Craft: Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) was a vital, but sometimes misunderstood poet. Baraka was an imposing and indomitable figure. His radical nature belied not only his middle-class upbringing, but the shocking contrast between his public persona and his soft, genial, and warm personal presence. He worked in many genres: poetry, fiction, plays, and music criticism, but his poetry deserves a closer look.

He was born in Newark, New Jersey as Everett LeRoi Jones to a future postal supervisor and a future social worker. Some readers and critics become apoplectic when discussing Baraka because of his controversial poems and statements, but unlike most of them, and unlike Newark itself, for that matter, Baraka had the gift of reinvention. He continuously, since 1957, re-examined, rethought, and reconfigured himself not only as a person, but also his relationship to language.