РефератыИностранный языкInInterviews Essay Research Paper David OssmanWhat did

Interviews Essay Research Paper David OssmanWhat did

Interviews Essay, Research Paper


David Ossman


What [did you learn from] . . . the Black Mountain people, and [William Carlos]


Williams?


From Williams, mostly how to write in my own language—how to write the way I speak


rather than the way I think a poem ought to be written—to write just the way


it comes to me, in my own speech, utilizing the rhythms of speech rather than any kind of


metrical concept. To talk verse. Spoken verse. From Pound, the same concepts that went


into the Imagist’s poetry—the idea of the image and what an image ought to be. I


learned, probably, about verse from Pound—how a poem should be made, what a poem


ought to look like—some little inkling. And from Williams, I guess, how to


get it out in my own language.


[. . . .]


Does your being a Negro influence the speech patterns—or anything else, for that


matter, in your writing?


It could hardly help it. There are certain influences on me, as a Negro person, that


certainly wouldn’t apply to a poet like Allen Ginsberg. I couldn’t have written


that poem "Kaddish," for instance. And I’m sure he couldn’t write


certain things that have to deal with, say, Southern Baptist church rhythms. Everything


applies—everything in your life. Sociologically, there are different influences,


different things that I’ve seen, that I know, that Allen or no one knows.


From The Sullen Art. Copyright ? 1963 by David Ossman


Kimberly W. Benston


Benston: How would you do a self-criticism, for example, of The


System of Dante’s Hell?


Baraka: Well, first of all, in terms of form, it tended at times to be


obscure. The reason for that is that is that I was really writing defensively. I was


trying to get away from the influence of people like Creeley and Olson. I was living in


New York then and the whole Creeley-Olson influence was beginning to beat me up. I was in


a very closed, little circle—that was about the time I went to Cuba—and I felt


the need to break out of the type of form that I was using then. I guess this was not only


because of the form itself but because of the content which that form enclosed, which was


not my politics. The two little warring schools that were going on then were what I call


the Jewish-Ethnic-Bohemian School (Allen Ginsberg and his group) and the Anglo-German


Black Mountain School. I was caught between the two of them because they were all literary


buddies and so forth. So I wrote the novel defensively and offensively at the same time


because I was trying to get away. I literally decided to write just instinctively, without


any kind of preunderstanding of what I was shaping-—just write it down.


[. . . .]


Benston: In the early poetry, is there at any point an attempt to


create the same kind of clarity you achieved in System, to attain a similar freedom


from

what you’re calling the Creeley-Olson influence?


Baraka: The poetry of that period was still definitely relying heavily


on the Creeley-Olson thing. But, while the Creeley-Olson thing is still here in the


poetry’s form, the content was trying to aggressively address the folks around me,


the people that I worked with all the time, who were all Creeley-Olson types, people who


took an antipolitical line (the Creeley types more so than Olson’s


followers—Olson’s thing was always more political). I was coming out saying that


I thought that their political line was wrong. A lot of the poetry in The Dead


Lecturer is speaking out against the political line of the whole Black Mountain


group, to which I was very close.


From "Amiri Baraka: An Interview" from Boundary 2, Winter


1978. Copyright ? 1978 by boundary 2.


William J. Harris


WJH: It seems that your moving to a longer line in your poetry has to


do with a rejection of the white world, of "white music" if you will.


AB: I think it has to do with the poetry since the sixties being much


more orally conceived rather than manuscript conceived. The poetry is much more intended


to be read aloud, and since the mid-sixties that has been what has spurred it on, has


shaped it.


WJH: Can you talk about this a little more? The latest poetry, some of


the Marxist poetry, seems like it’s really less poetry than it is a score for you to


read. Your readings are incredible and I am wondering are you caring less and less about


the text?


AB: It is less important to me. To me it is a score.


WJH: What does this mean? In 200 years when you aren’t around,


are you going to expect people to be listening to tapes of your work?


AB: Yeah, I hope.


WJH: That is really interesting because it means you are moving away


from the idea of the written page.


AB: The page doesn’t interest me that much—not as much as


the actual spoken word. The contradiction with that is that I should be recording all the


time, which I’m not for obvious reasons. I’m much more interested in the spoken


word, and I think that the whole wave of the future is definitely not literary in a sense


of books and is tending toward the spoken and the visual. . . . I think that page will be


used by people who want to read it aloud. The question to me of a poet writing in silence


for people who will read in silence and put it in a library where the whole thing is


conceived in silence and lost forever is about over. And I think it didn’t really


influence many people. I mean if you conceive of how many people are in the world and how


many people ever learned how to read.


From "An Interview with Amiri Baraka," from The Greenfield Review,


Fall 1980, copyright ? 1980 by The Greenfield Review; all rights controlled by


William J. Harris.

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