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Poems by Amiri Baraka
and Leo Connellan edited
by Daniela
Gioseffi Featuring Amiri Baraka and Leo Connellan We are pleased to
welcome two eminent and highly accomplished poets to our second “Guest Spot”: African American, Amiri
Baraka of Newark, New Jersey, and Irish American, Leo Connellan of New England.
Our last issue featured an essay by Ishmael Reed: America: The Multi-national Society in VIA’s “Guest Spot”
which strives to include writers of poetry and prose, who though part of the
American mainstream, offer something special and original from their ethnic,
racial, or regional roots. We wish to feature guests writers who have helped
to forge a Renaissance of writing within their own sub-cultures even as they
have contributed a pioneering originality to American letters. To the next
issue, we hope to welcome Grace Paley, the Jewish American “Chekov of New
York,” an artist of the short story and a poet of consummate craft, social
conscience, and original voice. Amiri Baraka,
formerly known as “Leroi Jones,” one of America’s most distinguished poet
playwrights, is a successful civil rights organizer as well as an educator
and prominent writer. His first book, Preface
to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), brought him national attention.
His poetry and fiction won him a John Hay Whitney fellowship in 1961. Since,
he has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller
Foundation Grant Award for drama, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award
in poetry. Baraka was instrumental in creating an uncompromising, radical,
Black literary movement. His highly charged, original poetry brought him
attention from the avante garde—including Beat Generation poets like Allen
Ginsberg who has highly praised his work. In 1964, he received an Obie Award
for his drama Dutchman and in 1966
a prize for The Slave at the First
World Festival of Drama in Dakar, Senegal. In 1969 he published Four Black Revolutionary Plays and in
1967, Baptism and the Toilet. His book Black
Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968), edited with Larry
Neal, was among the seminal works of the contemporary “Black Power” and
“Black Is Beautiful” movements in literature. A prolific critic of literature
and jazz music, as well as a gifted sociopolitical commentator, controversial
like Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka offers a timely analysis of racism in his many
speeches, essays, and creative works. A recent book, Jessie Jackson and Black People: Essays 1972–92, was heralded for
its astute observations about the workings of American politics. Recently, he
was involved in helping his son run a political campaign for Mayor of Newark,
New Jersey. He has been deeply involved with The Black Arts Repertory Theater
School of Harlem, Spirit House in Newark, and The Congress of Afrikan People
of which he was a founder and president. Amiri Baraka has been a professor of
poetry and literature at The New School for Social Research and Columbia
University among many other colleges and universities. The poem reprinted
here, “Monk’s World,” originally appeared in a bi-lingual Italian publication:
Morso Dal Suono, Castelvetro
Piacentino, Italy, 1993. The others, (©)copyrighted 1994 by the author, are
more recent creations, kindly contributed to VIA’s “Guest Spot.” Leo Connellan, an
Irish New Englander is the true “poet laureate” of Connecticut where he
should be honored for all he’s given to school children and college students
all over the state who can identify with his accessible, meaningful craft and
style of teaching fine literature. As a working class man, who spent many
years as a traveling salesman, and a knowledgeable, self-made scholar of
poetry and its craft, Connellan is a writer of original Irish-American, as
well as universal, voice. His consummate endeavor has given us the truth of
New England life. The author of twelve books of poetry, winner of the Shelley-Memorial
Award of the Poetry Society of America and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
for his New and Collected Poems
(1989), he is Poet-in-Residence at Connecticut State University. His poems
were recorded at the Library of Congress in January of 1972. The publication
of The Clear Blue Lobster Water Country
(Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1985) and his First Selected Poems (Pittsburgh UP, 1976) caused him to be
heralded by many of the finest poets and critics of our time as a vital poet,
defiant of dull academic stuffiness—a poet of the people and for the people.
Richard Eberhart has said, “Leo Connellan does not belong to the mainstream
of university poetry for university-educated readers, but to another
mainstream of American consciousness whose textbook is raw life and whose
words can be understood by anyone.” Roland Flint said, in The New York Times Book Review: “Mr.
Connellan’s writing comes all sad and shaggy, rowdy, rough and ready from
deep regions of the now declassified creative unconscious.” Richard Wilbur
wrote, “Connellan’s poems are vivid, harsh, spare, surely cadenced and
colloquially eloquent.” Connellan’s Lament
for Federico Garcia Lorca and Lament
for the Jews at Munich appear in his New
and Collected Poems, soon to be re-issued by Curbstone Press,
Willimantic, CT (© Copyrighted 1989) 1995. He’s currently working on a
novel, Knapsack and Stars, a
lively, sociologically penetrating and poetic account of his “hobo” travels
through the United States in the 1940s and 50s. a poem some
people will have to understand Dull unwashed windows of eyes and buildings of industry. What industry do I practice? A slick colored boy, 12 miles from his home. I practice no industry. I am no longer a credit to my race. I read a little, scratch against silence slow spring afternoons. I
had thought, before, some years ago that I’d come to the end of my life. Watercolor
ego. Without the preciseness a violent man could propose. But
the wheel, and the wheels, wont let us alone. All the fantasy and
justice, and dry charcoal winters All the pitifully intelligent citizens I’ve
forced myself to love We
have awaited the coming of natural phenomenon.
Mystics and romantics, knowledgeable workers of
the land. But
none has come. (Repeat) but
none has come. Will the machinegunners please step
forward? young soul First, feel, then feel, then read, or read, then feel, then fall, or stand, where you already are. Think of your self, and the other selves . . . think of your parents, your mothers and sisters, your bentstick father, then feel, or fall, on your knees if nothing else will move you, then
read and
look deeply into
all matters come
close to you city
boys— country
men Make
some muscle in
your head, but use
the muscle in
yr heart each morning Each morning I go down to Gansevoort St. and stand on the docks. I stare out at the horizon until it gets up and comes to embrace me. I make believe it is my father. This is known as genealogy. monk’s World That
street where midnight is
round, the moon flat &
blue, where fire engines solo &
cats stand round & look is
Monk’s world When I last saw him, turning around high
from 78rpm, growing a
landscape of spaced funk When I last spoke to him, coming out the
Vanguard, he hipped me to my
own secrets, like Nat he
dug the numbers & letters blowing
through the grass initials
& invocations of the past All the questions I asked Monk He answered
first in
a beret. Why was a
high priest staring Why
were the black keys signifying.
And who was wrapped
in common magic like
a street empty of everything except
weird birds The last time Monk smiled I read the
piano’s diary. His fingers where
he collected yr feelings The
Bar he circled to underscore the
anonymous laughter of smoke &
posters. Monk carried equations he danced at you. “What’s happening?” We said, as he dipped
& spun.
“What’s happening?” “Everything. All the time. Every
googoplex of
a second.” Like a door, he opened, not disappearing but
remaining a distant profile of
intimate revelation. Oh, man! Monk was digging Trane now w/o
a chaser he drank himself in.
& Trane reported from the
6th or 7th planet deep in the
Theloniuscape. Where fire engines screamed the blues &
night had a shiny mouth &
scattered flying things. lament for
federico garcia lorca In the early dawn bleak cold without sunlight, They smashed the Butterfly against a wall. Yes, I know we are only children, children picking up the smatterings of what we can. That brutal morning the capes of Spain folded themselves in shame. We are children who were not there, know nothing of it. But there are those among us who even while we are children put the eyes out of kittens, tie Cats’ tails together and toss them over a clothesline feeling warm pleasure witnessing their frantic clawing each other to death. We will be the ones who will do it again. In all likelihood the boys among us will grow up and marry the girls trying endlessly to prove our manhood. Some of us never can. We will always think it is in question, that all eyes focus on us as un-men. We will murder anyone who does not eel a need to prove it, is such a voice that birds stop in flight in air to listen. He is in the veins in which Spain’s Conquistadores’ blood reached its bouquet. His precious singing words of such magnitude they clutch our breath. Yes, I know we are only children, children picking up the smatterings of what we can. He was whisked out of his house as dawn was breaking, his eyes deprived of one more sun before forever dark. Killed because he wore skirts in the heart of his trousers. We will let it happen again, when the time comes some of us will do it. We are children who could see to it, it did not but we will not. Would not want to be of them who smashed the Butterfly against a wall and the Courvoisier of his mind wasted forever at only age thirty-six. Whatever is the good to talk to children who will do it again. Federico, Garcia, Lorca . . .
some of us some of us are
heartbroken. . . . They do not make enough candles in all the world’s churches to burn for you. Not enough Rosaries can be said or Acts of Contrition. Because I know it will happen again. lament for
jews at munich How much do you want a country! I ask you, how much is your earth, land, a nation that is yours worth. How much! Here were the cream of broken udders. The dying cows calved and here they were. Here were the cream of cripples tortured and destroyed who refused to perish and vanish and had the astonishing ego to come back to Germany again. And everyone knew that Arabs were there too. So, how much do you want a country! How much did jews dehydrating to death in Cuba’s harbor want a country! And jews stripped of everything telling jolly fairy stories to their babies clutched in their arms while christian gas came out of showers. How much did they wish that their dying would be for a country! Salamon paid for George Washington’s army, the jews wanted a country so much. You say you love the United States, and I think you think you do, the conception of giving up your own child to slaughter in front of your eyes as a price for your country has never really been presented to you. You claim you love the United States, and I believe you love what you
understand. You wear hard hats with the American
flag, like it doesn’t exist unless you paint it and wear it in prejudice as you sing the Anthem before ball games full of
nigger stars. Still, how much do you really want a country! It’s hard protecting a virgin forever one’s own, along her borders and in her heart. You really have to want a country or it’s hardly worth what you have to put out to keep a woman who is your mother land from being ravaged and obliterated. Now, the IRA Irish guerrilla is a man who says goodbye to his mother in the morning and the next time he sees her is when he blows her apart in the supermarket he’s mined. But it hasn’t won him his country, it has only murdered his mother. You have never wanted an Israel so badly that to keep the dream realized you would yourself direct the slaughter of your blood comrades, sobbing, retching for their lives behind
blindfolds as you directed their deaths. Because if you once start conceding, it keeps up until you have no country any more. Everyone knew the Arabs were there. We want this, you want this. You are only thinking how you can participate without being known. Like bouncing Ping Pong balls, talking casually while just a bunch of jews are being led right by you to die. Nothing keeps happening that mankind does not want. As long as it is not you who is dying or having the bottoms of your feet beaten until it shifts your skeleton while you are still alive breathing in it. What will we do when our wars are gone now that we do not even have legal execution in the death houses of our prisons. . . .
what will we do with
ourselves. . . . Everyone knew the Arabs were there. . . . Everyone knows that nothing will be done. |