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The Dead Lecturer
79 pages.
79 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1964
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About the author
Amiri Baraka
157 books398 followersPoems and plays, such as
Dutchman
(1964), of American writer Amiri Baraka originally Everett LeRoi Jones focus on racial conflict.
He attended Barringer high school. Coyt Leverette Jones, his father, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. Anna Lois Russ Jones, his mother, worked as a social worker.
He studied at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard universities but left without a degree and attended the new school for social research. He won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard. He studied philosophy and religion, major fields. Jones also served three years in the air force as a gunner. Jones continued his studies of comparative literature at Columbia University. An anonymous letter accused him as a Communist to his commanding officer and led to the discovery of Soviet literature; afterward, people put Jones on gardening duty and gave him a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.
In the same year, he moved to Greenwich Village and worked initially in a warehouse for music records. His interest in jazz began in this period. At the same time, he came into contact with Beat Generation, black mountain college, and New York School. In 1958, he married Hettie Cohen and founded Totem Press, which published such Beat Generation icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Jones in July 1960 visited with a delegation of Cuba committee and reported his impressions in his essay Cuba libre . He began a politically active art. In 1961, he published Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note , a first book. In 1963, Blues People: Negro Music in White America of the most influential volumes of criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning free jazz movement, followed. His acclaimed controversy premiered and received an Obie Award in the same year.
After the assassination of Malcolm X (1965), Jones left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem. His controversial revolutionary and then antisemitic.
In 1966, Jones married Sylvia Robinson, his second wife, who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967, he lectured at San Francisco State University. In 1967, he adopted the African name Imamu Amear Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka.
In 1968, he was arrested in Newark for allegedly carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest during the riots of the previous year, and people subsequently sentenced him to three years in prison; shortly afterward, Raymond A. Brown, his defense attorney, convinced an appeals court to reverse the sentence. In that same year, Black Music, his second book of jazz criticism, collected previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka penned some similar strongly anti-Jewish articles to the stance at that time of the Nation of Islam to court controversy.
Around 1974, Baraka himself from Black nationalism as a Marxist and a supporter of third-world liberation movements. In 1979, he lectured at Africana studies department of State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1980, he denounced his former anti-Semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-Zionist.
In 1984, Baraka served as a full professor at Rutgers University, but was subsequently denied tenure. In 1989, he won a book award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes award.
In 1990, he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and 1998 , he served as supporting actor in Bulworth, film of Warren Beatty. In 1996, the red hot organization produced Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip, and Baraka contributed to this acquired immune def
He attended Barringer high school. Coyt Leverette Jones, his father, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. Anna Lois Russ Jones, his mother, worked as a social worker.
He studied at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard universities but left without a degree and attended the new school for social research. He won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard. He studied philosophy and religion, major fields. Jones also served three years in the air force as a gunner. Jones continued his studies of comparative literature at Columbia University. An anonymous letter accused him as a Communist to his commanding officer and led to the discovery of Soviet literature; afterward, people put Jones on gardening duty and gave him a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.
In the same year, he moved to Greenwich Village and worked initially in a warehouse for music records. His interest in jazz began in this period. At the same time, he came into contact with Beat Generation, black mountain college, and New York School. In 1958, he married Hettie Cohen and founded Totem Press, which published such Beat Generation icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Jones in July 1960 visited with a delegation of Cuba committee and reported his impressions in his essay Cuba libre . He began a politically active art. In 1961, he published Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note , a first book. In 1963, Blues People: Negro Music in White America of the most influential volumes of criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning free jazz movement, followed. His acclaimed controversy premiered and received an Obie Award in the same year.
After the assassination of Malcolm X (1965), Jones left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem. His controversial revolutionary and then antisemitic.
In 1966, Jones married Sylvia Robinson, his second wife, who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967, he lectured at San Francisco State University. In 1967, he adopted the African name Imamu Amear Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka.
In 1968, he was arrested in Newark for allegedly carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest during the riots of the previous year, and people subsequently sentenced him to three years in prison; shortly afterward, Raymond A. Brown, his defense attorney, convinced an appeals court to reverse the sentence. In that same year, Black Music, his second book of jazz criticism, collected previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka penned some similar strongly anti-Jewish articles to the stance at that time of the Nation of Islam to court controversy.
Around 1974, Baraka himself from Black nationalism as a Marxist and a supporter of third-world liberation movements. In 1979, he lectured at Africana studies department of State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1980, he denounced his former anti-Semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-Zionist.
In 1984, Baraka served as a full professor at Rutgers University, but was subsequently denied tenure. In 1989, he won a book award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes award.
In 1990, he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and 1998 , he served as supporting actor in Bulworth, film of Warren Beatty. In 1996, the red hot organization produced Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip, and Baraka contributed to this acquired immune def
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
September 6, 2024
Taunt and enmeshing - can see why this was a widely read book of poems during the turbulent 60's - but the issues still echo to our collective here and now. So often we tend to contextualize our past on the accepted consensus of our class experience; I suspect this is because there is a demographic 'comfort zone' we all become familiar with. This book of poems will challenge you to listen again - to a voice that may tell you disturbing secrets.
April 8, 2009
Amiri Baraka has been so many different kinds of writers throughout his long career that it would be hard to say that I like all of his work--rather, I like several of the writers he's been and LeRoi Jones is my favorite. The Dead Lecturer was written at the height of his disillusionment with the New York School, on the cusp of changing his name, before becoming a Black Nationalist. Part of the greatness of the The Dead Lecturer is that it's an interstitial book, aesthetically and ideologically, where we encounter LeRoi Jones as an extremely political poet, but one of a different model than later Barakas. His natural mode is didacticism--he is telling you the truth and you can do nothing but listen; every argument is densely woven with metaphors; he uses abstractions liberally, railing against love, history,ignorance, desire. Jones' hatreds and passions sparkle side by side in these poems. "The Politics of Rich Painters" has to be one of the most lucid indictments of the culture industry that any one has written in poem form. The opening lines of of "Short Speech to my Friends" will be forever etched in my brain:
"A political art, let it be
tenderness,"
"A political art, let it be
tenderness,"
May 13, 2022
I have just finished Dianne Ravitch's magnificent history of the New York public school system, "The Great School Wars", which she made some highly unfavorable references to Amiri Baraka who at that stage in his carreer went by the name of Leroi Jones. Ms. Ravitch labelled Jones/Baraka as "anitwhite" which he would have taken as a complement. I had forgotten about having read the work until reading Ms. Ravitch's book and am now reviewing it.
I was fifteen years old when I read the book in 1969. I wrote a book report for my Grade Ten English class in order to advertise my support for the Black Power movement which was highly fashionable for university students at the time but dreadfully precious for someone of my age. Given that I was living north of Lake Superior some 1900 km from New York City, it was also completely absurd.
Nonetheless the reputation of Jones/Baraka as the leading poet of the Black Power movement has survived. I do not regret having read this book. I would have needed to be a different person not to have.
Three stars. Free verse is seldom this good.
I was fifteen years old when I read the book in 1969. I wrote a book report for my Grade Ten English class in order to advertise my support for the Black Power movement which was highly fashionable for university students at the time but dreadfully precious for someone of my age. Given that I was living north of Lake Superior some 1900 km from New York City, it was also completely absurd.
Nonetheless the reputation of Jones/Baraka as the leading poet of the Black Power movement has survived. I do not regret having read this book. I would have needed to be a different person not to have.
Three stars. Free verse is seldom this good.
January 4, 2021
I have an old copy under the name LeRoi Jones (filed under J). When I don't like something that's well-respected, I suspect the problem is me. That's fine. I'll take the blame here. It's not for me.
July 8, 2024
Sorry, can't see the supposed jazzy genius behind the misogyny, antisemitism and homophobia.
August 9, 2013
Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka's second book of poetry captures him in transition - personally, emotionally ("I am inside someone who hates me."), artistically, socially, and politically. The perfection of the poems in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note is not found here; it is replaced by a searching quality, as if Baraka is trying to find his way to the next stage of his development. That next stage did not represent a totally positive change - I can understand his rage against white society, but that rage had a somewhat negative affect on his work. And the anti-Semitism that started showing up in Baraka's writing at this point has always disturbed me.
But The Dead Lecturer is still an amazing performance. The poems are dense and virtuosic, full of surprises and enigmas. I don't pretend to understand everything Jones/Baraka is getting at, but as my friend Paul said, he is "young and in love with language." There are disturbing moments and confusing passages, but there is much to wonder at here. And, hey - "I Substitute For The Dead Lecturer" is one of the great poem titles of all time.
And now I'm going back to his first book to read "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" and "Look For You Yesterday, Here You Come Today."
But The Dead Lecturer is still an amazing performance. The poems are dense and virtuosic, full of surprises and enigmas. I don't pretend to understand everything Jones/Baraka is getting at, but as my friend Paul said, he is "young and in love with language." There are disturbing moments and confusing passages, but there is much to wonder at here. And, hey - "I Substitute For The Dead Lecturer" is one of the great poem titles of all time.
And now I'm going back to his first book to read "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" and "Look For You Yesterday, Here You Come Today."
April 5, 2015
"They pray / at the / steps of abstract prisons, to be kings, when all is silence, when all / is stone. When even the stupid fruit of their loins is gold, or / something / else they cannot eat."
Baraka before his anger was diffuse and controversial and instead inhabited a clarity that is sorely missed, still sorely needed. Rest in power.
Baraka before his anger was diffuse and controversial and instead inhabited a clarity that is sorely missed, still sorely needed. Rest in power.
November 23, 2011
Baraka is often brilliant. He also often puts his foot into his mouth. He also often knows that he is putting into his mouth. He is putting it there anyway, just because it isn't to your liking that a foot be there. This is why I love him. This is a good place to start.
July 6, 2008
An American original: searching, expressive, incendiary.
August 23, 2022
A transitory, disenchanted, and precious volume of letters. This volume really brought me into Baraka's tent of jazz lyricism, lines that feel so ahead of time to be penned in the 60s and not rapped over, say, a Kool Keith instrumental from the late 80s. This is prescient hip hop lyricism. The poet's lyrics carve a strange break between the speaker and the vehicle of expression, the poem, and this draining tone (see “This Is the Clearing I Once Spoke Of” and “An Agony. As Now”) follows clearly from his previous volume. While his experimentation with form has more room to breath ("A Poem for Willie Best” is especially gripping, and inflected by Baraka’s experiment with the vignette form), given the longer length afforded, we also experience new priorities in terms of the thematics offered.
For example, “Short Speech To My Friends” is a clear indication towards Baraka’s future expression and identification with Black Nationalist impulses. We can trace this through the poem's toy with the idea of a poetics that mobilizes political inspirations. Some final lines unravel Baraka's uneasy embrace of a new world view, one that would find him divorced from prior Greenwich Village associations: “The poor have become our creators. The black. The thoroughly / ignorant. / Let the combination of morality / and inhumanity / begin.” Across the volume, we get critiques targeting various examples of NY's cultural intelligentsia (see “The Politics of Rich Painters”).
While there are many threads worth pulling on, one of the most prevalent involves Baraka's disenchantment with (orthodox) communism as a political platform that could speak to the quality of Black life as abject death (see "A Guerrilla Handbook").
“Black Dada Nihilismus” is one of the volume’s more controversial offerings (sharing energy with the later "Black Art" from Black Magic), but also one of its most layered. Baraka approaches art as a vehicle for politics, arguing a relationship between Western nihilism and Nazism as well as other culturally destructive (even genocidal) political platforms. “Green Lantern’s Solo,” while continuing attacks against art and intellectual establishments, also acts as a profound lamentation against the trappings of a stifling intellectualism that divorces the individual from any notion of life force, pure aspect, vigorous motion. Finally, “The Liar” features Baraka reflecting on his position as a public writer with many known and abandoned allegiances, questioning the relationship between public perception and his own innate being. Altogether, it is a fitting way to see the volume out.
“if I spare what flesh of yours / is left. If I see past what I feel, and call music simply 'Art,' and will / not take it to its logical end.” (from "Rhythm & Blues (1")
For example, “Short Speech To My Friends” is a clear indication towards Baraka’s future expression and identification with Black Nationalist impulses. We can trace this through the poem's toy with the idea of a poetics that mobilizes political inspirations. Some final lines unravel Baraka's uneasy embrace of a new world view, one that would find him divorced from prior Greenwich Village associations: “The poor have become our creators. The black. The thoroughly / ignorant. / Let the combination of morality / and inhumanity / begin.” Across the volume, we get critiques targeting various examples of NY's cultural intelligentsia (see “The Politics of Rich Painters”).
While there are many threads worth pulling on, one of the most prevalent involves Baraka's disenchantment with (orthodox) communism as a political platform that could speak to the quality of Black life as abject death (see "A Guerrilla Handbook").
“Black Dada Nihilismus” is one of the volume’s more controversial offerings (sharing energy with the later "Black Art" from Black Magic), but also one of its most layered. Baraka approaches art as a vehicle for politics, arguing a relationship between Western nihilism and Nazism as well as other culturally destructive (even genocidal) political platforms. “Green Lantern’s Solo,” while continuing attacks against art and intellectual establishments, also acts as a profound lamentation against the trappings of a stifling intellectualism that divorces the individual from any notion of life force, pure aspect, vigorous motion. Finally, “The Liar” features Baraka reflecting on his position as a public writer with many known and abandoned allegiances, questioning the relationship between public perception and his own innate being. Altogether, it is a fitting way to see the volume out.
“if I spare what flesh of yours / is left. If I see past what I feel, and call music simply 'Art,' and will / not take it to its logical end.” (from "Rhythm & Blues (1")
November 5, 2024
Snake Eyes
'That force is lost
which shaped me, spent
in its image, battered, an old brown thing
swept off the streets
where it sucked its
gentle living.
And what is meat
to do, that is driven to its end
by words? The frailest gestures
grown like skirts around breathing.
We take
unholy risks to prove
we are what we cannot be. For instance,
I am not even crazy.'
from An Agony. As Now
‘It is a human love, I live inside. A bony skeleton
you recognize as words or simple feeling.
But it has no feeling. As the metal, is hit, it is not,
given to love.
It burns the thing
inside it. And that thing
screams.’
from Valéry as Dictator
'What is tomorrow
that it cannot come
today?’
from The Liar
'What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
as fear. (Of the tree’s shadow
winding around the chair, a distant music
of frozen birds rattling
in the cold.'
from Balboa, The Entertainer
'Let me poems be a graph
of me. (And they keep
to the line, where flesh
drops off. You will go
blank at the middle. A
dead man.’
'That force is lost
which shaped me, spent
in its image, battered, an old brown thing
swept off the streets
where it sucked its
gentle living.
And what is meat
to do, that is driven to its end
by words? The frailest gestures
grown like skirts around breathing.
We take
unholy risks to prove
we are what we cannot be. For instance,
I am not even crazy.'
from An Agony. As Now
‘It is a human love, I live inside. A bony skeleton
you recognize as words or simple feeling.
But it has no feeling. As the metal, is hit, it is not,
given to love.
It burns the thing
inside it. And that thing
screams.’
from Valéry as Dictator
'What is tomorrow
that it cannot come
today?’
from The Liar
'What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
as fear. (Of the tree’s shadow
winding around the chair, a distant music
of frozen birds rattling
in the cold.'
from Balboa, The Entertainer
'Let me poems be a graph
of me. (And they keep
to the line, where flesh
drops off. You will go
blank at the middle. A
dead man.’
March 28, 2019
I'm convinced Baraka should be read by collection (I'd read individual poems before) because (damn) these poems move, and breathe, and pulse. I hit "Crow Jane" and Baraka is making me work for it, I mean really work for it. Trying to keep up with him is really the least I can do, so I try...
I emerged from these poems challenged, half-ruined, awake, moved, angry, and guilty. And I'm so much better for having this experience.
I should also add that after I finished these poems, I got to sit down with Prof. Nate Mackey and talk through them: a "holy shit what is my life right now" moment that I will never forget.
I emerged from these poems challenged, half-ruined, awake, moved, angry, and guilty. And I'm so much better for having this experience.
I should also add that after I finished these poems, I got to sit down with Prof. Nate Mackey and talk through them: a "holy shit what is my life right now" moment that I will never forget.
September 13, 2024
Complex, fluid, dynamic and enriching to reading aloud.
From “the dance”:
“…and let me once, create
Myself. And let you, whoever
Sits now breathing on my words
Create a self of your own. One
That will love me.”
From “the dance”:
“…and let me once, create
Myself. And let you, whoever
Sits now breathing on my words
Create a self of your own. One
That will love me.”
October 20, 2017
My copy says Le Roi Jones. The poet, the prosaic lecturer!
November 27, 2017
the lord saved me. the lord made me strong...
June 7, 2024
Didn’t finish tbh. Tortured Baraka appealing to what he knows is a dying whiteness can be a bit….annoying!! Strong lines with strange direction. I’ll finish later.
January 19, 2022
For Edward Dorn
"In blackest day, In blackest night
No evil shall escape my sight!
Let those who worship evil's might
Beware my power...
Green Lantern's Light."
Practices
silence, the way of wind
bursting
its early lull. Cold morning
to night, we go so
slowly, without
thought
to ourselves. (Enough
to have thought
tonight, nothing
finishes it. What
you are, will have
no certainty, or
end. That you will
stay, where you are,
a human gentle wisp
of life. Ah...)
practices
loneliness
as a virtue. A single
specious need
to keep
what you have
never really
had.
- As a possible lover, pg. 9
* * *
. Against what light
is false what breath
sucked, for deadness.
Murder, the cleansed
purpose, frail, against
God, if they bring him
bleeding, I would not
forgive, or even call him
black dada nihilism.
The protestant love, wide windows,
colour blocked to Mondrian, and the
ugly silent deaths of jews under
the surgeon's knife. (To awake on
69th street with money and a hip
nose. Black dada nihilism, for
the umbrella'd jesus. Trilby intrigue
movie house presidents sticky the floor.
B.D.N., for the secret men, Hermes, the
blacker art. Thievery (ahh, they return
those secret gold killers. Inquisitors
of the cocktail hour. Trismegistus, have
them, in their transmutation, from stone
to bleeding pearl, from lead to burning
looting, dead Moctezuma, find the West
a grey hideous space.
- Black Dada Nihilism, 1, pg. 61-62
* * *
Luxury, then, is a way of
being ignorant, comfortably
An approach to the open market
of least information. Where theories
can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins
without being cracked by ideas.
(I have not seen the earth for years
and think now possibly "dirt" is
negative, positive, but clearly
social. I cannot planet a seed, cannot
recognize the root with clearer dent
than indifference. Though I eat
and shit as a natural man. (Getting up
from the desk to secure a turkey sandwich
and answer the phone: the poem undone
undone by my station, by my station,
and the bad words of Newark.) Raised up
to the breech, we seek to fill for this
crumbling century. The darkness of love,
in whose sweating memory all error is forced.
Undone by the logic of any specific death. (Old gentlemen
who still follow fires, tho are quieter
and less punctual. It is a polite truth
we are left with. Who are you? What are you
saying? Something to be dealt with, as easily.
The noxious game of reason, saying, "No, No,
you cannot feel," like my dead lecturer
lamenting thru gipsies his fast suicide.
- Political Poem, for Basil, pg. 74
February 21, 2016
I reluctantly give such a middling rating, and only do so because I cannot be sure what I've gained from The Dead Lecturer.
Much of his poetry burns with a raw and visceral sensuosity; it lays bare fine emotions; it rouses one to anger where polemic, and is subtle and complex where it engages with the ethics of the self. But at many times I struggled to find something intelligible from his poems.
Leroi Jones clearly favoured an aesthetic that is elusive and incoherent; and it is from this that my difficulties with the book stem.
I will try and read later works by him to see if he ever settles enough for me to really enjoy his whole poems. For the moment, this feels much like a curate's egg.
Much of his poetry burns with a raw and visceral sensuosity; it lays bare fine emotions; it rouses one to anger where polemic, and is subtle and complex where it engages with the ethics of the self. But at many times I struggled to find something intelligible from his poems.
Leroi Jones clearly favoured an aesthetic that is elusive and incoherent; and it is from this that my difficulties with the book stem.
I will try and read later works by him to see if he ever settles enough for me to really enjoy his whole poems. For the moment, this feels much like a curate's egg.
April 11, 2015
3.5 stars. Very interesting read.
When I was in Middle School I glanced through a poetry anthology on my parent's bookshelves and kept coming back to a poem, 'The Death of Nick Charles,' by LeRoi Jones. Sometimes you find a poem at the right time because at that age I felt like it expressed things I was feeling. The anthology was published 1965, prior to LeRoi Jones changing his name to Amiri Baraka and becoming more controversial.
When it comes to The Dead Lecturer, I enjoy the parts where he's celebrating language more than the parts he's expressing political rage. Still, I enjoyed many of the poems and I'm glad I read it.
When I was in Middle School I glanced through a poetry anthology on my parent's bookshelves and kept coming back to a poem, 'The Death of Nick Charles,' by LeRoi Jones. Sometimes you find a poem at the right time because at that age I felt like it expressed things I was feeling. The anthology was published 1965, prior to LeRoi Jones changing his name to Amiri Baraka and becoming more controversial.
When it comes to The Dead Lecturer, I enjoy the parts where he's celebrating language more than the parts he's expressing political rage. Still, I enjoyed many of the poems and I'm glad I read it.
July 25, 2013
I really feel that you need to live in the 60s and hear Baraka (at the time he was LeRoi Jones) read his work aloud for it to have power. If you study black lit at all, you learn that poetry was THE choice for getting out feelings in reaction to injustice because it is the fastest to write. For me, his poetry has NOTHING on his brilliant playwright skills. Dutchman, for me, remains a favorite out of any play.
July 16, 2012
Amiri Baraka when he was LeRoi Jones and young and in love with language.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews