Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1961-1995) - Softcover

Baraka, Imamu Amiri

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568860145 ISBN 13: 9781568860145

Publisher: Marsilio Pub, 1995

Synopsis

The first collection of selected poetry from perhaps the preeminent African American literary figure of our time. Baraka almost single-handedly changed both the nature and the form of post-World War II African-American literature, and this volume is an important contribution to Modernist literature.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

The poems selected here span from Baraka's first collection, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), to the long poem Wise, Why's, Y'z, published earlier this year. The best work here has been culled from his second and third books, The Dead Lecturer (1964) and Black Magic (1969). Despite coming out of distinct phases in Baraka's life (the former when he was a book Beat, by the latter he'd become black nationalist), these works combine the personal and political in highly charged ways. When Baraka writes of "the roaring harmonies of need" or of "stumbling over our souls in the dark, for the sake of unnatural advantage," he succeeds as both an activist and a poet. However, as revolutionary politics increasingly intrude, Baraka seems largely to abandon the craft of poetry for the the broader strokes of diatribe and rant ("dont tell me shit about the tradition of slavemasters/ & henry james... "). However disappointing much of this later work may be, it is readily argued that Baraka's influential work prefigured rap and the current vogue of spoken-word performances and poetry slams. This collection provides a useful overview of his work.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

As the editor of this critically important collection explains in his foreword, the title Transbluesency derives from a 1946 Duke Ellington composition. The entire book resonates with jazz rhythms and homages to Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane. This use of jazz as inspiration and artistic model is just one of many signs that Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) came of age during the Beat movement and remains perhaps its truest practitioner. His poems are aggressive challenges to the status-quo, relying on daring images, short chant-like lines, neologisms, slang, blues lyrics, and scat-singing: "BaBa Ree Bopp/Ooo Shoobie/Doobie." Transbluesency is a chronicle of nearly 40 years of poetic output, from "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" (1961) to "Wise, Why's, Y's" (1995). In an era when celebrated African American poets like Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa are writing highly literary verse, Baraka raucously celebrates "negritude." Highly recommended.?Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Marsilio Pub
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1568860145
• ISBN 13: 9781568860145
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Vangelisti Paul