 Amiri
Baraka was born in 1934, in Newark,
New Jersey, USA. The author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama,
and music history and criticism, Baraka is 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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Somebody
Blew Up
America & Other Poems
by Amiri Baraka
Price: US$15
Paperback, Poetry/Literature, 57 pp.,
5"x7.5" (2004)
ISBN: 0-913441-72-4
2nd Printing by popular demand!
The publication of Amiri Baraka's
Somebody
BlewUp America & Other Poems makes one
more mark in the development in modern
Black radical & revolutionary cultural
reconstruction.
- Kamau Brathwaite, CowPastor, Barbados;
Comparative Lit., New York University |
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