Amiri Baraka
The dramatist, novelist and poet, Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. With the beginning of Black Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. Also, he advocated scientific socialism with his revolutionary inclined poems and aimed at creating aesthetic through them.Amiri Baraka’s writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black Liberation and White Racism. Today, a number of well known poems, short stories, plays and commentaries on society, music and literature are associated with his name. A few of the famous ones include, ‘The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues’, ‘The Book of Monk’ and ‘New Music, New Poetry’ among others.
Poetry by Amiri Baraka
The gaunt thing
with no organs
creeps along the streets
of Europe, she will
commute, in her feathered bat stomach-gown
with no organs
with sores on her insides…
What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
as fear. (Of the tree’s shadow
winding around the chair, a distant music
of frozen birds rattling
in the cold