{"id":12789,"date":"2015-02-11T09:56:57","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T13:56:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=12789"},"modified":"2015-02-11T09:56:57","modified_gmt":"2015-02-11T13:56:57","slug":"aldon-nielsen-on-amiri-barakas-sos-poems-1961-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/aldon-nielsen-on-amiri-barakas-sos-poems-1961-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Aldon Nielsen on Amiri Baraka’s SOS (Poems 1961-2013)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As I put it on Face Book a week or so ago when Aldon Nielsen\u2019s review of SOS (Poems 1961-2013)<\/em> came out: \u201cAn excellent corrective to the ignorant NYT put-down piece of a week ago. Aldon Nielsen knows exactly what he is speaking of, i.e. knows in detail the incredible width & depth of Amiri Baraka\u2019s oeuvre \u2014 one of the major literary achievements of the second part of the 20C, not on a purely North American but on a world-wide scale.\u201d Below the opening paras of the review, & a link to get you to the\u00a0complete piece.<\/p>\n

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Save Our Stanzas \u2013 Selecting Amiri Baraka<\/h3>\n

by Aldon Lynn Nielsen<\/em><\/p>\n

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For many years I have complained loudly and often about the lack of a readily available major gathering of Amiri Baraka\u2019s poetry. It would be hard to think of another late career poet of his importance\u00a0who was not the subject of aCollected<\/i>\u00a0as well as a Selected<\/i>. (TheComplete<\/i> generally awaits the poet\u2019s demise \u2014 but even then . . .. Recollect that one of Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s friends asked, following the publication of both theCollected<\/i>\u00a0and Poems Retrieved,<\/i>\u00a0whether a Complete<\/i>\u00a0was even a possible thing. Looking at the masses of Baraka\u2019s work, I have often wondered the same thing.)<\/p>\n

Long out of print, the Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka\/LeRoi Jones<\/i>, published in 1979, was advertised as \u201ccontaining those poems which the author most wants to preserve,\u201d and that has long been the most substantial collection of Baraka\u2019s verse we had \u2013 339 pages running fromPreface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note<\/i>\u00a0through to Poetry for the Advanced<\/i>. (This was the only volume in which many of us could find that second collection from Baraka\u2019s Marxist epoch.) There was no editor named in the book, so one assumes the selections are indeed Baraka\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

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A quarter century on, Marsilio publishedTransbluesency: Selected Poems 1961-1995,<\/i>\u00a0edited by Paul Vangelisti in consultation with the poet. I loved the cover of that book the minute I saw it, and began reading with the highest hopes, but I was already concerned just picking up the volume. The 1979 Selected<\/i>\u00a0ran to 339 pages; the 1995 Transbluesency<\/i>, taking in decades more work to choose from, was 271 pages long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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(ctd here<\/a>)<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I put it on Face Book a week or so ago when Aldon Nielsen\u2019s review of SOS (Poems 1961-2013) came out: \u201cAn excellent corrective to the ignorant NYT put-down piece of a week...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,90,91,1475],"tags":[1632,147],"class_list":["post-12789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-poetics","category-poetry","category-review","tag-aldon-lynn-nielsen","tag-amiri-baraka"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12789"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12805,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12789\/revisions\/12805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}