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The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Amiri Baraka. William J. Harris, ed. Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991. $14.95
It would have seemed nearly criminal, but in the vastly more painful crimes committed by the few world citizens in positions of commanding wealth and power, it went unnoticed by all but a few poetry readers. For years virtually nothing of Baraka 's was available in print. One of the prolific writers of the post Second World War period - poetry, drama, music criticism, political analysis. Oddly, of the little of his work that remained in print throughout, it is his music criticism, the two early books Blues People and Black Music that stayed around. Given that Baraka's outspoken political stance - unkind to liberals and conservatives, "white and black middle classes alike - has dropped him from the big book review outlets, and let his books vanish from the public eye - one might expect the comparatively harmless genre of music criticism to be "what the queasy would remember him by. Yet, it is nonetheless strange that this material should remain palatable - because for Baraka, "the Music" is that single most revolutionary and articulate African American statement. His Autobiography (among the many books now out of print) makes clear the role "the Music" played in bringing him home to whatever social consciousness he's arrived at.
But in an age when music has largely lost out to commerce, the music Baraka writes about has gone into far margins. Everyone knows who Miles Davis was, but how many listen to Cecil Taylor, even after the committee awarded him a MacArthur?
So - finally a big volume of Baraka, almost 500 pages, issued by Thunder's Mouth Press. A quick glance shows it can't replace the books from which it draws - Black Magic Poetry, Home: Social Essays, Daggers and Javelins - but it does provide a sweeping account of Baraka's development. His is a life that disturbs many, while looking indisputably honest to a few. It is a life marked by major ideological developments which ferociously alter the writing - from year to year, decade to decade. William J. Harris, who edits lheReader, has hit upon an organization for the volume that tries to name certain stages, and thus clarify,...