Podcasts about Charles Olson

durée : 00:45:00 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Albane Penaranda - "La nouvelle poésie anglaise" : entretien avec le poète anglais Eric Mottram. L'émission "Albatros" proposait, en 1983, une série de cinq entretiens avec des poètes anglais contemporains. L'émission "Albatros" proposait en 1983 une série de cinq émissions sur la nouvelle poésie anglaise. La première était consacrée au poète Eric Mottram, universitaire et poète, spécialiste de Faulkner et Burroughs : rencontre chez lui dans un quartier du sud de Londres. * Nous sommes des poètes anglais oui, nous écrivons en anglais, pas d'erreur possible. Mais nous n'écrivons pas à l'intérieur d'une définition étroite de ce qu'on pourrait appeler la culture standard anglaise, celle de l'establishment qui lie la poésie à une métrique très stricte, à rimes. [.] Il y a aussi dans ce pays une poésie autre. Il fait référence à Stéphane Mallarmé, au mouvement surréaliste, à Tristan Tzara, à Paul Ceylan, à Rainer Maria Rilke. Il revient sur l'importance et l'influence de la poésie américaine des années 1950 et 1960 : Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, etc. L'émission avec Eric Mottram (1924-1995) était suivie de quatre autres émissions avec des représentants de la nouvelle poésie anglaise : Tom Raworth, Bob Cobbing, Allen Fisher et Jeff Nuttall Production Pierre Joris Réalisation Jacques Taroni 1ère diffusion : 02/10/1983 Indexation web : Sandrine England, Documentation de Radio France Archive INA-Radio France - invités : Eric Mottram Poète anglais

I'm in Asheville NC this weekend and yet the Black Mountain College center is closed. None-the-less, let me tip my hat to one of the leaders of the circle that became known as the Black Mountain Poets with this short acapella rendition of one of his poems.  For more than 650 other combinations of various words (mostly poetry) and original music visit our archives at frankhudson.org

In the summer of 2022, research assistants Don Shipton and Teddie Brock took part in a roundtable discussion that explored the archival work of student researchers involved with the audio archives of Canadian poet, Fred Wah. Alongside his literary and academic work, Wah has had a longstanding practice of recording poetry readings, lectures, and conversations, documenting key moments in North American poetry.This sonic-archival meditation highlights the impact of recording technology on the trajectory of poetic circulation and composition, as it brings together the ‘many voices' that constituted Wah's listening and recording practices as a young poet. The first part of this episode will revisit a recording of Wah's conversation with Deanna Fong, co-director of the Fred Wah Digital Archive, in which Wah reflects on the significance of portable tape recording to literary community-building and the development of a poetic ‘voice.' The episode will also present a selection of archival clips documenting the poets whose recorded voices Wah encountered throughout the 1960s, including Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn, among others.Special thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for their production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books for hosting the “Mountain Many Voices” roundtable event.

In this episode Conference Director Matthew Biberman talks with noted Charles Olson scholar, Josh Hoeynck about the Olson Society and their slate of panels at the upcoming 50th LCLC conference to be held in February 2023. This episode is for fans of Olson as well as aficionados of contemporary American poetry and the black mountain school of poetry.

Want to see the video version of this podcast? Please visit Youtube here: https://buff.ly/3IF1qtA BUY THE BOOK - METHOD WRITING: The First Four Concepts https://amzn.to/39l0NX1 BUY THE BOOK - ADVANCED METHOD WRITING https://amzn.to/3tFJqrq Jack Grapes is an award-winning poet, playwright, actor, teacher, and the editor and publisher of ONTHEBUS, one of the top literary journals in the country. He has won several publishing grants and Fellowships in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. He's also received nine Artist-in- Residence Grants from the California Arts Council to teach writing in various schools throughout Los Angeles. He is the author of 13 books of poetry, including TREES, COFFEE, AND THE EYES OF DEER, and BREAKING DOWN THE SURFACE OF THE WORLD. A spoken-word CD, Pretend, was recently issued by DePaul University. He is also author of a chapbook of poems and paintings titled AND THE RUNNING FORM, NAKED, BLAKE. His most recent publication is LUCKY FINDS, a boxed set of 50 cards that extend and parody the dynamic artistic productions of high-modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. For more information on Jack's classes, please visit: https://jackgrapes.com/classesgeneral-info MORE VIDEOS WITH JACK GRAPES https://bit.ly/2SNWVbh CONNECT WITH JACK GRAPES https://jackgrapes.com GET THE BOOK OF POEMS ON AMAZON: All The Sad Angeles - Jack Grapes https://amzn.to/3qttqug (Affiliates) ►WE USE THIS CAMERA (B&H) – https://buff.ly/3rWqrra ►WE USE THIS EDITING PROGRAM (ADOBE) – https://goo.gl/56LnpM ►WE USE THIS SOUND RECORDER (AMAZON) – http://amzn.to/2tbFlM9 ►WRITERS, TRY FINAL DRAFT FREE FOR 30-DAYS! (FINAL DRAFT) - http://ow.ly/Gz4w30rDSKt BOOKS WE RECOMMEND https://buff.ly/3o0oE5o SUPPORT FILM COURAGE BY BECOMING A MEMBER https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs8o1mdWAfefJkdBg632_tg/join CONNECT WITH FILM COURAGE http://www.FilmCourage.com http://twitter.com/#!/FilmCourage https://www.facebook.com/filmcourage https://www.instagram.com/filmcourage http://filmcourage.tumblr.com http://pinterest.com/filmcourage SUBSCRIBE TO THE FILM COURAGE YOUTUBE CHANNEL http://bit.ly/18DPN37 LISTEN TO THE FILM COURAGE PODCAST https://soundcloud.com/filmcourage-com Stuff we use: LENS - Most people ask us what camera we use, no one ever asks about the lens which filmmakers always tell us is more important. This lens was a big investment for us and one we wish we could have made sooner. Started using this lens at the end of 2013 - http://amzn.to/2tbtmOq AUDIO Rode VideoMic Pro - The Rode mic helps us capture our backup audio. It also helps us sync up our audio in post http://amzn.to/2t1n2hx Audio Recorder - If we had to do it all over again, this is probably the first item we would have bought - http://amzn.to/2tbFlM9 LIGHTS - Although we like to use as much natural light as we can, we often enhance the lighting with this small portable light. We have two of them and they have saved us a number of times - http://amzn.to/2u5UnHv COMPUTER - Our favorite computer, we each have one and have used various models since 2010 - http://amzn.to/2t1M67Z EDITING - We upgraded our editing suite this year and we're glad we did! This has improved our workflow and the quality of our work. Having new software also helps when we have a problem, it's easy to search and find a solution - https://goo.gl/56LnpM Please subscribe to our Youtube channel. You can show additional support via our Youtube sponsor tab by going here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs8o1mdWAfefJkdBg632_tg/join or through Patreon here - http://www.patreon.com/filmcourage. Thank you for listening! We hope you've enjoyed this content. *These are affiliate links, by using them you can help support this channel. Amazon Associate and I earn from qualifying purchases.

Charles Olson is the President of OCI, based out of Omaha, NE. With nearly two decades of experience changing the industry, Charles brings a plethora of knowledge to the table. His passion for change has led him on a journey to create a culture of success and teamwork, adapting to an evolving industry.About OCI:People often ask what OCI stands for and the answer is: Insurance Made Simple. While, that may not have anything to do with the three letters of the name it does have everything to do with what the company stands for. OCI works with agents and brokers to provide information, assistance, and answers, always keeping up to date on the ever changing matrix of products and services that make up the insurance and employee benefit industries. With well over 100 years of combined expertise, OCI has seen the insurance marketplace change and evolve. Insurance can mean a lot of things, so whether it's health, life, income replacement, long term care or annuities; OCI has the best products to help you meet the needs of your clients. While product is important, it's the “Insurance Made Simple” philosophy that advisors, agencies, broker dealers & captive companies have come to realize makes OCI a disrupter in the industry. It's a new way of doing business that the industry has been waiting for.Drink of the day: Coors, Busch and WoodfordEpisode links:Ellerbrock-Norris: https://www.ellerbrock-norris.com/Ellerbrock-Norris Wealth Strategies: https://www.ellerbrock-norris-ws.com/OCI: https://www.ociservices.com/Elliot Bassett on LinkedInRyan Brott on LinkedInCharles Olson on LinkedInThis episode is sponsored by LAUNCH.In the world of insurance, independent agencies fight to survive. Brokers are forced to compete by blocking markets and bid for the lowest price. Worse yet, the industry is fragmented.Agencies find it difficult to collaborate across division on the same client. Millions of dollars in potential revenue are left on the table. And agency owners lie awake at night wondering how to scale.THAT'S WHERE LAUNCH COMES IN.Access the full-revenue potential in your existing book of business. See opportunities other agencies can't. Offer more value. Gain a competitive advantage in a commoditized market.Visit https://getlaunch.io/ to learn more.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of poets at UBC Vancouver began a little magazine: the TISH poetry newsletter. The TISH poets would later be called one of the most cohesive writing movements in Canadian literary history. In the summer of 2019, Craig Carpenter visited one of the former editors of TISH magazine —who is also his former professor of modern Canadian poetry. Based on interviews conducted during this visit and a subsequent visit in the winter of 2019, Craig has created an episode that explores his evolving relationship with his former professor and scenes from more than 50 years of literary history. Craig takes us through the relationships and the stories that formed a part of the TISH movement and the poet that Robert Hogg has become.Craig gives a heartfelt thank you to all those who took the time to offer feedback on early script drafts: Deanna Fong, Judith Burr, Mathieu Aubin, Marjorie Mitchell. Special thanks to Dr. Karis Shearer, all of his  colleagues at the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, and, of course, to Robert Hogg.SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.Episode Producer:Craig Carpenter is an MA student in the IGS Digital Arts & Humanities theme at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). A poet, journalist, sound designer, and former literary editor, Craig brings a diverse set of skills to the SpokenWeb project. His thesis will explore the podcast as public scholarship and engages archival recordings of second wave TISHITES Daphne Marlatt and Robert Hogg. With particular attention to Charles Olson's 1950 essay PROJECTIVE VERSE, he is investigating the intersection of proprioceptive poetics, the embodiment of voice in performance and sound studies. Musical score by Chelsea Edwardson: Chelsea Edwardson uses music as a tool to transform stories and concepts into the sonic realm, creating experiences through sound that heal and inspire. Her background in ethnomusicology brings the depth of tone and expression that transcends culture, taking the listener to worlds beyond a physical place and into a landscape of feelings. To learn more, visit https://www.chelseaedwardson.com.Featured Guest:Robert Hogg was born in Edmonton, AB, and grew up in Cariboo and Fraser Valley, BC. Hogg graduated from UBC with a BA in English and Creative Writing. During his time at UBC, Hogg became affiliated as a poet and co-editor a part of TISH. In 1964, Hogg hitchhiked to Toronto and visited Buffalo NY, where Charles Olson had been teaching at the time. At SUNY at Buffalo, he completed a Ph.D. on the works of Charles Olson. Shortly after, Hogg taught American and Canadian poetry at Carleton University for the following thirty-eight years. Hogg currently lives at his farm located in Ottawa.Sound Recordings Featured:Archival Audio from PennSound.comShort intro clips of: Warren Tallman, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering: all from PennSound digital archives.Recording of “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-WC/the_red_wheelbarrow_multiple.phpRecording of “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” by Robert Duncan: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Duncan/Berk-Conf-1965/Duncan-Robert_01_Often-I-am-Permitted_Berkeley-CA_1965.mp3Recording of “I Know a Man” by Robert Creely: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley/i_know_a_man.phpRecording of “Maximus From Dogtown I” by Charles Olson: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Olson/Boston-62/Olson-Charles_14_Maximus-Dogtown-2_Boston_06-62.mp3Archival Audio from AMP Lab's Soundbox CollectionRobert Hogg reads at Black Sheep Books, Vancouver, 1995: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/Archival Audio from KPFARobert Hogg reads at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965: http://www.kpfahistory.info/bpc/readings/Young%20poets.mp3

Picking up where we left off, in Part 1, discussing a walking that doesn't involve walking, in Walking 2 we continue our reading of Thoreau's essay, touching on the monomyth, John Brown, Charles Olson, Emerson, the art of walking backwards, Robin Hood and Johnny Cash. Gilgamesh as well as the Australopithecus come up as well as Thoreau's sense of a new literature " or we haven't seen nothing yet.

SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of ‘curated close listening' and conversation.  You can find more episodes from SoundBox Signals at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca. Resources:The SoundBox Collection: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/Amy Thiessen's Honours Project / Digital Exhibition on Sharon Thesen's "The Fire": sharonthesenthefire.omeka.netThe Real Vancouver Writers' Series: https://realvancouver.org/Episode 7 of the SpokenWeb Podcast produced by Hannah McGregor: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/Secret Feminist Agenda podcast: https://secretfeministagenda.com/category/podcast/   Christine Mitchell's "Can You Hear Me?":  https://amodern.net/article/can-you-hear-me/Due to COVID-19, both the Tech Talk Series and the Inaugural Sharon Thesen Lecture by John Lent mentioned at the end of this episode were unfortunately cancelled or postponed. Producers and Guests:Nour Sallam is an Honours English and Political Science major with a passion for literature and art. She is interested in journalism, digital reporting, and the impacts that language and discourse have on perceptions of the world. Nour is also the Copy Editor of The Phoenix News. She is excited to practice attentive listening and explore literary sound through her work as the SpokenWeb UBCO Podcast Producer.Karis Shearer, Director of the AMP Lab and the SoundBox Collection, is an associate professor at UBC's Okanagan campus in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. She sits on the SpokenWeb Governing Board and is the lead UBCO Researcher for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant, contributing expertise in the areas of Canadian poetry, performance, pedagogy, and media culture.Amy Thiessen is an Honours English student at UBCO where she is working on a digital edition of Sharon Thesen's poem "The Fire." She is a writer, an RA and project manager for the UBCO SpokenWeb project and an aspiring teacher.Emily Murphy is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at UBCO's Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. She is also Assistant Director of UBCO's AMP Lab. She researches technology and cultural memory. Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor in Publishing at SFU where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and the history of middlebrow periodicals. She  also hosts a number of podcasts including Secret Feminist Agenda and the SpokenWeb Podcast.  

In which the wonderful and somewhat mysterious poet Albert Glover reads from his forthcoming book, Gone as Well. Albert's statement about himself: “The poet Charles Olson, my best teacher and mentor, has been a major influence. I have also been privileged to study with Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Basil Bunting, Hugh Kenner, and Jeremy Prynne....

Picking up where we left off, in Part 1, discussing a walking that doesn’t involve walking, in “Walking 2” we continue our reading of Thoreau’s essay, touching on the monomyth, John Brown, Charles Olson, Emerson, the art of walking backwards, Robin Hood and Johnny Cash. Gilgamesh as well as the Australopithecus come up as well as Thoreau’s sense of a “new literature” — or we haven’t seen nothing yet.

Returning guest Charles Olson joins Jeremiah and Chris in the newest episode of the "Shh, The Movie Is Starting" podcast to watch the 1995 cult classic "Hackers" starring Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller. Just how badly dated is this psuedo-cyberpunk, techno-filled teenage thriller in this day and age? Listen to find out!

The third of a four part series on Vincent Ferrini at the Maud-Olson Library (January 31st)

A look at Charles Olson through the works of Kate Colby, Amanda Cook and Kate Tarlow Morgan

Andrew Hoyem is the creative spirit of the Arion Press. He's a published poet and exhibited artist who occasionally includes his own writings and drawings in Arion books. The concepts for all Arion publications originate with Hoyem, who chooses literary texts, commissions new work from writers and artists he admires, and designs the books, including their bindings and typography. In the Press's livre d'artiste series, he has worked closely with distinguished artists, many of whom come to the Press in San Francisco to work with him on projects. We met at his offices in The Pracidio in San Francisco to talk about, among other things, Dave Hazelwood's Auerhahn Press, the Grabhorn Press, the importance of text pages, Bruce Rogers, Random House's Leaves of Grass (1931), Charles Olson, skunks, The Legion of Honor Museum, Livres d'artistes, artist Fred Martin, solving problems, Moby Dick (1979), ghost stories, perseverance, weekly tours, M&H Type, connecting with interesting people, Hart Crane's The Bridge (2017) and getting the basics right. 

In his manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ (1950) the poet Charles Olson proposed a new view of poetic structure based on the...

Special guest Charles Olson joins Jeremiah and Chris for the newest episode of the Shh, The Movie Is Starting podcast! The movie - the John Hughes 1985 screwball comedy "Weird Science". Yes, the one where a couple of lonely nerds create Kelly Le Brock with their computer. It's not creepy. Not at all. *wink

Mit Bernt Hahn, Klaus Ramm / BR 2016 / Länge: 71'40 // Der Büchnerpreisträger Helmut Heißenbüttel war eine der prägenden Persönlichkeiten der deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur, auch zur Erneuerung des Hörspiels hat er mit seinem akustischen Werk und seinen programmatischen Essays entscheidende Impulse gegeben. Zwanzig Jahre nach seinem Tod porträtiert ihn Klaus Ramm aus einer ganz anderen Perspektive: Heißenbüttel war zugleich ein leidenschaftlicher Leser und unorthodoxer Literaturkritiker, der in dem eher bieder-konventionell orientierten literarischen Klima der fünfziger und sechziger Jahre den Blick öffnete auf Ungewohntes, Unabgesichertes und unbekannt Gebliebenes: auf die europäische und amerikanische Moderne ebenso wie auf die durch die Nazizeit verschütteten Traditionen und die avancierten Neuansätze der deutschen Literatur. Seine Rezensionen sind - wie seine Hörspiele - überzeugende Plädoyers für eine andere, offenere, risikoreichere Wahrnehmung der Welt durch Sprache und durch Literatur. Bernt Hahn liest ausgewählte Kritiken zu Uwe Johnson, Alexander Kluge, Franz Mon, Charles Olson, Andy Warhol und anderen aus dem Band Zur Lockerung der Perspektive.

Jed Birmingham, Writer-in-Residence at the GWC and Burroughs scholar gets introduced by Greg Gibson last night.  He spent good time at the Maud/Olson Library which helped his thinking about the concept of an archive.    

Don Byrds reads on September 21.    

Ann McArdle and Amanda Cook

Join Michael Boughn in a conversation of his new essay on Charles Olson, Empire and the thinking of America.

PennSound, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, is an excellent audio archive, with pages dedicated to BMC rector and instructor Charles Olson and BMC alumnus and poet Robert Creeley. Click here for the studio recording at Black Mountain College of Olson reading from Maximus, and here for his […] The post Sounds of BMC appeared first on Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, writer, critic, translator, archivist, and much more. As a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, he is known as much for his scholarship as for his generosity: with his time, with his attention to student's work, and with his talents as editor and writer. Ammiel recently visited my apartment for a conversation about his youth in Boston growing up around poet and writer Charles Olson, his activism during the Vietnam years, and the path that led him to become a scholar of the Middle East. 

“Form is an Extension of Content,” wrote Charles Olson.  What is a writer’s relationship to form? Three accomplished, innovative and genre-crossing writers explore the power and influence of structure, starting with the sentence, in revealing and shaping their material. *Click here to see photos from the program!

AMIRI BARAKACLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO SHOWPoet, writer, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Baraka was well known for his strident social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond with objectivity to his works. Throughout most of his career his method in poetry, drama, fiction, and essays was confrontational, calculated to shock and awaken audiences to the political concerns of black Americans. For decades, Baraka was one of the most prominent voices in the world of American literature.Baraka’s own political stance changed several times, thus dividing his oeuvre into periods: as a member of the avant-garde during the 1950s, Baraka—writing as Leroi Jones—was associated with Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; in the ‘60s, he moved to Harlem and became a Black Nationalist; in the ‘70s, he was involved in third-world liberation movements and identified as a Marxist. More recently, Baraka was accused of anti-Semitism for his poem “Somebody Blew up America,” written in response to the September 11 attacks.Baraka incited controversy throughout his career. He was praised for speaking out against oppression as well as accused of fostering hate. Critical opinion has been sharply divided between those who agree, with Dissent contributor Stanley Kaufman, that Baraka’s race and political moment have created his celebrity, and those who feel that Baraka stands among the most important writers of the twentieth century. In the American Book Review, Arnold Rampersad counted Baraka with Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison “as one of the eight figures . . . who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture.”Baraka did not always identify with radical politics, nor did his writing always court controversy. During the 1950s Baraka lived in Greenwich Village, befriending Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The white avant-garde—primarily Ginsberg, O’Hara, and leader of the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson—and Baraka believed in poetry as a process of discovery rather than an exercise in fulfilling traditional expectations. Baraka, like the projectivist poets, believed that a poem’s form should follow the shape determined by the poet’s own breath and intensity of feeling. In 1958 Baraka founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press, important forums for new verse. He was married to his co-editor, Hettie Cohen, from 1960 to 1965. His first play, A Good Girl Is Hard to Find, was produced at Sterington House in Montclair, New Jersey, that same year. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Baraka’s first published collection of poems appeared in 1961. M.L. Rosenthal wrote in The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II that these poems show Baraka’s “natural gift for quick, vivid imagery and spontaneous humor.” Rosenthal also praised the “sardonic or sensuous or slangily knowledgeable passages” that fill the early poems. While the cadence of blues and many allusions to black culture are found in the poems, the subject of blackness does not predominate. Throughout, rather, the poet shows his integrated, Bohemian social roots. The book’s last line is “You are / as any other sad man here / american.”With the rise of the civil rights movement Baraka’s works took on a more militant tone. His trip to Cuba in 1959 marked an important turning point in his life. His view of his role as a writer, the purpose of art, and the degree to which ethnic awareness deserved to be his subject changed dramatically. In Cuba he met writers and artists from third world countries whose political concerns included the fight against poverty, famine, and oppressive governments. In Home: Social Essays (1966), Baraka explains how he tried to defend himself against their accusations of self-indulgence, and was further challenged by Jaime Shelley, a Mexican poet, who said, “‘In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we’ve got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of.’” Soon Baraka began to identify with third world writers and to write poems and plays with strong political messages.Dutchman, a play of entrapment in which a white woman and a middle-class black man both express their murderous hatred on a subway, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1964. While other dramatists of the time were wedded to naturalism, Baraka used symbolism and other experimental techniques to enhance the play’s emotional impact. The play established Baraka’s reputation as a playwright and has been often anthologized and performed. It won the Village Voice Obie Award in 1964 and was later made into a film. The plays and poems following Dutchman expressed Baraka’s increasing disappointment with white America and his growing need to separate from it. Critics observed that as Baraka’s poems became more politically intense, they left behind some of the flawless technique of the earlier poems. Richard Howard wrote of The Dead Lecturer (1964) in the Nation: “These are the agonized poems of a man writing to save his skin, or at least to settle in it, and so urgent is their purpose that not one of them can trouble to be perfect.”To make a clean break with the Beat influence, Baraka turned to writing fiction in the mid-1960s, penning The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), a novel, and Tales (1967), a collection of short stories. The stories are “‘fugitive narratives’ that describe the harried flight of an intensely self-conscious Afro-American artist/intellectual from neo-slavery of blinding, neutralizing whiteness, where the area of struggle is basically within the mind,” Robert Elliot Fox wrote in Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany.The role of violent action in achieving political change is more prominent in these stories, as is the role of music in black life.In addition to his poems, novels and politically-charged essays, Baraka is a noted writer of music criticism. His classic history Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) traces black music from slavery to contemporary jazz. Finding indigenous black art forms was important to Baraka in the ‘60s, as he was searching for a more authentic voice for his own poetry. Baraka became known as an articulate jazz critic and a perceptive observer of social change. As Clyde Taylor stated in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, “The connection he nailed down between the many faces of black music, the sociological sets that nurtured them, and their symbolic evolutions through socio-economic changes, in Blues People, is his most durable conception, as well as probably the one most indispensable thing said about black music.” Baraka also published the important studies Black Music (1968) and The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987). Lloyd W. Brown commented in Amiri Baraka that Baraka’s essays on music are flawless: “As historian, musicological analyst, or as a journalist covering a particular performance Baraka always commands attention because of his obvious knowledge of the subject and because of a style that is engaging and persuasive even when the sentiments are questionable and controversial.”After Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was killed in 1965, Baraka moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The Black Arts Movement helped develop a new aesthetic for black art and Baraka was its primary theorist. Black American artists should follow “black,” not “white” standards of beauty and value, he maintained, and should stop looking to white culture for validation. The black artist’s role, he wrote in Home: Social Essays (1966), is to “aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.” Foremost in this endeavor was the imperative to portray society and its ills faithfully so that the portrayal would move people to take necessary corrective action. He married his second wife, Amina, in 1967. In that same year, Baraka published the poetry collection Black Magic,which chronicles his separation from white culture and values while displaying his mastery of poetic technique. There was no doubt that Baraka’s political concerns superseded his just claims to literary excellence, and critics struggled to respond to the political content of the works. Some felt the best art must be apolitical and dismissed Baraka’s newer work as “a loss to literature.” Kenneth Rexroth wrote inWith Eye and Ear that Baraka “has succumbed to the temptation to become a professional Race Man of the most irresponsible sort. . . . His loss to literature is more serious than any literary casualty of the Second War.” In 1966 Bakara moved back to Newark, New Jersey, and a year later changed his name to the Bantuized Muslim appellation Imamu (“spiritual leader,” later dropped) Ameer (later Amiri, “prince”) Baraka (“blessing”).By the early 1970s Baraka was recognized as an influential African-American writer. Randall noted in Black World that younger black poets Nikki Giovanni and Don L. Lee (later Haki R. Madhubuti) were “learning from LeRoi Jones, a man versed in German philosophy, conscious of literary tradition . . . who uses the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy in his System of Dante’s Hell and the punctuation, spelling and line divisions of sophisticated contemporary poets.” More importantly, Arnold Rampersad wrote in the American Book Review, “More than any other black poet . . . he taught younger black poets of the generation past how to respond poetically to their lived experience, rather than to depend as artists on embalmed reputations and outmoded rhetorical strategies derived from a culture often substantially different from their own.”After coming to see Black Nationalism as a destructive form of racism, Baraka denounced it in 1974 and became a third world socialist. He produced a number of Marxist poetry collections and plays in the 1970s that reflected his newly adopted political goals. Critics contended that works like the essays collected in Daggers and Javelins (1984) lack the emotional power of the works from his Black Nationalist period. However, Joe Weixlmann, in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, argued against the tendency to categorize the radical Baraka instead of analyze him: “At the very least, dismissing someone with a label does not make for very satisfactory scholarship. Initially, Baraka’s reputation as a writer and thinker derived from a recognition of the talents with which he is so obviously endowed. The subsequent assaults on that reputation have, too frequently, derived from concerns which should be extrinsic to informed criticism.”In more recent years, recognition of Baraka’s impact on late 20th century American culture has resulted in the publication of several anthologies of his literary oeuvre.The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1999) presents a thorough overview of the writer’s development, covering the period from 1957 to 1983. The volume presents Baraka’s work from four different periods and emphasizes lesser-known works rather than the author’s most famous writings. Transbluency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995), published in 1995, was hailed by Daniel L. Guillory in Library Journal as “critically important.” And Donna Seaman, writing inBooklist, commended the “lyric boldness of this passionate collection.” Kamau Brathwaite described Baraka’s 2004 collection, Somebody Blew up America & Other Poems, as “one more mark in modern Black radical and revolutionary cultural reconstruction.” The book contains Baraka’s controversial poem of the same name, which he wrote as New Jersey’s poet laureate. After the poem’s publication, public outcry became so great that the governor of New Jersey took action to abolish the position. Baraka sued, though the United States Court of Appeals eventually ruled that state officials were immune from such charges.Baraka’s legacy as a major poet of the second half of the 20th century remains matched by his importance as a cultural and political leader. His influence on younger writers has been significant and widespread, and as a leader of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s Baraka did much to define and support black literature’s mission into the next century. His experimental fiction of the 1960s is considered some of the most significant African-American fiction since that of Jean Toomer. Writers from other ethnic groups have credited Baraka with opening “tightly guarded doors” in the white publishing establishment, noted Maurice Kenney in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, who added: “We’d all still be waiting the invitation from the New Yorker without him. He taught us how to claim it and take it.”Baraka was recognized for his work through a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York. He was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Amiri Baraka crossed over on January 9,  2014To visit Amiri Baraka's website CLICK HERE

In American Smoke (Hamish Hamilton), the third part of a loose trilogy of topographical ruminations that began with Hackney: That Rose-red Empire and Ghost Milk, Iain Sinclair follows the traces of the writers of the American Beat generation – Kerouac, Burroughs, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Malcolm Lowry and more – in a journey that takes in the Old West, Mexico, volcanoes, murder, and a good deal else besides. He was at the shop to talk about the book with writer, editor and curator Gareth Evans. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Edward Hirsch examines the complex relationships between American poets and painters.

Just in Time: Poems 1984-1994 (New Directions) On the occasion of a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, Robert Creeley discusses the many influences on his singular poetry: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky and Robert Duncan. In addition, he talks about the love of family and friends that has united his influences and his past into a "company."