Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an African-American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at a number of universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the PEN Open Book Award, formerly known as the Beyond Margins Award, in 2008 for Tales of the Out and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 October 1934
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
The films of Warhol, when they are about anything are about sucking people off. This can be high art, to people who are interested in sucking people off. But that will not liberate Black people.
Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured
To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
from the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship
Warriors are poets and poems and all the loveliness here in the worlds.
I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes.
The word “art” is something the West has never understood. Art is supposed to be a part of a community. Like, scholars are supposed to be a part of a community... Art is to decorate people’s houses, their skin, their clothes, to make them expand their minds, and it’s supposed to be right in the community, where they can have it when they want it... It’s supposed to be as essential as a grocery store... that’s the only way art can function naturally.
And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won't come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.
The African, because of the violent differences between what was native and what he was forced to in slavery, developed some of the most complex and complicated ideas about the world imaginable.
There is no depth to education without art.
Thought is more important than art....To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.
Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world's realities.
All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international but one should not be used to cover the other
The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.