Baraka : Black Treasure

[Charles Brown <BrownBingb@xxxxxxx>]

I'm reading Race and Resistance, ( edited by Herb Boyd; 2002 South End
Press) I just read the essay by Amiri Baraka. " Riffin on Music and
Language" For you New Yorker/New Jerseyers, he has regular things in
New Jersey- Newark.  He says,

  What we are working on now in Newark is we have some groups called
  Blues People, which my wife and I have been running for 15 years. We
  have poetry and music and drama the last Saturday of every month at
  our house in the basement. We have a 60-seat theater. We have a park
  We do two things. If your're ever in the area, last Saturday of the
  month, four in the afternoon, we do a thing in Weequahic Park. It's
  about five bucks Why are we doing that ? Because you can't allow the
  institutions created by imperialism to be the only purveyors of
  culture.

NY/NJ Marxlisters might want to look into going to one of those
events.  He was a (the ?) Black Beat Poet.  His Blues People would be
worth looking at in research on Black music. The essay I just read has
some very interesting ideas on the connection between language and
music.

And he is very much a communist, a Marxist-Leninist for some time now,
having evolved from Black Nationalism. He came to the Black Radical
Congress meeting here in Detroit,and he's on the BRC email list. I
chauffeured him from the hotel to read his poetry. At that time he was
doing his anti-Guiliani poem.  Poet Laureate of N.J. ! Underfire for
his poem on 9/11.



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.