Joel Lewis Recounts Amiri Baraka's Role in the NJ Poetry Community for Talisman
A new issue of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics is out, and features an excerpt from New York poet Joel Lewis's ongoing project/memoir of his relationship with Amiri Baraka, Speak No Evil: Amiri Baraka and Others in Hoboken. "Among poets, [Baraka] 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," writes Lewis in his preface to the piece. An excerpt of the excerpt follows.
...Amiri gave his usual solid performance that night [at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken]. 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!”
Read it all at Talisman.