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AMIRI BARAKA AND EDWARD DORN: The Collected Letters. Edited by Claudia Moreno Pisano. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2013.
These letters are heady stuff, fascinating reading. It is like being catapulted into a wonderful newly discovered opera about bohemia. Of course, the music here is jazz not classical, and the heroes-yes uncompromising-are brave and idealistic albeit foul-mouthed, but they do want to save the world with their art. As fellow Beat poet Diana di Prima says in her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001), they had the feeling of doing "important work-the importance of getting it out" (218). With their mimeograph machines they were going to triumph over the cruel world, bring capitalism to its knees. They were willing to endure great poverty so they could create great art. But since this is not an opera but a candid look into the lives of two great American avant-garde poets and their culture, we see the warts as well as the shining armor. The heroes of the piece, of these letters between young close friends, are Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), a black well-connected East Village poet and a wheeler-dealer on New York art scene, and Edward Dorn, a white, less well-connected poet, mostly in Pocatello, Idaho, teaching as an adjunct at Idaho State University. The times were mostly the 1960s. These letters give us this world...