Professional Documents
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Kimberly W. Benston
Benston: There seem to be two distinct notions current about the shape
of your total career as a poet. One holds that sometime in the mid-Sixties
you made a complete break from the traditions, modes, and ideas which
had concerned you. The other view sees more continuity between the
young LeRoi Jones and the mature Amiri Baraka. How would you assess
your career in these terms?
Baraka: There is certainly a line of development, but it's from a lower to a
higher stage of awareness - hopefully. There are certain things I write now
that echo earlier concerns, and certain things that have been transformed
altogether, that have changed into their opposites.
Benston: What kinds of things?
Baraka: Well, for instance, I was always, from the first poem that I ever
had printed, concerned with national oppression - what it did to me
mentally, spiritually, what it turned people into, what one's reaction to
national oppression was, etc. Being black has certainly remained a
constant; but my ability to explain the sources and origins of national
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oppression has deepened. What you said in your book about my essay on
black writers ["The Myth of a 'Negro Literature' "] was quite accurate:
there was a dichotomy there. I condemned black writing because black
writers all wanted to style themselves after the white bourgeoisie. I felt
that what they wrote wasn't actually black literature in the first place; it
was an imitation. Which was true, to a certain extent. What I, of course,
did not look at was the class structure operating behind black writing. So
then I said that the reason that black music is strong is because it was
directly black, it was coming from black people, there wasn't a whole lot
of fakery or trying to make believe they were really white middle-class
folks playing an instrument. But the incorrect thing in the essay was not
clearly making a class analysis all the way through. For instance, I held up
Melville and Joyce as great writers - and I think it is true that Melville and
Joyce are certainly better than Phyllis Wheatley or Charles Chesnutt, that's
accurate enough - but the analysis was not clear. So at times it looks as
though I'm just putting down black literature, when in reality I was trying
to make a very exact class analysis of why this middle-class black literature
was weak, why black music was strong. Then I definitely didn't make a
class analysis of Melville and Joyce, and show their weak and strong
points.
Benston: Was this a function of not having the proper theoretical tools at
your disposal?
Baraka: It was not having read thoroughly enough.
Benston: Would it be conceivable to go back and take something like
"The Myth of a 'Negro Literature' " - or the early poems or The System
of Dante's Hell - and develop the central points from your present
position?
Baraka: What I would want to do is look at the various volumes and make
criticisms; I want to do self-criticism of my own work.
Benston: How would you do a self-criticism, for example, of The System
of Dante's Hell?
Baraka: Well, first of all, in terms of form, it tended at times to be
obscure. The reason for that is that I was really writing defensively. I was
trying to get away from the influence of people like Creeley and Olson. I
was living in New York then and the whole Creeley-Olson influence was
beginning to beat me up. I was in a very closed, little circle - that was
about the time I went to Cuba - and I felt the need to break out of the
type of form that I was using then. I guess this was not only because of the
form itself but because of the content which that form enclosed, which
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was not my politics. The two little warring schools that were going on then
were what I call the Jewish-Ethnic-Bohemian School (Allen Ginsberg and
his group) and the Anglo-German Black Mountain School. I was caught
between the two of them because they were all my friends and we were all
literary buddies and so forth. So I wrote the novel defensively and
offensively at the same time because I was trying to get away. I literally
decided to write just instinctively, without any thought to any form or to
any kind of preunderstanding of what I was shaping - just write it down.
Benston: It was a consciously improvisational art?
Baraka: Exactly; and I developed a theory about what I was doing. I
would think of what I was saying, then write all the things that thinking
about that made me think of, always suggesting those things, never stating
them outright.
Benston: In the novel itself you termed your method a combination of
"fast narrative" and "association complex." One wonders whether you
had in mind Joycean stream-of-consciousness and/or jazz modulation.
Baraka: Both, really. Having read the Joyce, I knew what that was, that it
was in the world, that it existed. And the jazz was there, too, of course.
They were both part of the condition from which my ideas were coming.
What I was trying to do, without saying exactly, "This is what I am
saying" - because, at that time, for me to say that would have come out
as Creeley-Olson - was write all the associations and emotions connected
with what I was thinking about. I thought the result would then be
beyond whatever would come out ready-made and pat. As far as the
content is concerned, I would now criticize it for holding up the
subjective, for celebrating the subjective and the idealistic.
Benston: Did you feel that by the novel's end the narrator had moved
past that kind of suffocating subjectivism and had attained a sense of
otherness, or that he was a failure?
Baraka: Well, I thought that the very fact that at the end of the novel I
could write plain narrative meant that I had achieved, to a certain extent,
my goal: to get away from those influences. At the end, I felt comfortable
with the narrative for the first time. Do you see the difference? It wasn't
the little, stylized, Creeley-esque stuff that I was doing at the time; it
began to be my own kind of sound, my own voice. I felt more comfortable
with that, even though what I was relating, the story, was kind of
harrowing and grim, as far as the character's personal experience was
concerned. But I thought that the tale was of one particular thing that was
behind the teller, that the tale was in the past actually. The teller, having
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told that tale, not only moved past it and into the present, but was even at
a further stage of awareness.
Benston: So there is a development there?
Baraka: Oh yes.
Benston: And the epilogue reveals this?
Baraka: It's an attempt to sum it up and say clearly, in a kind of ex-post
form, "This is what this is."
Benston: In the early poetry, is there at any point an attempt to create
the same kind of clarity you achieved in System, to attain a similar
freedom from what you're calling the Creeley-Olson influence?
Baraka: The poetry of that period was still definitely relying heavily on
the Creeley-Olson thing. But, while the Creeley-Olson thing is still there in
the poetry's form, the content was trying to aggressively address the folks
around me, the people that I worked with all the time, who were all
Creeley-Olson types, people who took an antipolitical or apolitical line
(the Creeley types more so than Olson's followers - Olson's thing was
always more political). I was coming out saying that I thought that their
political line was wrong. A lot of the poetry in The Dead Lecturer is
speaking out against the political line of the whole Black Mountain group,
to which I was very close. That was a very interesting melange of folks in
New York at the time. You know we had the Black Mountain group, the
New York poets (O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Jimmie Merrill,
and those people), and then we had the Ginsberg group. So there were
three crowds. I was sort of tight with all of them, I hung out with all of
them; but the overwhelming line was always antipolitical. Or, when
politics did emerge, as in Olson's work, I didn't agree with it.
Benston: You felt kind of like a crowd of one....
Baraka: Right. And I think a lot of the poetry in that period, like the
political poem, "Short Speech to My Friends," is talking to those people
and to that particular sensibility that was denying the idea that politics
could in fact be incorporated into poetry.
Benston: Did the poem "Betancourt" and the "Cuba Libre" essay - the
works that grew directly from your Cuba experience - effect a
self-conscious turning point?
Baraka: Yes. See, when I went to Cuba, it was like a revelation to me.
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Suddenly, there I was in Cuba and, at first, I didn't understand that that
was real stuff, that people actually could make a revolution, that you
could actually seize countries. There I was down there with a whole lot of
young dudes my own age who were walking around with guns - they just
did it. It blew my mind; I was never the same. Then, when I came back to
the States, I wrote the "Betancourt" poem. It was written to a woman
whom I'd met down there who was a Mexican Communist. She had berated
me constantly about being a petit bourgeois poet. When I came back, all
the arguments about national oppression that I had felt before became
intensified. I wasn't just going on half perception. I had seen people taking
over big aristocrats' houses and turning private beaches into public
beaches, etc. For example, I saw them take over the Hilton Hotel and
change its name from Havana Hilton to Havana Libre. As a matter of fact,
I was trying to call home one time and the American operator said, "Is this
the Havana Hilton?" And the Cuban operator said, "No, this is the Havana
Libre." And so the American woman says, "Havana Libre - what's that?"
And the Cuban woman just said, "You better get used to it. This is the
Havana Libre!" (Laughter) That was really a great thing. I was down there
with Robert Williams, Julian Mayfield, Harold Cruse, Richard Gibson, a lot
of folks, and we actually were right there in the beginning of that. So
when I came back I was turned completely around and began to go on a
really aggressive attack as far as politics was concerned.
Benston: You've spoken of your relation to Creeley, Olson, Ginsberg, and
others who have been termed postmodern. What of your relation to the
early moderns - Eliot, Joyce, Pound, etal.?
Baraka: There was always a dichotomy between my natural feelings and
the ideas I acquired and learned. But the early moderns were definite
influences which I acquired quite consciously. Eliot especially was a heavy
influence in the beginning.
Benston: What about Eliot in particular?
Baraka: Not precisely what he said so much as the tone of it - the
complete cynicism and detachment, and the sophisticated, urbane voice
(particularly in "Prufrock" - more so than even "The Waste Land").
Experience hadn't mashed him, twisted him completely. He had survived
his experience, it seemed to me.
Benston: When you were involved with cultural nationalism you spoke of
the need for a "post-Western" form. Were you, then, consciously desirous
of a post-postmodern as well as a postmodern (Creeley, Olson, Ginsberg, et
al) art?
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short essay form is really suited for the kind of daily struggle I'm engaged
in - it's a kind of struggle form; you can do a lot of things in it.
Benston: Is this because that form has more room, more flexibility than
you're accustomed to when writing poetry?
Baraka: Possibly. Let's say it has more ability to expand - it's wider than
a poem, as far as I'm concerned. Because in poetry you usually have a
rhythmic dynamic that you either try to force, if you don't have it with
you, or, if you have it with you, it flows and has a life of its own. But in
the short essay form the rhythm follows from what you want to say, and
you can sustain that or you can change it - you can simply do anything
you want to.
Benston: Is the form of the musician's craft similar to this kind of
expansion, or is the poetic form, in its confinement, more like music?
Baraka: I always thought of poetry as the form that most corresponds to
music, consciously so, instinctively so. I always thought this because of the
high concentration on rhythm in verse - at least as far as my own
understanding of poetry is concerned. I'm very conscious of rhythm in
poetry - there has to be a rhythmic kind of focus, a build-up - and I
think the essay form could correspond to music in places, at a given
moment. But I think it's less interested in the overall sound of words and
more interested in what it's saying.
Benston: Some people have discussed your poetry in terms of specific jazz
movements and musicians, speaking of Parkeresque and Coltranesque
poems and phases. Is music still a major influence on your poetry?
Baraka: You mean trying to infuse my poetry with some particular
sound? Well, at this particular time, I'm not focused on that as much. In
the last few years, I've listened certainly to more rhythm and blues, more
rock music, than anything else - and certainly what I try to do in poetry
is linked more to that than ten years ago when I was listening to
avant-garde jazz primarily.
Benston: Is this, aside from changing taste, because of the music's lyrics,
the content that you seem to be emphasizing?
Baraka: As a matter of fact, I'm writing a book on this very topic. I've
been writing it for a while, a book on John Coltrane. For the last ten years
rhythm and blues has been much stronger than jazz. The whole jazz thing
went off into a metaphysical, petit bourgeois dimension. Of course, a lot
of rhythm and blues goes off into that - like Alice Cooper, the
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Benston: While outlining a theory of art, you once said that art was
"impressive." Did you mean that it was powerful and affective as opposed
to soothing and purgative?
Baraka: The whole meaning of "impressive": not only does it make you
check it out but it affects you, it im-presses or stamps its image upon you.
Benston: In your drama - Slave Ship particularly - you concretely
attempt to so impress the audience that they become what they are
looking at, that they in fact complete what they're looking at, so that they
are as "impressive" as the art itself. In your most recent play [The Motion
of History], which reflects your turn to Marxism, are you still involved
with an affective theater?
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Baraka: At times. But I think that this is much more of 3 theater of ideas,
much more a theater of statement.
Benston: Are you using, then, images and music as support to the
statement?
Baraka: Yes, to expand it, to make it so that people understand it more
clearly.
Benston: What role does the music play in it?
Baraka: I'm trying to put a total theatrical imprint on it, so that a lot of
the speeches have musical backgrounds. I use the music as they do in
movies, as background, to heighten the emotions and the dramatic effect
- which is old, classic theater.
Benston: It sounds as if you might have been influenced by Brecht's ideas.
Baraka: Yes, well I'm very interested in Brecht. I've been reading some of
Brecht's critical works. I saw Brecht's plays years ago and just last year I
saw The Threepenny Opera and a few of his other plays. I think my
present form of theater develops more directly from my own interest in
film. I would like to write films and make films; I've wanted to do that for
the last ten years. I haven't been able to do it for obvious reasons - that
whole industry is controlled by the bourgeoisie in a very tight way. I try to
compensate for not being able to make films by using film to amplify the
stage statements and, in fact, the last couple of plays I've written have
been written as if they were scripts for films. I think one of the problems
that I have is not being able to find a correct stage form for what's
basically a filmic idea. Watching The Motion of History I've been taking
notes and I believe the next time I do a play I'll have a better
understanding of how actually to incorporate those filmic techniques on
the stage.
Benston: What are the crucial aspects of these techniques in your art?
Baraka: It's a matter of fluidity, time, and a simultaneity of images montage and so forth. It's a matter of being able to say a lot of things in a
short space of time. And that's not impossible, but I haven't been able to
do it correctly yet.
Benston: In your drama up to the time of Slave Ship, you seemed to be
searching, because of the cultural nationalist perspective, for a proper
ritual form. Now, with your turn to dialectical materialism, it would seem
that ritual might be a problem, given its essentially conservative nature.
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