Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that. He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at yet higher and higher tempos. Amiri Baraka Read Quote
My own thinking has evolved. You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it… That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood. Amiri Baraka Read Quote
I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that. Amiri Baraka Read Quote
The poet is someone, I think, who’s interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness. Amiri Baraka Read Quote
I had just been in some repressive situations – the black middle-class college scene and the crazy United States Air Force – and so I just felt like getting out of that. I thought, now, that I wanted to be a writer. I had something that I wanted to do, that I was interested in doing, so I wanted to pursue that. Amiri Baraka Read Quote
It seems natural to me that as a writer, you should have some kind of, you know, there should be some kind of projection that you actually have influenced people who are closest to you. Amiri Baraka Read Quote
The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it’s Whitman, who lost his job for ‘Leaves of Grass,’ or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose ‘Howl’ was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you’re going to put yourself in jeopardy. Amiri Baraka Read Quote
I’m trying to make the poems as musical as I can – from the inception. So that whether they’re read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given. Amiri Baraka Read Quote
As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is. Amiri Baraka Read Quote
