9/11 fury poet Baraka is dead
AMIRI BARAKA, the fist-shaking poet whose plays made him a polarizing and trailblazing cultural force — and who drew outrage with a work that suggested Israeli workers at the Twin Towers were told to stay home on 9/11 — died Thursday at 79.
The author’s booking agent said Baraka, hospitalized since December, died at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
Perhaps no writer of the 1960s and ’70s did more to extend the political debates of the civil rights era to the world of the arts. Born LeRoi Jones, he inspired generations of artists and his immersion in spoken word traditions and raw street language anticipated rap and hip hop.
“We want ‘ poems that kill,”’ Baraka wrote in 1965 in his landmark “Black Art” manifesto. “Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns/Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.”
His 1963 book “Blues People” was called the first major history of black music penned by an African-American. A line from his poem “Black People!” — “Up against the wall mother f---er” — became a counterculture slogan.
A 2002 poem he wrote as New Jersey’s poet laureate — alleging that some Israelis had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks — led to widespread outrage. He was denounced by critics as buffoonish, homophobic and anti
Semitic.