Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters 1959-1960
Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: Selections from the Collected Letters 1959-1960
$8.00
Editor: Claudia Moreno Pisano
34 pages, softcover, saddle-stitch binding
Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters presents the
correspondence of twentieth-century North American poets Edward Dorn and
Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) between the years 1959 and 1965.
The major basis of their relationship, and these letters, is undoubtedly
an artistic one, the early 1960s finding both poets just beginning to
publish and becoming active, public figures. This correspondence becomes
the primary ground for a wide range of discussions, from quotidian
observations of being snowbound without enough heat or being overdressed
on an overly warm spring day to the hashing out of experiences, fears,
and anxieties directly related to the socio-political culture of the
early 1960s: bar fights around race matters, an aggravated police
presence around fears of agitation and protests. A look at the complete
set of letters finds them formative and showing signs of what is to come
later: by 1965, knowledge, beliefs, actions, friendships, and alliances
had shifted drastically, setting the stage for a highly tumultuous late
1960s. The correspondence between Dorn and Baraka takes us from a time
when the norms of cultural ideology held Americans squarely in a
superficial postwar ease to the moments when the uncovering of darker
truths became manifest and the veneer of consumer culture began to fall
apart. Dorn and Baraka both understood the poem as an act of the
intellect and knew that poetry is a public action that carries with it
responsibility. With this sense of art as not only a valid but a
necessary means of grappling with and understanding both the beautiful
and the horrific in the world fueling each poet, the letters become both
reflection and place of creation, the ground upon which to experiment.
Author Biographies:
EDWARD DORN(1929-1999) was born in the
poverty-stricken Illinois of the Great Depression, forever marked by the
circumstances and land from which he came. Intellectually hungry and
always dissatisfied with the status quo, Dorn spent several years
studying with Charles Olson, both in and out of Black Mountain. Dorn
engaged in sharp, critical inquiry in an attempt to push into motion
what he knew was a too-often complacent country. His frankness landed
him the dubious honor of, in the words of fellow poet Tom Raworth, “a
lonely position at the best of times… a persona non grata.” In the
Summer 2004 special double issue of Chicago Review dedicated to Dorn,
editor Erik Steinhoff understands that though “Dorn should need no
introduction” given his location in the radical and powerful lineage of
“the Black Mountaineers arrayed under and around Charles Olson’s
decisive influence… it is also understandable that Dorn would need an
introduction.” Deemed a “difficult” poet and man by many, Dorn’s work
“functions as a department of disturbances, running athwart whatever
linguistic, political, or cultural securities or sincerities we might
hold.” Dorn spent his life writing, teaching, and editing as he traveled
between England and North America; he would accept a position at the
University of Colorado, Boulder in 1977 and remain there until the end
of his life.
AMIRI BARAKA (1934-) is a
poet, writer, dramatist, and activist. Rejecting his lower middle class
black lifestyle and receiving a dishonorable discharge by the Air Force
(the Error Farce, in his own words), by 1958 Jones had ventured to New
York City, where he spent many years in Greenwich Village, an integral
participant in the bohemian poetry, theater, and music scenes. Baraka
would write in a wide range of artistic forms, including poetry, plays,
essays, reviews, even liner notes for the jazz records coming out of the
artistic ferment of the mid-twentieth century music world. Having seen
several poems of Dorn’s in various small literary magazines, Baraka
began writing to him with praises and a request for poems for his own
magazine, Yugen. This was the first little magazine to include all the
various groups that would come to comprise the New American Poetry; the
Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance
poets, among others, were all featured. In 1965, after the death of
Malcolm X, Baraka moved uptown to Harlem and founded the Black Arts
Repertory Theatre, a key part of the Black Arts Movement. Baraka has
since returned to Newark, continuing his works in the arts and as an
activist.
Selected Archives:
- Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, IN
- Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, CA