#Leroi Jones

[garadinervi]

«Trobar», No. 2, Trobar, Brooklyn, NY, 1961 [Between the Covers, Gloucester City, NJ]

Contributors: Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, George Economou, Seymour Faust, George Hitchcock, Amiri Baraka (as LeRoi Jones), Robert Kelly, Rochelle Owens, Jerome Rothenberg, Armand Schwerner, Gary Snyder, and others

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

[manwalksintobar]

if we’ve gotta live underground and everybody’s got cancer/ will poetry be enuf?  // Eisa Davis to Ntozake Shange

         dear ntozake,

I got sacks of mercury under the skin beneath my eyes either cried too much or i’m abt to the cool war’s burnin up my retina again does poetry start where life ends? i know i’m supposed to be cool: i wear corrective lenses that feature high definition tragedy. baby in the dumpster       ethnic cleansing assassinations       multinational mergers i’m supposed to shake my head write a poem believe in ripples. but i ain’t cool. i emit inhuman noises i imagine terrorist acts as i flick my imaginary ash onto the imaginary tray i imagine going insane with a purpose and writing it down feels sorta unnecessary does poetry end where life begins? berkeley girl       black girl        red diaper baby born of the blood of the struggle but with reaganomics and prince pickin up steam in ‘81 nothing came between me and my calvins 10 yrs old       unpressed hair       playin beethoven readin madeleine l’engle       got scared in my pants when i heard this girl testifying ‘TOUSSAINT’ in the black repertory group youth ensemble i was just sittin in a rockin chair pretendin to be 82 and talkin like I knew all bout langston’s ‘rivers’

i wasn’t as good as her and i definitely wadn’t cool so i gave up drama and decided to bake soufflés zake you wda beat me up in the playground if we’da grown up together and you did eighth grade       ‘he dropped em’ at the regional oratorical competition i saw another fly honey rip it this time it’s ‘a nite with beau willie brown’ i was bleedin on the ground i became yours no more soufflés i jacked for colored girls right off my mama’s shelf my mama fania who was sweatin with you and raymond sawyer and ed mock and halifu osumare dancin on the grass       back in the day in you i found a groove never knew i had one like that did that monologue over and over alone in my room my bunk bed the proscenium arch 13 yrs old       screamin and cryin abt my kids gettin dropped out a window didn't know a damn thing about rivers but i knew abt my heart fallin        five stories you were never abbreviated or lower case to me you just pimped that irony that global badass mackadocious funkology you not only had hígado you had ben-wa balls in yr pussy

betsey brown on my godmother's couch nappy edges in mendocino at the mouth of big river spell #7 after the earthquake in silverlake the love space demands had to be in brooklyn yr poems are invitations to live in yr body love letters yr admirers dream they coulda written themselves no one cd find a category that was yr size blackety black but never blacker than thou you teased me into sassiness when i had none to speak of made profane into sacred but never formed a church sanctified women's lives whether we were reading nietzsche or a box of kotex we were magical and regular you many-tongued st louis woman of barnard and barcelona you left us the residue of yr lust left us to wander life as freely as sassafrass cypress and indigo and even the unedumacated could get yr virtuosity cuz you always fried it up in grease you built an aqueduct from lorraine hansberry's groundwater and it bubbled straight to george c wolfe you never read what the critics said and you scrunched up the flesh between yr eyebrows like everybody else in my family

but zake is poetry enuf?

i beg the question cuz you grew me up you    and adrienne kennedy     and anna deavere smith and all my mothers you blew out the candles on my 26th so when there's mercury under the skin beneath my eyes and the world ain't so cool do you write a poem or a will?

like leroi jones said     if bessie smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music so do we all write like amiri baraka does or do we all get our nat turner on?

i beg the question cuz i wanna get my life right do some real work and i really don't want to kill any white folk i mean     can we talk abt this maybe it's just my red diaper that's itchin but i still got that will to uplift the race sans bootstraps or talented tenths or paper bag tests this time we uplift the human race and i know the rainbow might be but is poetry enuf?

it's a naive question but i'm old enuf to ask them once in a while if we do finally unload the canon clean it out stock up on some more colorful balls ain't we only gettin the ones that are available at a store near you? doesn't the market end up setting the new standards anyway? is poetry enuf if it ain't sellin? if ain't nobody readin it? can poetry keep a man     who can't read from droppin his kids out a window?

and how can i call a ceasefire to this cool war in stanzas of eights when we've declared poetry a no fly zone? we have learned to protect it and its potential politics like a mother shoot down anyone who might overdetermine a poem's meaning (while we poets divebomb everyone else's politics with impunity like we're the United States or something)

if poetry is just poetry we save it from the conservatives but doesn't that mean it's of no use to the progressives?

is poetry enuf? cuz that's all i'm doin. makin up stories    on stage     on the page keepin the beat and that's all my friends are doin and that's what a lot of folks my age are doin

but if we've gone and burnt up everything in the sky if there's nothin else to eat but landfill stroganoff if we've gotta live underground and everybody's got cancer will poetry be enuf?

my aunt angela says i can do my thang and keep swinging left hooks to oppression if i stay up stay into it stay involved just one form of praxis will do. it's just my guilt that thinks i need twenty-two what's enuf?

shouldn't i (or somebody) be our secular bodhisattva become a real power player but skip the talk show can't we stabilize, rekindle collectives and cooperatives and collaborations therapeutic communities that double as creative juggernauts a publishing house     a theatre where the plays cost less than the movies get the neighborhood coven back together take dance breaks in the cubicles sing until the flourescent lights burst into snow i ask you because you changed me zake you changed thousands of women and i know poetry can't be enuf if you drunk

i ain't tryin ta walk off wid alla yr stuff and i got nuttin but love for ya so that's why i gotta know i'm sittin on my bed encircled by every book you've ever published they're open like fans marking pages with the flint of genius all i want is for this circle to grow so tell me:

is this where poetry and life are twins? i felt so crumpled up when i started writing you poetry seemed so useless and dingy next to all the bright red bad news but now that the poem is over i feel wide open like an infant of the spring just tell me how to feed this light to my responsibilities and poetry just might be enuf           love           eisa

[lisamarie-vee]

[abjectionporn-blog]

[theloniusnewyork]

[laku-incarnate]

Silent Night by Amiri Baraka

Whenever the Devil

Is disguised

                       As God

He is called

                      Santa Claus!

[lineageandtrajectory]

LeRoi Jones (1961) Preface To A Twenty Volume Suicide Note. Totem Press/Corinth Books.

[agirlnamedbone]

—CM Burroughs (The Vital System, 2012)

[afrotumble]

“Negro music,” he wrote, “is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about the way music is made. The potential [white] critic of jazz [think rap/hip-hop if you will] had only to appreciate the music, or what he thought was the music, and did not need to understand or even be concerned with the attitudes that produced it, except perhaps as a purely sociological consideration.”

[booksinantwerp]

Celebrating all the women in fashion and beyond that on #InternationalWomensDay Here are 8 important women that made a mark in fashion. Only a few of the many in fashion. 1. Vivienne Westwood (portrait by Kayt Jones) 2. Ann Demeulemeester (portrait by Patrick Robyn) 3. Miuccia Prada (portrait by Marc Quinn) 4. Véronique Leroy (portrait by Karl Lagerfeld) 5. Donatella Versace (portrait courtesy of Donatella Versace) 6. Sonia Rykiel (portrait by Sarah Moon) 7. Anna Sui (portrait by Joshua Jordan) 8. Martine Sitbon (portrait courtesy of Martine Sitbon) follow on Instagram for more

[garadinervi]

«Trobar», No. 4, Trobar, Brooklyn, NY, 1962 [Between the Covers, Gloucester City, NJ]

Contributors: Rochelle Owens, George Economou, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Kelly, Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn, Jerome Rothenberg, Diane Wakoski, Jackson Mac Low, Amiri Baraka (as Leroi Jones), Joel Oppenheimer, and others

[bughead-in-the-comics]

From Trick Schtick, PEP Comics #354 (1979).

[manwalksintobar]

Way Out West  // LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka]

                                     (for Gary Snyder)

As simple an act as opening the eyes. Merely coming into things by degrees. Morning: some tear is broken on the wooden stairs of my lady's eyes. Profusions of green. The leaves. Their constant prehensions. Like old junkies on Sheridan Square, eyes cold and round. There is a song Nat Cole sings … This city & the intricate disorder of the seasons. Unable to mention something as abstract as time. Even so, (bowing low in thick smoke from cheap incense; all kinds questions filling the mouth, till you suffocate & fall dead to opulent carpet.) Even so, shadows will creep over your flesh & hide your disorder, your lies. There are unattractive wild ferns outside the window where the cats hide. They yowl from there at nights. In heat & bleeding on my tulips. Steel bells, like the evil unwashed Sphinx, towing in the twilight. Childless old murderers, for centuries with musty eyes. I am distressed. Thinking of the seasons, how they pass, how I pass, my very youth, the ripe sweet of my life; drained off… Like giant rhesus monkeys; picking their skulls, with ingenious cruelty sucking out the brains. No use for beauty collapsed, with moldy breath done in. Insidious weight of cankered dreams. Tiresias' weathered cock. Walking into the sea, shells caught in the hair. Coarse waves tearing the tongue. Closing the eyes. As simple an act. You float  

[lisamarie-vee]

[this-is-a-podcast-fanblog]

Night Vale Obscure Ship Tournament