The questions of a black vulcanoe

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.

With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetics.

The movement and his published and performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963) practically seeded “the cultural corollary to black nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu.

Other titles range from Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), to The Music (1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz and Blues authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina, and his boldly sortied essays, The Essence of Reparations (2003).

The Essence of Reparations is Baraka’s first published collection of essays in book form radically exploring what is sure to become a twenty-first century watershed movement of Black peoples to the interrelated issues of racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation, which he has long been addressing creatively and critically.

It has been said that Amiri Baraka is committed to social justice like no other American writer. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems is Baraka’s first collection of poems published in the Caribbean and includes the title poem that has headlined him in the media in ways rare to poets and authors.

The recital of the poem “that mattered” engaged the poet warrior in a battle royal with the very governor of New Jersey and with a legion of detractors demanding his resignation as the state’s Poet Laureate because of Somebody Blew Up America’s provocatively poetic inquiry (in a few lines of the poem) about who knew beforehand about the New York City World Trade Center bombings in 2001.

The poem’s own detonation caused the author’s photo and words to be splashed across the pages of New York’s Amsterdam News and the New York Times and to be featured on CNN--to name a few US city, state and national and international media.

Baraka lives in Newark with his wife and author Amina Baraka; they have five children and head up the word-music ensemble, Blue Ark: The Word Ship and co-direct Kimako’s Blues People, the “artspace” housed in their theater basement for some fifteen years.

His awards and honors include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York at Stony Brook, and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

SOMEBODY BLEW UP AMERICA

(All thinking people
oppose terrorism
both domestic
& international…
But one should not
be used
To cover the other)

They say its some terrorist, some
barbaric
A Rab, in
Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring

It wasn't
the gonorrhea in costume
the white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases

They say (who say? Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks

Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation

Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa

Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil

Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do Jesus resemble

Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest

Who define art
Who define science

Who made the bombs
Who made the guns

Who bought the slaves, who sold them

Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn't insane

Who/ Who / Who/

Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese

Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers

Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army

Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker

Who/ Who/ Who/

Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war

Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain't nobody bigger

Who own this city

Who own the air
Who own the water

Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth

Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
Who go on vacation anytime

Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos

Who/Who/Who

Who own the ocean

Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio

Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners

Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws

Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying
WHO/ WHO/ WHOWHO/

Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who decide
Jesus get crucified

Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide

Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival

Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner

Who/Who/Who ^^^

Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie
Who/ Who/ ???

Who fount Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion

Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere

Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

Who invaded Grenada
Who made money from apartheid
Who keep the Irish a colony
Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later

Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani,
the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,

Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane , Betty Shabazz, Princess Margaret, Ralph Featherstone, Little Bobby

Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo,
Assata, Mumia,Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
MedgarEvers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put a price on Lenin's head

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars
WHO/WHO/ ^^

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured , assassinated, vanished

Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,

Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"

Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek who WHO W H O/

Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal, The New
Frontier, The Great Society,

Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere

Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson,
who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs, Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys, The Hollywood Ten

Who set the Reichstag Fire

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away ?
/
Who,Who, Who/
explosion of Owl the newspaper say
the devil face cd be seen Who WHO Who WHO

Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror
violence, and hunger and poverty.

Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful

Who you know ever
Seen God?

But everybody seen
The Devil

Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog

Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO (+) who who ^
Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!

Safe upon the solid rock

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay Millay, Edna, St. Vincent (22 Feb. 1892-19 Oct. 1950), poet, was born in the small town of Rockland, Maine, the daughter of Henry Tollman Millay, a schoolteacher, and Cora Buzzelle.


In 1900 Cora Millay divorced her husband for financial irresponsibility and soon thereafter moved to Camden, Maine, with Edna and her sisters. The hardworking mother supported them by nursing--often overnight--and encouraged her daughters to love reading and music and to be independent.


Millay attended public high school, where she wrote for and served as editor in chief of the school magazine (1905-1909). She also published several juvenile pieces in the St. Nicholas Magazine (1906-1910). Her first great poem, "Renascence," was published in an anthology called The Lyric Year in 1912.

When a Young Women's Christian Association education officer heard Millay read this poem, she helped obtain a scholarship for the talented girl to attend Vassar College. Millay took preparatory courses for one semester at Barnard College and then entered Vassar in 1913. While there she wrote poetry and plays (published in the Vassar Miscellany), acted, starred in her own play, The Princess Marries the Page, and studied literature and languages. Although she frequently rebelled against rules designed to protect female students, Millay graduated with an A.B. in 1917. That year Millay published Renascence and Other Poems.


She moved to New York City, where she acted with the Provincetown Players, lived impecuniously in Greenwich Village, and indulged in love affairs with several men, including the novelist Floyd Dell and, briefly, the married poet Arthur Davison Ficke.


She earned a little money by publishing short stories (under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd) and poems in Ainslee's magazine (1918-1921). In 1919 she wrote and directed a one-act, antiwar verse play with a fairy-tale motif titled Aria da Capo, for the Provincetown Players. During this period she also met the critic Edmund Wilson, at that time the managing editor of Vanity Fair, which had published some of her work (1920). Millay won a $100 prize from Poetry: A Magazine of Verse for "The Bean-Stalk" in 1920.

She also published her second book of verse, A Few Figs from Thistles (1920; rev. eds., 1921 and 1922), and Aria da Capo (1920), which sold well. With an agreement to write for Vanity Fair, the hardworking Millay enjoyed a varied sojourn in Europe from 1920 to 1923. In 1921 she published two more plays and a solid collection of poetry, Second April. Meanwhile, she had other love affairs, including a reported relationship with a French violinist that led to an abortion.


She encouraged but soon decided not to marry the poet Witter Bynner. After obtaining a $500 advance from Horace Liveright for a novel titled "Hardigut" that was never completed, she sent for her mother, and the two toured France and England; they then returned to New York. In 1923 Millay was honored as the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. I


n that same year she published The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, and after a brief courtship she married the 43-year-old widower Eugen Jan Boissevain; they had no children. He was a burly American importer of Dutch-Irish extraction who was sensitively intelligent, profeminist, and considerate. Millay went on arduous reading tours and sailed around the world with her husband in 1924.


The couple bought and occupied "Steepletop," their permanent home on 700 acres of farmland near Austerlitz, New York, during 1925. Shortly thereafter Millay created the stirring libretto for The King's Henchman, Deems Taylor's splendid opera, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 1927 starring the American baritone Lawrence Tibbett. The libretto was published and went through four quick editions, reportedly earning Millay $100 a day for a while.

Later in 1927 Millay became involved in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchists and labor agitators, had been convicted in 1921 of the 1920 murder of two payroll guards in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The verdict was challenged by those who felt that the two were being persecuted for their history as social activists and anarchists.


Although questions about their innocence remained, they were executed on 23 August 1927. Millay and many other intellectuals had joined in a sensational protest, in which she personally appealed to Governor Alvan T. Fuller and was arrested and jailed for joining the "death watch." In response, Millay wrote and published "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" (New York Times, 22 Aug. 1927). Her involvement in the protest was evidence of her long-standing sympathy for the socialistic aspects of communism.


Despite or perhaps partly because of this notoriety, many honors came to Millay, including her election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1929) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1940). During approximately this same period, however, three deaths severely depressed her. Her close friend, the poet Elinor Wylie, died in 1928, her mother died in 1931, and her estranged father died in 1935. Given her psychological makeup, Millay had found the ideal husband in Boissevain.


He attended to all the household chores, traveled widely with his "Vincent"--often to Florida, the Riviera, and Spain--and cooperated with her intellectual and linguistic interests. He catered to her whims and even condoned her having an occasional lover. One, George Dillon, who was fourteen years her junior and whom she met in 1928 while giving a reading at the University of Chicago, inspired Fatal Interview (1931), a 52-sonnet sequence. In one sonnet she snarls: "Love me no more, now let the god depart, / If love be grown so bitter to your tongue!"


Nonetheless, Dillon and Millay collaborated later on translations from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1936). Still later, in a sonnet in Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939), she says, "As God's my judge, I do cry holy, holy, / Upon the name of love however brief." Beginning in 1933, Millay and her husband enjoyed summer retreats on tiny Ragged Island, having bought the 85-acre spot in Casco Bay, Maine. Her other pre-World War II works include The Buck in the Snow (1928), Wine from These Grapes (1934), and Conversation at Midnight (1937); the original, unique manuscript of this dialogue of seven men was burned in a Sanibel Island hotel fire a year earlier.


In Huntsman, What Quarry? Millay had included stirring poems against the brutalities of Fascist Spain, Nazi Germany, and imperialistic Japan. Other events, such as Italy's attacks on Ethiopia and the German-Russian nonaggression treaty, caused the once-pacifist poet to call for preparedness and then to dash off pro-British and pro-French propaganda verse. Most of her poetry of World War II, much of which she collected in Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook (1940), has proved vapid, but a memorable exception is The Murder of Lidice (1942).


This long, dramatic verse narrative is based on the depraved German army butchery of an entire Czech village. In 1944 Millay suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to write for two years. During this time and later, her husband catered to her so selflessly that he depleted his own reserves of strength and died in 1949 of lung cancer followed by surgery and a stroke.


Millay, who with her husband had drunk to excess since the 1930s, evidently grew more dependent on alcohol during her brief, inconsolable widowhood. She died sitting at the foot of her staircase, alone, at Steepletop. Millay is the poetic voice of eternal youth, feminine revolt and liberation, and potent sensitivity and suggestiveness.


Her best and most representative themes are bittersweet love, sorrow, the inevitability of change, resignation, death, and ever-abiding nature. One of her very best poems is her early, mystical "Renascence," about spiritual interment and resurrection through the cycles of nature. It smoothly combines naiveté and profundity and modern and archaic diction.


In "Afternoon on a Hill" (published in Renascence [1917]) the delicate persona says, "I will touch a hundred flowers / And not pick one." She occasionally takes a snide tone in A Few Figs from Thistles (1920); for example, she begins one sonnet with these lines: "I shall forget you presently, my dear, / So make the most of this, your little day." But the collection also includes "Recuerdo," which memorably describes the dawn that a happy couple sees from a ferryboat: "The sky went wan, and the wind came cold, / And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold." Second April (1921) contains tender elegies to a Vassar friend who died of influenza in 1918. "


The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver," the technically brilliant title poem of Millay's 1923 collection, dramatizes a mother's love: a woman too poor to provide necessities for her little son weaves clothes for him by magically playing her harp. In the same book "The Spring and the Fall" bitterly contrasts a lover's vernal attention and his autumnal gibes and concludes that "'Tis not love's going hurts my days, / But that it went in little ways." The Buck in the Snow (1928) proved unpopular, perhaps because it features much experimental verse; for example, "The Pigeons" contains one line of twenty-five syllables. Her imagery grows startling, as when in "On First Having Heard the Skylark" the bird's cry is "like a crystal dart." The bitter philosophical poems in Wine from These Grapes (1934) are well represented by "Apostrophe to Man," in which, seeming to anticipate World War II, Millay exhorts everyone to "expunge yourself, die out, / Homo called sapiens."


The mounted huntsman in the terse title poem of Huntsman, What Quarry? is tempted to enjoy "a one-night's bride" but decides instead to go kill the fox. Notable from the posthumous Mine the Harvest (1954) are Millay's delight that "thought unbraids itself" ("Ragged Island"), her conceited disgust with time-consuming visitors--"What chores these churls do put upon the great" ("Cave Canem"), and Christ's warning to His followers, "No shelter will be found / Save in my shadow" ("Jesus to His Disciples"). Millay will always be remembered for her flippant quatrain, which she titled "First Fig" (1920): My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light! She should also be remembered, however, for her "Second Fig" (1920): "Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: / Come see my shining palace built upon the sand!" Her "shining" poetry should never fall out of fashion. Its lyricism, praise of beauty, freedom, and individualism, and technical virtuosity are timeless. Most of Millay's papers are at the New York Public Library, Yale University, and the Library of Congress. See also Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (1952). Primary and secondary bibliographies are Karl Yost, A Bibliography of the Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1937); John J. Patton, "A Comprehensive Bibliography of Criticism of Edna St. Vincent Millay," Serif 5 (Sept. 1968): 10-32; and Judith Nierman, Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Reference Guide (1977). Biographical studies include Jean Gould, The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1969); Joan Dash, A Life of One's Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married (1973); and Anne Chaney, Millay in Greenwich Village (1975). The best critical study is Norman A. Brittin, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1967; rev. ed., 1982). Discerning evaluations of Millay's early poetry are in Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength: An Outline of American Poetry (1620-1930) (1929), while generally derogatory comments are in Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968; rev. ed., 1984). Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems, ed. Colin Falck (1991), provides a provocative introduction. David Felix, Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Intellectuals (1965), chronicles the crime, trial, reviews, and executions and concludes that both men were probably guilty. Katherine Anne Porter, The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), describes the actions of the protestors, including Millay and Porter herself, during the Sacco-Vanzetti tragedy. An obituary is in the New York Times, 20 Oct. 1950.