exit from the world of art that dominated a cultural movement in mainstream America.
During research, I learned that he was also inspired by modernist writers such as William Carlos Williams, who taught him to speak in his writing and to think when you speak. He taught me that there is such a thing as writing too defensively that there is no such thing as “writing black or writing white,” but writing with soul that is the ultimate test to one writer’s credibility. Also, he says there is a testament to a writer, that being that he can tell the difference between telling a story and giving the reasoning about why one must think this way.
When reflecting back on the movie, I think they could have built a more stable bridge between the two writers, as well as when Farrini came into the classroom to present his piece of art.