Leroi

Leroi Jones. Amiri Baraka. Whatever. He's cooked up his share of poems. Some of 'em I like pretty good, too. Some of 'em - meh. I read Preface To A Twenty Volume Suicide Note a long time ago, when I was still in undergrad. It haunted me for months. I couldn't tell what it was doing. That's because I didn't have a handle on the context, history, and culture of American poetry. Nor did I have a handle on me.

In this way, Preface... was like a strange rock formation that I just happened upon in the jutting landscapes of my early adulthood. Now I read it while waiting for my grits to cook and can actually recall a sense memory of when I thumbed its pages on the midnight bus in Portland, Oregon, hidden beer bottle tucked between my feet, rain streaking down. The Willamette River was right at the banks, but nary a salmon to speak of.

Now I can see that "Leroi" didn't have much of a handle on himself, either. The poems here are really struggling to break free of something. So the self-consciousness factor is high. Baraka's militancy hasn't arrived yet, but it's crystallizing, taking its first shapes in the postmodern froth of word-soup cupped up from the Harlem mud puddles of Allen Ginsberg's America.

In a way, the self-consciousness and awkwardness of Preface makes it a bit more interesting than, say, the Anthologized "Howl" or "Kaddish," but less interesting than, oh, Frank O'Hara's beard or The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show in Stereophonic Surround Sound...not to take anything from Ginsy or Baraka - both rightful bards engaged in the Work in this here New World (Order).

"And what's the work?" quoth Ginsberg, "To ease the pain of living. Everything else - drunken dumbshow." Right fucking on, old boy.