Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an African-American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at a number of universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the PEN Open Book Award, formerly known as the Beyond Margins Award, in 2008 for Tales of the Out and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 October 1934
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
from the slave ship to the citizenship we faced a lot of bullship
James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.
Hope is delicate suffering.
Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured
The future is always here in the past
If you are black, the only roads into the mainland of American life are through subservience, cowardice, and loss of manhood. These are the white man's roads.
I am a soul in the world: in the world of my soul the whirled light from the day the sacked land of my father.
If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.
Atheist Jews double crossers stole our [black people’s] secrets. . . . They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves . . . . Selling fried potatoes and people, the little arty bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the arab’s head.
You can't be an American without being related to other Americans.
what is lost because it is most precious what is most precious because it is lost
What will be / the sacred words?
A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.
Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.