This week on From the Vault we pay tribute to one of the great voices of our time, poet Amiri Baraka, who died on Thursday, January 9, 2014 at the age of 79. The Pacifica Radio Archives holds a unique collection of Amiri Baraka recordings, selections of which will be presented in this episode.
We begin with a recording from 1964 at an event called New Negro Poets USA, in which Baraka, then known as Leroi Jones, references Jomo Kenyatts, the first Prime Minister of Kenya. At the time, Jones (Baraka) was considered a Beat Poet, and in fact owned Totem Press in Greenwich Village, which published some of his contemporary poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
After Malcolm X was assassinated in February of 1965, Jones would leave his wife and children, distance himself from the white Beat Poets, and relocate to Harlem where he would undergo a radical personal transformation. He would change his name to Amiri Baraka and his writing would reflect his newfound Black Nationalist worldview.
Skipping ahead in time a bit, the next selections we feature reflect Baraka's paradigm shift... first a 1984 recording made at the The Village Gate nightclub in Greenwich Village, where Baraka read his famous poem "Why's Wise," and then a November 11, 2011 interview with Amiri Baraka when he visited Pacifica Radio Archives, perused the corridors of our tape vault, and was interviewed by journalist, author, and From the Vault colleague Joanne Griffith.
From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio Listeners.
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