Friday, January 10, 2014
This week my brother Joe was moved from University Hospital in Newark to a rehab facility in Raritan NJ (much closer to my sister & a long but easier trip for my brother Jim, who lives down near Atlantic City.). He promptly was taken to Somerset Hospital with a variety of serious problems, & had a "code blue" cardiac arrest. He's holding on.
Poet Amiri Baraka died, age 79. He had been hospitalized in another Newark Hospital over the holidays with undisclosed problems. Baraka (Leroi Jones when he made his initial reputation) was a huge literary figure in Jersey, an activist & committed Marxist. Establishment politicians of course despised him. Strangely, Amiri was appointed Poet Laureate of NJ back around 2001, read a poem about 9/11 that offended all sorts of people, & the position was abolished rather than just firing & replacing him. There aren't many poets in Jersey who would have accepted that position, because Baraka was, like him or not, the most prominent literary Presence in Jersey. No one else came close. Only Allen Ginsberg, when he visited Jersey, as he did frequently, was bigger, & he & Baraka were old friends dating back to the Beat era. I'll be writing more about Amiri Baraka. He did influence me & figure into my education in some odd ways.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Poet Amiri Baraka died, age 79. He had been hospitalized in another Newark Hospital over the holidays with undisclosed problems. Baraka (Leroi Jones when he made his initial reputation) was a huge literary figure in Jersey, an activist & committed Marxist. Establishment politicians of course despised him. Strangely, Amiri was appointed Poet Laureate of NJ back around 2001, read a poem about 9/11 that offended all sorts of people, & the position was abolished rather than just firing & replacing him. There aren't many poets in Jersey who would have accepted that position, because Baraka was, like him or not, the most prominent literary Presence in Jersey. No one else came close. Only Allen Ginsberg, when he visited Jersey, as he did frequently, was bigger, & he & Baraka were old friends dating back to the Beat era. I'll be writing more about Amiri Baraka. He did influence me & figure into my education in some odd ways.
Labels: in the news
