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Baraka, Amiri - An Interview

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  • Amiri Baraka: An Interview

    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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  • Baraka: I was consciously striving for a post-bourgeois/Western form, even before the cultural nationalism period. Now, Creeley, Olson, et al. were themselves post-bourgeois/academic poets, and that was valuable for me. But they were also, in some ways, an extension of Western art, and so I tried to get away from them in System. "Modernism" and "post- modernism" are essentially the same thing. The three schools I've mentioned (Black Mountain, Ginsberg, New York) were opposed to the existent bourgeois/academic poetry, but their work contained elements that eventually established yet another bourgeoislacademic school. They were more modern, to be sure - they led to a crumbling of the old forms. But to a great extent they perpetuated the same kind of processes - Black Mountain, for example, can be as obscure as, say, Pound; so can Olson, for that matter. I learned from these three schools; but, at the same time, I felt the need to develop from them because their concerns weren't those of the masses. They weren't asking for revolution.

    Benston: How, as a poet, can one link the intimacy of one's own emotion and experience with the aspirations of a collective consciousness?

    Baraka: Basically, your feelings come from your worldview, from your way of perceiving reality. All people want to be revolutionary; there's always a need to struggle to try to transform your worldview, to remold your worldview, so that you actually perceive reality as do the great masses, the working class. That's basically the problem. There is no actual dichotomy between your personal feelings, your private, personal under- standing of your experience, and the strivings of the collective con- sciousness if you have succeeded in remolding your worldview so that you actually perceive the world from the viewpoint of the working class, the proletariat. The dichotomy arises when you maintain a kind of isolated, subjective perspective, but still try to reach out toward the collective will.

    Benston: Do you think that maintaining such a subjective worldview is a surrender to a given form, to a secure confinement within a given idea? I ask that because one central aspect of your poetry is that no finality is allowed a concept, a political position, even an image. Is change a result of reality's constant development?

    Baraka: Yes; again, you come back to your worldview. You see, there are two ways of perceiving the world. The bourgeois worldview - which is a metaphysical and idealistic worldview - perceives things as static, unchanging, eternal. That always suits the bourgeoisie because these "eternal verities" always assert, "Things can never change, things have always been this way. . . . it's human nature to have classes, somebody must be on top, that's the nature of humanity, etc." It's a metaphysical

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  • line that serves exploitative societies because if everything is supposed to be static they are not threatened. But the other view perceives the world in a constant state of change - that is the one constant, change. I've understood this for a long time, perceptually; though I'd come into contact with German philosophy (especially Hegel and Wittgenstein) in college and, later, at the New School, I didn't know I was grappling with dialectics or anything like that. As a matter of fact, for a while I thought it had something to do with metaphysics, that "the only constant is change" was a metaphysical principle. But I definitely have had perceptual knowledge for a long time that "the only constant is change," that the change is progressive, and that you have to understand the nature of it to advance your own perception. Now, as I came more and more in contact with dialectical materialism and Marxism, I began to understand very clearly that change is constant and also that reality moves from a lower to a higher level - that ultimately the motion of society and humanity is always onward and upward, from ignorance to knowledge, from the superficial to the in-depth and the detailed. Once you understand clearly that this is the nature of reality you will see that your own development has to be in that direction.

    Benston: When you determine to write from a current point of view, are the forms you use dictated by the changing reality you perceive?

    Baraka: I think the forms themselves are dictated by the time, place, and condition, like anything else. Always: time, place, and condition -that's the matrix for form. The content is always trying to talk about reality, about its change, and about the necessity for change. But the form depends on time, place, and condition. I just read an interesting book about Lu Hsun, the Chinese writer. Lu Hsun wrote in many forms. When he was a revolutionary democrat he used the short story - and the stories are great; read them sometime. But later on, as his own kind of understanding intensified, he changed his form, and the form that he used most was what he called the "short essay form," in which he combined poetry and revolutionary observation. I see now that that is a very comfortable form - short, two or three pages. He used it, as he says, like a "daggar and a javelin" - you know, to draw blood quickly and demolish.

    Benston: Would you say that Hard Facts, and other of your works in the last few years, searches for that kind of form?

    Baraka: Yes, right, I think so. I think my own feeling now is closer to the short essay form, and reading about Lu Hsun made me realize why I felt more comfortable using it. For instance, I have a weekly radio program in Newark, and I can sit down and write a four-page essay each week for that radio program on anything, and write it in the space of under an hour. The

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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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  • Funkadelics, or other kinds of nuts. But there's a big difference between, say, the Coltrane of "Giant Steps" and the post-"Love Supreme" Coltrane, when he starts going off into Eastern cosmology and other esoteric ideas, and actually loses a lot of the tough street sound - you know, the fast rhythm - and goes into a kind of contemplative, quietist form which loses the fire of actuality. And that time, that era, is when the rhythm and blues thing comes on so hard.

    Benston: Do you think there's a historical relationship between what happened to jazz in the mid-Sixties and what you're saying has happened to rhythm and blues; that, as you described the history of Afro-American music in Blues People, there is a logical movement at work: as one form becomes hardened and deadened, there remains an energy that simply becomes displaced into another form?

    Baraka: It passes on, exactly. That's what's happening - and it'll do it again. (Jazz is again making a move now.) I was thinking recently about the way music is played compared to the words that are sung - how they're alike, both being indicative of your worldview. If you listen to somebody who's in the jazz thing, say, Lonnie Liston Smith - listen to him sing songs. One of his very popular songs is called "Give Peace a Chance"; all he keeps saying is "Give peace a chance," a very quietist, pacifistic line. On the other hand, you've got people in rhythm and blues like the Isley Brothers talking about "The Powers that Be," or the O.J.'s talking about "Sixteen Families" and "The Rich Get Richer," or Hal Melvin and the Blue Notes talking about "Wake Up Everybody." Now, you can also perceive those concerns in what they are actually playing; for them to actually sing it will let you in on it, but that's what they are playing anyway.

    Benston: So the collective orientation isn't necessarily a function of whether expression is linguistic or musical?

    Baraka: Yes. You see, what I am saying is that a lot of these jazz people are holding to some kind of solipsistic, petit bourgeois, metaphysical position.

    Benston: When you listen to the music, how do you tell that?

    Baraka: Its preoccupation is not immediacy, or not, say, rhythmic immediacy. It often actually wants to sound very dreamy and evanescent, and in the rock thing they might go off sounding just plain crazy, like they're doped up. Now, if you put words to it, it simply brings it out clearly; but you certainly know what's happening from the notes themselves, from the musical context alone.

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  • Benston: Do you think that late Coltrane - "Expression" or the "Live in Seattle" album, for example - goes off into the kind of craziness that you say rock music indulges in?

    Baraka: What goes on, basically, is bourgeois navel-watching, as if you've got all the time in the world just to lay and listen to that for hours and hours and hours. It's a kind of fascination with the form of the art so that you get the sense that he's sculpting over and over the same material, contemplating it endlessly. Altogether those things happen because in that period he was very heavily into the whole theosophical business. It's got to be reflected in the art - it's just a reflection of what he is thinking.

    Benston: Is there a connection between what you're calling the "bourgeois worldview" and the form of cultural nationalism which you've disavowed?

    Baraka: Bourgeois nationalism is actually bourgeois ideology just turned inside out - black instead of white. The bourgeois nationalist poet would react against Greek mythology and praise Yoruba myth, for example, but if you analyze their economic bases you find they come out of the same thing: slave society and feudal society. What the bourgeois nationalist doesn't understand is that African slave society is no better than European slave society. The masses are slaves in both.

    Benston: When you wrote Blues People you acknowledged African slavery but said that dehumanization never existed in African slavery and, further, that this constituted a crucial difference between African and American slavery. Are you now retracting this distinction?

    Baraka: Slavery is dehumanizing whether it is slavery practiced by blacks against blacks, by whites against whites, or whatever. The one added fact in the United States was racism, which did not exist with black versus black or white versus white slavery, a fact created by capitalism. The people who try to make African slavery some kind of paradise are out of their minds - slavery is slavery.

    Benston: Did you feel that when you were writing Blues People?

    Baraka: No. My way of stating it was confused, but that ultimately is the truth of the distinction that I tried to make. I think the error I made is trying to make African slavery seem more humanistic. Slavery is slavery. The only further point is that in the United States there was an added factor, which was racism.

    Benston: In Blues People you constructed a paradigm of an African

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  • aesthetic as opposed to a Western aesthetic and then employed that paradigm to chart the evolution of Afro-American music. Do you feel that model holds up?

    Baraka: It would have to be rewritten because I would have to better understand the class base of the music I was talking about. What I was trying to lay out first of all is that Afro-American music developed from African culture. That was in the face of people who diminished and denigrated the African influence, saying it didn't exist. There were many musicologists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century who said that there was no African influence, that even blues came from English folk songs. I was laboring against cultural aggression and based my own perceptions on a general anti-imperialist attitude; but I lacked an all-around scientific approach to it. In the book I'm trying to write on John Coltrane I hope to correct the basic errors that I see in Blues People, which are errors related specifically to cultural nationalism. You cannot make a paradise out of African slavery.

    Benston: So you think that when you were talking about the nexus of African ritual and the nexus of African culture you were over-idealizing Africa and carrying that idealization through the history of Afro-America and its music?

    Baraka: Right. I tried to make African culture an absolute, a static absolute to which Afro-American culture related at all points in a static way. In the Coltrane book I'm trying to chart more accurately the path of art as a whole, Afro-American art specifically, especially in the period of Trane's life [1920-1967], which is a very profound, very impressive period in the world. I'm trying to make a theory of art based on that singular experience.

    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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  • Baraka: In its origins, of course, ritual is a conservative form; that's its economic basis. I think it can be used to make statements that have to do with that same kind of conservatism in this particular era.

    Benston: In that case ritual on the stage would be a kind of sub-text which would be critical, not a culminating image of transcendence.

    Baraka: Yes, and that's the way I use it in this play, as a kind of critical statement on some things.

    Benston: Was your former notion of ritual tied to your cultural nationalism?

    Baraka: Sure. The static, ahistorical worldview that cultural nationalists take tends to elevate ritual as a form that defies time, space, economic condition, etc. I think now to use ritual you would have to use it in a critical way.

    Benston: Are you saying that cultural nationalism tends to be anti- or ahistorical in its broad outlines?

    Baraka: Sure. Specifically, it is ahistorical in that it tries to make African culture a static, unchanging artifact. It praises African culture in its feudalistic and slave forms, as if those were the highest pinnacles of black society. We have not evolved from some static paradise. Life then was like life today: continual and progressive struggle.

    June, 1977.

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    Article Contentsp. 303p. nilp. 304p. 305p. 306p. 307p. 308p. 309p. [310]p. 311p. 312p. 313p. 314p. 315p. 316p. [317]p. [318]

    Issue Table of Contentsboundary 2, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1978), pp. 303-634Front Matter [pp. 319 - 577]A Supplement on Amiri BarakaAmiri Baraka: An Interview [pp. 303 - 318]Ellison, Baraka, and the Faces of Tradition [pp. 333 - 354]The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka [pp. 355 - 386]Does Axel's Castle Have a Street Address, or, What's New? Tendencies in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) [pp. 387 - 414]Love's Emblem Lost: LeRoi Jones's "Hymn for Lanie Poo" [pp. 415 - 434]Anonymous in America [pp. 435 - 442]

    Five Poems by Amiri BarakaLiterary Statement on Struggle! [pp. 322 - 323]A Conference of "Socialists" at Brown University [p. 324]Revolutionary Love [p. 325]Clay [p. 326]Reprise of One of A.G.'s Best Poems! [pp. 327 - 332]

    From Dodeka: A Second Plait, a Bracelet [pp. 443 - 460]Earthwalk [pp. 461 - 470]Elegy [pp. 471 - 480]Joyce and Cinema [pp. 481 - 502]Six Poems by Alan LoneyThat [p. 504]As We Supposed, the War Dance [p. 505]Cook's Wake [pp. 506 - 507]The Perishables [p. 508]Their Being Broke [p. 509]3 Days [pp. 510 - 512]

    Water (A Book) [pp. 513 - 520]The Secret Agent: The Agon(ie)s of the Word [pp. 521 - 540]Poetry by Georgia Alwan, Lucky Jacobs, James Ballowe, Donald RevellThe Nest [pp. 542 - 543]Leave of Absence [pp. 544 - 545]Great Dismal Swamp [p. 546]Daydream to Night [p. 547]Ritual Descent in Spring [pp. 548 - 550]Starved Rock [pp. 551 - 553]Augustine in Paphos [pp. 554 - 556]

    The Metanovel: Robbe-Grillet's Phenomenal Nouveau Roman [pp. 557 - 576]Four Poems by A. Poulin, Jr.The Angel of Confusion [p. 578]The Angels of Reincarnation [p. 579]The Angel of Imagination [p. 580]The Angel of the Gate [pp. 581 - 582]

    Reviewsuntitled [pp. 583 - 590]Semiotics and Semantics [pp. 591 - 598]Genteel Modernism [pp. 599 - 608]P or Not-P? The Failure of Dichotomies [pp. 609 - 622]Dancing the Man [pp. 623 - 627]

    Back Matter [pp. 628 - 634]


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