Joel Lewis
from Speak No Evil
Amiri Baraka and Others in Hoboken
[The accompanying memoir is from an ongoing project about my relationship with the poet/activist Amiri Baraka and with Baraka’s role in the NJ poetry community during the time I knew him. I first met him in 1976 as a college activist who raised the funds to bring him onto the campus of my NJ state college more for political purpose than for literary enrichment. Over the years, I sponsored him at any number of reading series I was involved in, ranging from the backrooms of bars to toney private schools. Inadvertently, I was indirectly responsible for one of Amiri’s last big dust-ups with the Mainstream America as I was “the guy” who came up with the idea for a NJ Poet Laureate. The furor over his recitation of his 9/11 poem Somebody Blew Up America resulted in the abolition of the award, much bad press, and an opportunity for some in mainstream literary community to disassociate and distance themselves from the writer and his work.
More than most well known literary personalities, Amiri had a distinct public persona that could be fierce, outrageous, and incendiary. As jazz historian Dan Morgenstern noted about meeting his music heroes up close -- they had a presence that you couldn’t miss. So did Amiri, who I’m sure learned something from all those hours in clubs about presentation. Among poets, however, he was gregarious, friendly, encouraging and a bit of a kibitzer as well. These series of memoirs attempt to capture this side of Amiri, which was well known to the poets who were part of his community, but almost absent from the many studies about him that I have encountered.]
One of the reoccurring motifs of my very early poetry was the image of the nighttime mid-Manhattan skyline glowing in the backdrop of Braddock Park. the big and bosky county preserve in my hometown of North Bergen, NJ. I saw that image every time the #165 bus deposited me back home after another evening in “the city.” Those illuminated skyscrapers seemed to taunt the cultural emptiness of the place I lived in; where neighbors would brag to each other about how many years it had been since they had been to Manhattan and where one would keep private your artistic ambitions. I had a handful of friends with whom I’d share work, put on readings and scour the used bookshops of Northern New Jersey looking for “a find.” It might be hard to imagine for young readers who are growing up in an era when young poets are as plentiful as Weimar-era deutschemarks, but there were relatively few poets our age (early 20s) running about, the only people who went to the handful of MFA writing programs were trained to write in a fairly narrow, neo-Romanticist register and that poetry had so receded in the popular imagination in the era just before rap, that many of my friends thought that “a poet” was akin to being a wheelwright or a chandler – some ancient craft that was no longer extant in the modern world.
With that kind of gloom about our choice of writing genre my friends and I were more than astonished when the Stevens Institute of Technology, an august engineering school located in nearby Hoboken, commenced with a program that brought nationally known poets to our side of the Hudson. The readings were free, and their wine served as well as steam tables filled with food. I became a regular at the readings and got a chance to meet some of the people I’d been carefully reading for years.
On the afternoon W.S. Merwin came to campus, I found myself hanging out with the poet himself in one of the student center lounges. Although Merwin was quite self-effacing and gentle, I couldn’t help but seeing his Pulitzer Prize, his Bolligen Prize, his Chancellorship from the Academy of American Poets, along with other cash awards, dangling from his collarless powder blue shirt like war medallions. We ended up talking about nearby Union City, where I went to a Jewish day school on New York Avenue & 26th street and where Merwin grew up on New York & 4th the son of minister. I was nervy enough to ask him about his physical encounter with Trungpa Rinpoche ‘s minions in Boulder (immortalized as “The Great Naropa Poetry Wars”) and he answered my questions with patience. I even asked Merwin what Eating Clubs, he and Galway Kinnell belonged to when they were students together at Princeton in the late 40s. “None,” he replied, “Galway and I did not go to Princeton to socialize and eat off fine china; we were there to get an education. We shunned the Eating Clubs.” When the hour of the reading arrived, we all went upstairs to a big auditorium that was filled with engineering students with pens and notebooks at the ready – apparently it was a mandatory event to fulfill a humanity requirement. I was surprised that Merwin’s wit, good humor and quotidian interest were absent from his poetry, which struck me as arid and distant. Ted Berrigan, as poet-in-residence for the Fall 81 semester, was in attendance at the reading. He called Merwin, “Bill” and their history went back to the era of Anti-Vietnam War poetry readings. “Bill & I were on a reading tour against ‘the War’ with Robert Bly and Galway Kinnell and Kinnell would read wearing this crazy vest, it looked like he skinned it off some dead bear,” Ted told me the next day. “ After the 5th reading we did, I asked him, ‘Galway! Did you bring any other clothes for this trip! Don’t you have anything else to wear besides that animal skin!’ Bly and Merwin were laughing, but Kinnell looked sorta pissed off.”
Other poets who came up to Castle Point were equally memorable. New Directions publisher James Laughlin read his long poem about his relationship with William Carlos Williams and wept at the poem’s conclusion (he also had a similarly structured piece about Ezra Pound, sans tears). I asked him what was the best selling New Direction book of all-time. “Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha by a mile!” he responded. I asked him about obtaining a long-ago published ND anthology of Blaise Cendrars, which was still on their backlist but bookstores I tried to order it from had no luck in obtaining. “I think we have a few copies left in the barn,” he said and asked for a mailing address. A couple of months later, a package arrived from New Directions. In it was the age-beaten Cendrars book, along with pieces of straw from its previous residence.hyw3
Amiri Baraka’s appearance at Stevens was on an entirely different register than the other poets I’d seen read at Stevens and his presence brought in a gaggle of local poets wanting to hear their hero. Unlike many a major poet who enacted a poetry persona on the podium and delivered an entirely predictable evening of poesy, going to hear Amiri was not unlike going to hear pianist Cecil Taylor – you just never knew what was going to happen. Unlike a poet like David Igniatow, who would bring a stack of his books, place them on the lectern and then proceed to randomly select jukebox favorites from his back catalog, Amiri almost always read new or very recent poems; he was unusually prolific and he eschewed his older work as most of it was not in sync with his current politics and aesthetics.
Amiri gave his usual solid performance that night. I’m unaware if he had any formal training as an actor, but his career in theater gave him a distinct advantage among his peers in bringing his words alive off the page. And in following an Old Left tradition, his between poems patter was a form of a “living newspaper” – always brining the actual world into the space of the artifice poem. He ran with William Carlos Williams’s idea that the source of his language came "from the mouths of Polish mothers" that he heard on the streets of Paterson and moved the venue to his lifetime home in Newark and to the small talk one heard on the corners of Market and Broad Streets. He had a stand-up comic’s mastery of the barb, the insult and the putdown. I can’t think of any major American poet who made such “bad manners” a core part of his poetry. To this day, whenever I see a picture of the sole African-American sitting on the US Supreme Court, my inner voice calls him; “Clar-ass Thomas, a confused Brother”, the way I heard Amiri address him many times. Similarly, I always think that the film “Do The Right Thing” was directed by “Spike Lie” – a name Amiri dubbed him during his very public dispute with the director around his biopic of Malcolm X.
After the reading, the audience was invited to a reception. The students, who made up the majority of the audience, would leave immediately after the reading to go back to their dorms and tackle the load of work associated with an engineering curriculum. Which left the food and drink for us poets. I remember hanging out that evening with Laura Boss of Lips magazine, open-reading impresario Bob Quatrone and my old college pals Ed Smith and Mike Reardon. Amiri joined our table -- after all, he was a Jersey poet just like us. There was a steam table of food to dine from, servers to ladle it out and big bowl of punch the shade of a Jersey sunset that no one ever seemed to touch. We young poets felt almost giddy at being treated so well.
At some point in the evening, Amiri, with an impish grin on his face, asked our table full of poets, “Do you know why you guys are poets?” We all looked at each other and then my late friend Mike, the most bookish of our group, paraphrased something we had just read by Paul Valery: “To nourish our native tongue, Amiri?’ “NAAHHH! “ responded Amiri with a chuckle, “The reason you guys are poets is because YOU ARE ALL LAZY! Writing a novel or a play – now that’s hard work!” He was joshing with us, but his comments echoed something I remember Quincy Troupe had told a St. Mark’s Poetry Project Workshop I attended: “Writing fiction is a middle-class art. I don’t mean the suburbs or John Cheever. I mean that you have the have the discipline to work “X” hours a day, produce a target amount of words each day, be willing to revise and revise and not spend your days hanging out with your friends in a bar.”
We all laughed along with Amiri, as his quip did have a soupçon of truth. I couldn’t, still can’t, imagine writing a novel – marginal me mostly afraid that I would end up with 300 pages of unpublishable work as opposed to a gaggle of poems circling America as “attached files.” And having run a magazine and a reading series, I was always amazed at the lackadaisical and barely their attitudes of some of the poets I worked with.
Maybe Amiri was playing the old Hegelian switcheroo with us – is the issue about laziness or is the issue about attitude? You can, if you want to, take your poetry as seriously as a fiction writer treats a novel, even if your small machine made of words barely gets to the bottom of page before concluding.
I had heard Amiri over the years talk about poetry being an ideal working class art. It takes nothing but a paper and pen, the material is the very language you communicate with and you can cheaply distribute your efforts with a copier or a computer printer – or just get up before a crowd and recite your words. The big issue, he noted, was the dialectic between spontaneity and discipline. His model was John Coltrane, whose mastery of the tenor saxophone and of the formal rules of improvisation allowed him to take planetary leaps into uncharted musical territory.
After the reading, Mike and I began the climb down Castle Point to Washington Street. Hoboken was still a few years from its revival, so its main stem was mostly shuttered shops and old guy bars with handfuls of patrons filling the Tuesday night seats. We caught the penultimate bus back to North Bergen, the 11:25pm #21 West New York, and joined the small crew of passengers who all seemed to be coming back from jobs and looking it. A few minutes after being seated, we started a collaborative poem – something that attending Poetry Project workshops got us in the habit of doing. As was our practice, we stuck in overheard conversations, bus window observations and flotsam from whatever happened earlier in the evening. Mike passed me his latest squib to our project – “Like a roach sittin’ on top of your muffin” – it was a line that we heard Amiri read that evening which cracked us up. Well, it cracked us up again. Would the poets we had seen at Stevens that year, Gerald Stern, C. K. Williams or, gimmeabreak, John Ciardi even think of writing something like that? We managed to wrap up the poem, took the #21 to the end of the line at Nungessers and headed straight to the neverclose White Castle #9 for a bag of “sliders” to close out the night’s proceedings.
Amiri Baraka and Others in Hoboken
[The accompanying memoir is from an ongoing project about my relationship with the poet/activist Amiri Baraka and with Baraka’s role in the NJ poetry community during the time I knew him. I first met him in 1976 as a college activist who raised the funds to bring him onto the campus of my NJ state college more for political purpose than for literary enrichment. Over the years, I sponsored him at any number of reading series I was involved in, ranging from the backrooms of bars to toney private schools. Inadvertently, I was indirectly responsible for one of Amiri’s last big dust-ups with the Mainstream America as I was “the guy” who came up with the idea for a NJ Poet Laureate. The furor over his recitation of his 9/11 poem Somebody Blew Up America resulted in the abolition of the award, much bad press, and an opportunity for some in mainstream literary community to disassociate and distance themselves from the writer and his work.
More than most well known literary personalities, Amiri had a distinct public persona that could be fierce, outrageous, and incendiary. As jazz historian Dan Morgenstern noted about meeting his music heroes up close -- they had a presence that you couldn’t miss. So did Amiri, who I’m sure learned something from all those hours in clubs about presentation. Among poets, however, he was gregarious, friendly, encouraging and a bit of a kibitzer as well. These series of memoirs attempt to capture this side of Amiri, which was well known to the poets who were part of his community, but almost absent from the many studies about him that I have encountered.]
One of the reoccurring motifs of my very early poetry was the image of the nighttime mid-Manhattan skyline glowing in the backdrop of Braddock Park. the big and bosky county preserve in my hometown of North Bergen, NJ. I saw that image every time the #165 bus deposited me back home after another evening in “the city.” Those illuminated skyscrapers seemed to taunt the cultural emptiness of the place I lived in; where neighbors would brag to each other about how many years it had been since they had been to Manhattan and where one would keep private your artistic ambitions. I had a handful of friends with whom I’d share work, put on readings and scour the used bookshops of Northern New Jersey looking for “a find.” It might be hard to imagine for young readers who are growing up in an era when young poets are as plentiful as Weimar-era deutschemarks, but there were relatively few poets our age (early 20s) running about, the only people who went to the handful of MFA writing programs were trained to write in a fairly narrow, neo-Romanticist register and that poetry had so receded in the popular imagination in the era just before rap, that many of my friends thought that “a poet” was akin to being a wheelwright or a chandler – some ancient craft that was no longer extant in the modern world.
With that kind of gloom about our choice of writing genre my friends and I were more than astonished when the Stevens Institute of Technology, an august engineering school located in nearby Hoboken, commenced with a program that brought nationally known poets to our side of the Hudson. The readings were free, and their wine served as well as steam tables filled with food. I became a regular at the readings and got a chance to meet some of the people I’d been carefully reading for years.
On the afternoon W.S. Merwin came to campus, I found myself hanging out with the poet himself in one of the student center lounges. Although Merwin was quite self-effacing and gentle, I couldn’t help but seeing his Pulitzer Prize, his Bolligen Prize, his Chancellorship from the Academy of American Poets, along with other cash awards, dangling from his collarless powder blue shirt like war medallions. We ended up talking about nearby Union City, where I went to a Jewish day school on New York Avenue & 26th street and where Merwin grew up on New York & 4th the son of minister. I was nervy enough to ask him about his physical encounter with Trungpa Rinpoche ‘s minions in Boulder (immortalized as “The Great Naropa Poetry Wars”) and he answered my questions with patience. I even asked Merwin what Eating Clubs, he and Galway Kinnell belonged to when they were students together at Princeton in the late 40s. “None,” he replied, “Galway and I did not go to Princeton to socialize and eat off fine china; we were there to get an education. We shunned the Eating Clubs.” When the hour of the reading arrived, we all went upstairs to a big auditorium that was filled with engineering students with pens and notebooks at the ready – apparently it was a mandatory event to fulfill a humanity requirement. I was surprised that Merwin’s wit, good humor and quotidian interest were absent from his poetry, which struck me as arid and distant. Ted Berrigan, as poet-in-residence for the Fall 81 semester, was in attendance at the reading. He called Merwin, “Bill” and their history went back to the era of Anti-Vietnam War poetry readings. “Bill & I were on a reading tour against ‘the War’ with Robert Bly and Galway Kinnell and Kinnell would read wearing this crazy vest, it looked like he skinned it off some dead bear,” Ted told me the next day. “ After the 5th reading we did, I asked him, ‘Galway! Did you bring any other clothes for this trip! Don’t you have anything else to wear besides that animal skin!’ Bly and Merwin were laughing, but Kinnell looked sorta pissed off.”
Other poets who came up to Castle Point were equally memorable. New Directions publisher James Laughlin read his long poem about his relationship with William Carlos Williams and wept at the poem’s conclusion (he also had a similarly structured piece about Ezra Pound, sans tears). I asked him what was the best selling New Direction book of all-time. “Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha by a mile!” he responded. I asked him about obtaining a long-ago published ND anthology of Blaise Cendrars, which was still on their backlist but bookstores I tried to order it from had no luck in obtaining. “I think we have a few copies left in the barn,” he said and asked for a mailing address. A couple of months later, a package arrived from New Directions. In it was the age-beaten Cendrars book, along with pieces of straw from its previous residence.hyw3
Amiri Baraka’s appearance at Stevens was on an entirely different register than the other poets I’d seen read at Stevens and his presence brought in a gaggle of local poets wanting to hear their hero. Unlike many a major poet who enacted a poetry persona on the podium and delivered an entirely predictable evening of poesy, going to hear Amiri was not unlike going to hear pianist Cecil Taylor – you just never knew what was going to happen. Unlike a poet like David Igniatow, who would bring a stack of his books, place them on the lectern and then proceed to randomly select jukebox favorites from his back catalog, Amiri almost always read new or very recent poems; he was unusually prolific and he eschewed his older work as most of it was not in sync with his current politics and aesthetics.
Amiri gave his usual solid performance that night. I’m unaware if he had any formal training as an actor, but his career in theater gave him a distinct advantage among his peers in bringing his words alive off the page. And in following an Old Left tradition, his between poems patter was a form of a “living newspaper” – always brining the actual world into the space of the artifice poem. He ran with William Carlos Williams’s idea that the source of his language came "from the mouths of Polish mothers" that he heard on the streets of Paterson and moved the venue to his lifetime home in Newark and to the small talk one heard on the corners of Market and Broad Streets. He had a stand-up comic’s mastery of the barb, the insult and the putdown. I can’t think of any major American poet who made such “bad manners” a core part of his poetry. To this day, whenever I see a picture of the sole African-American sitting on the US Supreme Court, my inner voice calls him; “Clar-ass Thomas, a confused Brother”, the way I heard Amiri address him many times. Similarly, I always think that the film “Do The Right Thing” was directed by “Spike Lie” – a name Amiri dubbed him during his very public dispute with the director around his biopic of Malcolm X.
After the reading, the audience was invited to a reception. The students, who made up the majority of the audience, would leave immediately after the reading to go back to their dorms and tackle the load of work associated with an engineering curriculum. Which left the food and drink for us poets. I remember hanging out that evening with Laura Boss of Lips magazine, open-reading impresario Bob Quatrone and my old college pals Ed Smith and Mike Reardon. Amiri joined our table -- after all, he was a Jersey poet just like us. There was a steam table of food to dine from, servers to ladle it out and big bowl of punch the shade of a Jersey sunset that no one ever seemed to touch. We young poets felt almost giddy at being treated so well.
At some point in the evening, Amiri, with an impish grin on his face, asked our table full of poets, “Do you know why you guys are poets?” We all looked at each other and then my late friend Mike, the most bookish of our group, paraphrased something we had just read by Paul Valery: “To nourish our native tongue, Amiri?’ “NAAHHH! “ responded Amiri with a chuckle, “The reason you guys are poets is because YOU ARE ALL LAZY! Writing a novel or a play – now that’s hard work!” He was joshing with us, but his comments echoed something I remember Quincy Troupe had told a St. Mark’s Poetry Project Workshop I attended: “Writing fiction is a middle-class art. I don’t mean the suburbs or John Cheever. I mean that you have the have the discipline to work “X” hours a day, produce a target amount of words each day, be willing to revise and revise and not spend your days hanging out with your friends in a bar.”
We all laughed along with Amiri, as his quip did have a soupçon of truth. I couldn’t, still can’t, imagine writing a novel – marginal me mostly afraid that I would end up with 300 pages of unpublishable work as opposed to a gaggle of poems circling America as “attached files.” And having run a magazine and a reading series, I was always amazed at the lackadaisical and barely their attitudes of some of the poets I worked with.
Maybe Amiri was playing the old Hegelian switcheroo with us – is the issue about laziness or is the issue about attitude? You can, if you want to, take your poetry as seriously as a fiction writer treats a novel, even if your small machine made of words barely gets to the bottom of page before concluding.
I had heard Amiri over the years talk about poetry being an ideal working class art. It takes nothing but a paper and pen, the material is the very language you communicate with and you can cheaply distribute your efforts with a copier or a computer printer – or just get up before a crowd and recite your words. The big issue, he noted, was the dialectic between spontaneity and discipline. His model was John Coltrane, whose mastery of the tenor saxophone and of the formal rules of improvisation allowed him to take planetary leaps into uncharted musical territory.
After the reading, Mike and I began the climb down Castle Point to Washington Street. Hoboken was still a few years from its revival, so its main stem was mostly shuttered shops and old guy bars with handfuls of patrons filling the Tuesday night seats. We caught the penultimate bus back to North Bergen, the 11:25pm #21 West New York, and joined the small crew of passengers who all seemed to be coming back from jobs and looking it. A few minutes after being seated, we started a collaborative poem – something that attending Poetry Project workshops got us in the habit of doing. As was our practice, we stuck in overheard conversations, bus window observations and flotsam from whatever happened earlier in the evening. Mike passed me his latest squib to our project – “Like a roach sittin’ on top of your muffin” – it was a line that we heard Amiri read that evening which cracked us up. Well, it cracked us up again. Would the poets we had seen at Stevens that year, Gerald Stern, C. K. Williams or, gimmeabreak, John Ciardi even think of writing something like that? We managed to wrap up the poem, took the #21 to the end of the line at Nungessers and headed straight to the neverclose White Castle #9 for a bag of “sliders” to close out the night’s proceedings.