Podcast appearances and mentions of Kenneth Rexroth

Welcome the final day of our Festive Calendar, a special series of The Reader Podcast. Every day this December we shared with you a seasonal poem or a short extract from a novel or story, read by one of our staff or volunteer Reader Leaders. Today's reading is the poem 'Winter Dawn' by Tu Fu, translated from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth. It's read by Katie Clark, who works at The Reader. Support our Christmas Appeal and make a difference to the lives of people living with dementia. Please give what you can at www.thereader.org.uk   Production by Chris Lynn. Music by Chris Lynn & Frank Johnson  

An episode from 8/30/24: Tonight, I read four poems by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). A few years ago, when I began digging through anthologies of American poetry, Rexroth stood out immediately among the usual names from the twentieth century. I can't think of many American poets who have written so beautifully about nature, about being a parent, or about love: Halley's Comet (1956) When We with Sappho (1944) The Wheel Revolves (1965) Hapax (1974) They can all be found in The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the Grid, To the House of the Sun, The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/humanvoiceswakeus/support

Howdy! In this episode of Getting Stoned I read Mind War by William S. Burroughs, and the poems Blood on a Dead World, Quietly, and The Bad Old Days by Kenneth Rexroth. Thanks for listening! Peace & Love, Stone --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stonepetoskey/message

Read by Terry Casburn Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!On March 24, 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York. After spending his early childhood in France, he received his BA from the University of North Carolina, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the Sorbonne. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007); Americus, Book I (New Directions, 2004); A Far Rockaway of the Heart (New Directions, 1997); and A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958). He has translated the works of a number of poets, including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to poetry, he is also the author of more than eight plays and three novels, including Little Boy: A Novel (Doubleday, 2019), Love in the Days of Rage (Overlook, 1988), and Her (New Directions, 1966).In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin opened the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, California, helping to support their magazine, City Lights. Two years later, they launched City Lights Publishers, a book-publishing venture, which helped start the careers of many alternative local and international poets. In 1956, Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg's book Howl and Other Poems, which resulted in his being arrested by the San Francisco Police for publishing “obscene work” and a subsequent trial that gained international attention. At the end, the judge concluded that “Howl” had “some redeeming social importance” and “was not obscene”; Ferlinghetti prevailed. City Lights became known as the heart of the Beat movement, which also included the writers Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac.In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in Ferlinghetti's honor, and in 1998, he was named the first poet laureate of San Francisco. He is the recipient of many international awards and honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, and the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award, presented for “outstanding service to the American literary community,” among others. In 2003, he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007, he was named Commandeur of the French Order of Arts and Letters. He died on February 22, 2021, in San Francisco, California.  From https://poets.org/poet/lawrence-ferlinghetti. For more information about Lawrence Ferlinghetti:“I Am Waiting”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42869/i-am-waiting-56d22183d718aA Coney Island of the Mind: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/a-coney-island-of-the-mind1/“Lawrence Ferlinghetti”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lawrence-ferlinghetti“Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 101”: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/obituaries/lawrence-ferlinghetti-dead.html“Thank You, Lawrence Ferlinghetti”: https://lithub.com/thank-you-lawrence-ferlinghetti/

Quiet washes over --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/daisy726/support

Ken Knabb is famed for his Bureau of Public Secrets (bopsecrets.org), his writings on the Situationist movement and Kenneth Rexroth. He's had a long time association with the Berkeley Zen Center.

No one more beautiful. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/daisy726/support

Sponsored by Yerba Buena Community Benefit District Co-presented by Healdsburg Jazz Festival and Poets & Writers In the great tradition of San Francisco jazz and spoken-word basement readings first forged by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, and Bob Kaufman, Litquake is proud to bring back this festival favorite, showcasing world-class poets accompanied by improvised music created on the spot. With Genny Lim, devorah major, Paul S. Flores, and Brontez Purnell. Music by the Marcus Shelby Trio.

Howdy! In today's episode of Getting Stoned I read the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth and do an original song, Sweet Music Man. Thank you so much for being here, I am most grateful that you stopped by to give a listen! Peace & Love, Stone --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/stonepetoskey/message

It's the birthday Kenneth Rexroth (1905). He published more than 50 books of poetry and once said, "Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust."

22. prosince 1905 se narodil Kenneth Rexroth - americký básník, překladatel, kritik a jazzový hudebník. Básně jsou z výboru Spirály času, vydala Mladá fronta v roce 1989. Přeložil Antonín Přidal. Podcast "Báseň na každý den" poslouchejte na Anchor, Spotify, Apple, Google, YouRadio, České Podcasty nebo Audiolibrix. Domovská stránka podcastu je na https://www.poetickyklub.cz. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/basennakazdyden/message

Good News: A reef which was destroyed by dynamite fishing (!) has been regrown and reseeded back to health and is now attracting the rest of the marine ecosystem, Link HERE. The Good Word: A wondrous poem from the brilliant Kenneth Rexroth. Good To Know: Some amazing facts about the Christmas tree industry in the […]

Freesia McKee shares her poetry and discusses how she makes a living as a poet and writer. In the second part of the show host Charlie Rossiter reviews DeWitt Clinton's new book "By a Lake Near a Moon" which was inspired by Kenneth Rexroth's translations of ancient Chinese poetry. SUBMIT TO THE OPEN MIC OF THE AIR! www.poetryspokenhere.com/open-mic-of-the-air Visit our website: www.poetryspokenhere.com Like us on facebook: facebook.com/PoetrySpokenHere Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/poseyspokenhere (@poseyspokenhere) Send us an e-mail: poetryspokenhere@gmail.com

A great practitioner, publisher and defender of poetry was Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He passed away just shy of his 102nd birthday earlier this year. Born in Yonkers, New York in 1919, his education was paused for World War II and Atlantic and Pacific tours in the U.S. Navy. He witnessed firsthand the ruins of Nagasaki after the atomic bombing in 1945. He became a committed voice for peace and social justice. Ferlinghetti co-founded the country's first all-paperback bookstore, City Lights Books in San Francisco in 1955. Bay area poets Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth, then Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg appeared under the City Lights imprint. The small press got national attention when Ferlinghetti and his partner were arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Ginsberg's poem Howl. The People of the State of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti proved an important victory for freedom of expression over censorship laws. Ferlinghetti had anarchist leanings. He remained politically committed through his art, and to liberation movements in Latin America especially.

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God” (1 Jn. 4). We all know regret. It comes over us as we remember a quarrel with a person we love, or recall the pain we felt when a cherished relationship was broken. The poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) married Andrée Schafer a brilliant painter who suffered from epilepsy. In the spring of 1927 the two of them hitchhiked from Seattle down the West Coast sleeping under bridges along the way.[i] When they arrived in San Francisco the two camped on Mount Tamalpais and immediately knew that this is the place where they wanted to stay. Andrée painted. Kenneth wrote and participated in the 1934 waterfront strike. By the end of the 1930’s they were quarreling, having affairs and then separated. Andrée’s seizures grew more severe and she died in 1940. Elsa Gidlow a mutual friend scattered her ashes in Steep Ravine, on the way to Stinson Beach. Kenneth Rexroth wrote several poems about Andrée and the watersheds of Mount Tamalpais. Let me read one: “Now once more gray mottled buckeye branches / Explode their emerald stars, / And alders smoulder in a rosy smoke / Of innumerable buds. / I know that spring again is splendid / As ever, the hidden thrush / As sweetly tongued, the sun as vital - / But these are the forest trails that we walked together, / These paths, ten years together. / We thought the years would last forever, /” “They are all gone now, the days / We thought would not come for us are here . / Bright trout poised in the current - / The racoon’s track at the water’s edge - / A bittern booming in the distance - / Your ashes scattered on this mountain - / Moving seaward on this stream.”[ii] In a sense every marriage is an island distant to us. And we do not really know what happened to the Rexroths. But this feeling of beauty, loss and distance, and perhaps regret, lies close to the Gospel of John and the end of Jesus’ life. My sermon today has three parts: the vine, the branches and the fruit. [i] Tom Killion, “Poetic Histories. The Sleeping Lady: Invention and Appropriation,” Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints (Berkeley, California: Heydey Press, 2009) 94ff. [ii] Rexroth wrote this poem at about the age of 36. Kenneth Rexroth, “Andrée Rexroth,” The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2003) 220.

David Kipen has a conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson about his work and the work of poet Kenneth Rexroth. His new book is Ministry for the Future, a science fiction novel set in the near future, about coping with the effects of climate change in the next 30 years.

It's the birthday of the poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), who mentored the Beat poets but became disillusioned as they turned into “hipsters.”

No me molestan los humanos. Ya me acostumbré bastante en estos veinticinco años. No me molesta si se sientan al lado mío en el transporte público, o comer en los mismos restaurantes, mientras no sea en la misma mesa. Sin embargo, no me parece bien que una mujer que yo respete baile con uno de ellos. Ya traté de invitarlos a casa, aunque sin éxito. No tendría por qué aceptar que mi hermana se casara con uno. Incluso si lo amase, imagínense los hijos. Su arte es interesante pero sin dudas bárbaro. Estoy seguro de que, si pudieran, nos matarían a todos mientras dormimos. Y reconózcanme que huelen mal.

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

Proust's Madeleine by Kenneth Rexroth

In this episode: A hash smuggler's tales of a Syrian prison, 8th Century Chinese Poetry, and Life advice from a sentient tree-being. “Crater Lake Cantata” by Lipbone Redding - performed by Beyond The See (Sam Shin - Cello, Anela Lauren - Harp, Lipbone Redding - Guitar)“Syria” - Harrison“Far Up The River ” by Tu Fu (8th Century, Chinese translated by Kenneth Rexroth) - read by Anita Lorraine Moore“Will We Remember?” - Anita Lorraine Moore“Tree Hugger” - Lipbone ReddingAir Traffic Control log tapes“Hashish” - Harrison“Night In The House By The River” - by Tu Fu (8th Century, Chinese translated by Kenneth Rexroth)- read by Anita Lorraine Moore, “Officer’s Family” - Harrison“Clear Evening After Rain” by Tu Fu (8th Century, Chinese translated by Kenneth Rexroth) - read by Anita Lorraine Moore“Crater Lake Cantata” by Lipbone Redding - performed by Beyond The See (Sam Shin - Cello, Anela Lauren - Harp, Lipbone Redding - Guitar)All music by Lipbone Redding © CitizenOneMusic, 2020 All Rights ReservedSupport the show (http://www.paypal.me/lipboneredding)

Ahora, en un minuto, nos diremos adiós: voy a arrancar el auto y te veré cruzar el bulevar por el retrovisor. A lo mejor alcances a distinguir mi nuca mientras desaparece en pleno tráfico. Y luego nunca más volveremos a vernos. Esto va a suceder de aquí a un minuto.

The Beats writers were a force in American culture for decades. But are they still relevant today? Are they great writers or just curious cultural figures? Does anyone under 40 still care about them? We talk Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, along with other figures like Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth and few words on Celine, Herbert Hunke and Neil Cassidy.

Includes a Ben Myers poem & Kenneth Rexroth

Nell'ottobre del '58 Waldron è in studio per Reflections, secondo album - interamente consacrato a composizioni di Monk - di Steve Lacy, specialista del sax soprano; Waldron e Lacy si sono conosciuti qualche tempo prima alle serate di musica e poesia del Five Spot, in cui intervengono poeti come Allen Ginsberg e Kenneth Rexroth: alla base dell'intesa fra il pianista e il sassofonista c'è propro il loro comune amore per Monk. Nel febbraio del '59 Waldron partecipa all'incisione di uno dei brani che entreranno nell'album di Mingus Blues & Roots. Sempre nel febbraio del '59 Waldron incide nuovamente in trio: dalla seduta nasce l'album Left Alone, che prende il titolo dal brano - in cui al trio si aggiunge Jackie McLean al sax alto - cofirmato da Waldron e da Billie Holiday: dei brani di cui la cantante scrisse le parole Left Alone è tra quelli che non ebbe occasione di incidere.

Nell'ottobre del '58 Waldron è in studio per Reflections, secondo album - interamente consacrato a composizioni di Monk - di Steve Lacy, specialista del sax soprano; Waldron e Lacy si sono conosciuti qualche tempo prima alle serate di musica e poesia del Five Spot, in cui intervengono poeti come Allen Ginsberg e Kenneth Rexroth: alla base dell'intesa fra il pianista e il sassofonista c'è propro il loro comune amore per Monk. Nel febbraio del '59 Waldron partecipa all'incisione di uno dei brani che entreranno nell'album di Mingus Blues & Roots. Sempre nel febbraio del '59 Waldron incide nuovamente in trio: dalla seduta nasce l'album Left Alone, che prende il titolo dal brano - in cui al trio si aggiunge Jackie McLean al sax alto - cofirmato da Waldron e da Billie Holiday: dei brani di cui la cantante scrisse le parole Left Alone è tra quelli che non ebbe occasione di incidere.

Nell'ottobre del '58 Waldron è in studio per Reflections, secondo album - interamente consacrato a composizioni di Monk - di Steve Lacy, specialista del sax soprano; Waldron e Lacy si sono conosciuti qualche tempo prima alle serate di musica e poesia del Five Spot, in cui intervengono poeti come Allen Ginsberg e Kenneth Rexroth: alla base dell'intesa fra il pianista e il sassofonista c'è propro il loro comune amore per Monk. Nel febbraio del '59 Waldron partecipa all'incisione di uno dei brani che entreranno nell'album di Mingus Blues & Roots. Sempre nel febbraio del '59 Waldron incide nuovamente in trio: dalla seduta nasce l'album Left Alone, che prende il titolo dal brano - in cui al trio si aggiunge Jackie McLean al sax alto - cofirmato da Waldron e da Billie Holiday: dei brani di cui la cantante scrisse le parole Left Alone è tra quelli che non ebbe occasione di incidere.

Host Charlie Rossiter explores the idea of the perfect poem with examples from Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth. He also looks back on the previous 53 episodes of Poetry Spoken Here. Snyder's Poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47754/i-went-into-the-maverick-bar Rexroth's Poem: https://onceadaypoetry.wordpress.com/2015/12/06/no-word-by-kenneth-rexroth/ Subscribe to Poetry Spoken Here on iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/poetr…d1030829938?mt=2 Visit our website: poetryspokenhere.com Like us on facebook: facebook.com/PoetrySpokenHere Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/poseyspokenhere (@poseyspokenhere) Send us an e-mail: poetryspokenhere@gmail.com

Kenneth Rexroth’s poetry, literary criticism, and political activism inspired a generation and solidified his place in the American literary canon. And while much has been written about his years in San Francisco laying the groundwork for a literary renaissance in that city that grew into the larger Beat movement, little has been written about his time in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio – a period when the budding poet rubbed elbows with anarchists, burlesque dancers, criminals, and the artistic and literary elite of the Midwest and the world. Read the show notes here. 

Travelers in Erewhon by Kenneth Rexroth read by Jim Colquhoun. Travelers in Erewhon was first published in The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. New Directions 1966. Writing from Jim Colquhoun can be found at https://blackdrop.wordpress.com

In the great tradition of jazz and spoken-word basement readings in North Beach first forged by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, and Bob Kaufman, hear this contemporary update co-presented by City Lights Books. With poets Chinaka Hodge, devorah major, and RyanNicole. Music by Afro-futurist jazz trio Broun Fellinis. Recorded live at Doc's Lab, formerly The Purple Onion, in San Francisco. https://www.facebook.com/litquake  https://twitter.com/Litquake

Kenneth Rexroth's erotic poem "Floating" discussed by the Talk About Poetry poets—Bob Herz, Phil Memmer, and Stephen Kuusisto.

On Monday's Access Utah we'll not only talk about key writers of the Beat Generation--such as Allen Ginsburg, Philip Whalen, and Kenneth Rexroth, but we'll hear their voices as well. John Suiter, author of “Poets on the Peaks,” a book about Beat poets and their experiences as fire lookouts in the Northwest during the 1950s, discovered some historic photographs and audio tapes during his research.

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

Recordings of poet Kenneth Rexroth, with an introduction to his life and work. Recorded October 25, 1965, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

A Wild Region (Moon Tide Press) and Follow Me Down (Tebot Bach) by Buckley; Now and Then: Collected Poems of Lee Mallory (Moon Tide Press) Join us as two poets published by the local Moon Tide Press read from their recent work! Kate Buckley, a ninth-generation Kentuckian, will earn her MFA from Spalding University in May 2010. She has been widely published and anthologized, her poems most recently appearing in Bellingham Review, North American Review and Shenandoah. She is the author of A Wild Region (Moon Tide Press, 2008) and Follow Me Down (Tebot Bach, 2009). Her recent honors and awards include the Gabehart Prize for Imaginative Writing and the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Prize, selected by Molly Peacock. Two poems from Kate's second book are currently under consideration for the Pushcart Prize. A professor at Santa Ana College, Lee Mallory co-produces the Factory Readings in Santa Ana and Poetry at Alta in Newport Beach, where he has lived most of his life. He was an acquaintance of the late Charles Bukowski and Kenneth Rexroth, and shared time with poet and pop novelist Richard Brautigan. In addition to his eight volumes of poetry and performance features at almost 100 poetry events, Lee has written over 125 poems which have appeared in such magazines as Konglomerati, Mojo Navigator(e), Invisible City, Wisconsin Review, Beyond Baroque and The Smith. He has also been covered frequently in newspapers and is a marathon runner. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS JUNE 5, 2010.