NPR Reviews Amiri Baraka's S O S: Poems 1961-2013

To mark Black History Month, Grove Press is publishing S O S: Poems 1961-2013 a collection of Amiri Baraka's verse. It hits bookshelves on Tuesday. To prepare NPR listeners for the sound and the fury, Tom Vitale reviews this important new collection of Baraka's work. From NPR:

For the late poet Amiri Baraka, poetry was about the sound of the words — that the poems should come alive when they were read aloud. "I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can — from the inception," he said in 1980. "So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given."

Baraka, who died in 2014, was one of the most important and controversial figures in African-American literature. On Tuesday, to mark Black History Month, Grove Press is publishing a career-spanning anthology of Baraka's poetry called SOS: Poems 1961-2013.

In his poetry, Baraka incorporated the rhythms and melodies of jazz. (He wrote music criticism and his seminal book Blues People — written under his given name, LeRoi Jones — is still in print.) Baraka said he looked at the texts of his poems like scores for pieces of music.

In the poem, "Am/Trak," Baraka said he was trying to capture the spirit of John Coltrane's music — as well as to show the context that produced that music — the social upheaval of the 1960s.

"He, like Langston Hughes before him, like Ralph Ellison to some extent, understood the pre-eminence, you'd have to say, of Black Music in Black American expressive culture," says Arnold Rampersad, professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He says Baraka started out writing poetry as part of the Beat movement in the Greenwich Village of the 1950s — casual and confessional verse in the style of his friend Allen Ginsberg. [...]

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