Get this - NJ poet laureate poem about 911....Somebody Blew Up America

They say its some terrorist, some barbaric A Rab, in Afghanistan It wasn't our American terrorists It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads Or the them that blows up nigger Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row It wasn't Trent Lott Or David Duke or Giuliani Or Schundler, Helms retiring

It wasn't The gonorrhea in costume The white sheet diseases That have murdered black people Terrorized reason and sanity Most of humanity, as they pleases

They say (who say?) Who do the saying Who is them paying Who tell the lies Who in disguise Who had the slaves Who got the bux out the Bucks

Who got fat from plantations Who genocided Indians Tried to waste the Black nation

Who live on Wall Street The first plantation Who cut your nuts off Who rape your ma Who lynched your pa

Who got the tar, who got the feathers Who had the match, who set the fires Who killed and hired Who say they God & still be the Devil

Who created everything Who the smartest Who the greatest Who the richest Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest

Who stole Puerto Rico Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan Australia & The Hebrides Who forced opium on the Chinese

Who own them buildings Who got the money Who think you funny Who locked you up Who own the papers

Who own the mine Who twist your mind Who got bread Who need peace Who you think need war

Who own the oil Who do no toil Who own the soil Who is not a nigger Who is so great ain't nobody bigger

Who own your crib Who rob and steal and cheat and murder and make lies the truth Who call you uncouth

Who live in the biggest house Who do the biggest crime Who go on vacation anytime

Who killed the most niggers Who killed the most Jews Who killed the most Italians Who killed the most Irish Who killed the most Africans Who killed the most Japanese Who killed the most Latinos

Who own what ain't even known to be owned Who own the owners that ain't the real owners

Who made Bush president Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying Who talk about democracy and be lying

Who the biggest terrorist Who change the bible Who killed the most people Who do the most evil Who don't worry about survival

Who have the colonies Who stole the most land Who rule the world Who say they good but only do evil Who the biggest executioner

Who own the oil Who want more oil Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie

Who found Bin Laden, maybe they Satan Who pay the CIA, Who knew the bomb was gonna blow Who know why the terrorists Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion And cracking they sides at the notion

Who make the credit cards Who get the biggest tax cut Who walked out of the Conference Against Racism Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing? Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

Who invaded Grenada Who made money from apartheid Who keep the Irish a colony Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later

Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani, the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral, Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,

Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane, Betty Shabazz, Die, Princess Di, Ralph Featherstone, Little Bobby

Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo, Assata, Mumia, Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney, Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put the Jews in ovens, and who helped them do it Who said "America First" and ok'd the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt Who murdered the Rosenbergs And all the good people iced, tortured, assassinated, vanished

Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,

Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo Who invented Aids Who put the germs In the Indians' blankets Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"

Who blew up the Maine & started the Spanish American War Who got Sharon back in Power Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo, Chiang kai Chek

Who decided Affirmative Action had to go Reconstruction, The New Deal, The New Frontier, The Great Society,

Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus Subsidere

Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop, Who poison Robeson, who try to put DuBois in Jail Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs, Garvey, The Scottsboro Boys, The Hollywood Ten

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away?

Who make money from war Who make dough from fear and lies Who want the world like it is Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty.

Like an Owl exploding In your life in your brain in your self Like an Owl who know the devil All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog

Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell Who and Who and WHO who who Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!

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Controversy a hallmark of poet's life
Monday, October 14, 2002

By PAUL H. JOHNSON
Staff Writer

The Air Force kicked him out. Howard University flunked him. Rutgers University denied him tenure. So it comes as little surprise to Amiri Baraka that the governor of New Jersey wants to fire him.

Baraka, 68, who was born Everett Leroy Jones - amiri means "commander" and baraka means "blessing" in Swahili - has been ensnared in one controversy or another since arriving on the literary scene nearly a half-century ago. He has been called an anti-Semite, a sexist, a racist, and a homophobe - as well as one of the nation's greatest living poets.

What does surprise Baraka is that Governor McGreevey and others did not realize that his unheralded appointment as New Jersey's poet laureate would lead to the level of outrage swirling around a poem that only recently came to light.

"If you're going to appoint someone poet laureate, you would presume they would know something about their work,'' Baraka said from his comfortable Newark home, decorated with jazz art and overflowing with books. He was born in Newark and has lived there nearly all his life.

To some New Jersey legislators, Baraka is an irritant that needs to be removed. His poem "Somebody Blew Up America," they say, spreads the dangerous lie that Israel had advance knowledge of the attack on the World Trade Center.

"The removal of Amiri Baraka as New Jersey poet laureate is merited because of his insensitive statements to the Jewish community," said state Sen. John C. Coniglio, D-Paramus. "An official state position cannot be used to spread malice, divisiveness, and hate."

Coniglio and other state senators have sponsored a bill that would empower McGreevey to fire Baraka and give the state Senate approval power over poet laureate nominees.

Baraka vows to resist his removal.

"If they want to fight, I'll fight,'' he thundered.

Although Baraka is one of the nation's most reviled poets at the moment, he also is one of the most successful writers New Jersey has produced. He is on a par with poets William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsburg, both of whom became embroiled in their fair share of controversy. Baraka also is one of the foremost jazz essayists in American history and an important playwright who made a name in the vibrant world of off-Broadway theater in the 1960s.

Baraka has been a Guggenheim Fellow and won a PEN/Faulkner award, an Obie, (the off-Broadway equivalent of the Tony), the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award for Poetry. He has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been the subject of biographies, doctoral dissertations, and academic panels.

"As a contemporary American artist, Baraka must be ranked with the likes of John Coltrane, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Thomas Pynchon," wrote literary critic William J. Harris.

Even some of his opponents grudgingly acknowledge Baraka's skill as a writer.

"He actually has some talent as a poet, I'm sorry to say," said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Association of America.

There is perhaps no other poet more closely associated with Newark or the black power movement than Baraka.

"He is an integral part of the history of Newark. He played a major role in the transition to black power in Newark," said Lawrence Hamm, a former member of the Newark Board of Education and current president of the People's Organization for Progress, a civil rights group. Hamm was in high school when he met Baraka in the 1970s.

"He was very instrumental for many of us. We had missed Dr. King, we missed Malcolm X. [Baraka] did for us what they did for his generation," Hamm said.

An avowed Marxist, Baraka has been a Greenwich Village beat poet and a black nationalist. He was married to a Jewish woman, but they divorced when he joined the black power movement in the wake of Malcolm X's 1965 murder.

Although Baraka penned gay-themed plays, in his essays he taunted gay writer James Baldwin in the 1960s. The two reconciled in the 1970s.

Baraka supported Kenneth Gibson when Gibson became Newark's first black mayor, but then spurned him when he adopted pro-business policies. Baraka acknowledges embracing and shedding more identities - and friends - than most people.

"Baraka has had a long and complicated career,'' said Sarah Lawrence College Professor Koomzie Woodard, author of "Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics."

Baraka, who taught for years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and and is a professor emeritus there, was denied tenure at Rutgers in 1990. He had been a visiting professor at the state university.

Baraka briefly attended Rutgers and then Howard University, where he flunked out. He then joined the Air Force, where he read book after book to counter the tedium of military life. Before long, he was ejected from the military for "unbecoming behavior." He found it to be a blessing in disguise because he could pursue his poetry.

Baraka soon became a part of the beat generation of poets who congregated in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. He married a fellow poet, Hettie Cohen, who is white, and wrote poetry under the name LeRoi Jones, a French twist of his birth name.

After Malcolm X's death, Baraka abruptly left his first wife, moved to Harlem, and embraced the black power movement. There he met his current wife, Amina Baraka.

"I responded like my generation,'' Baraka said of his transformation from beatnik to black radical. "When they killed Malcolm X, they affected a lot of African-Americans. We thought somebody had to pay."

He moved back to Newark, where he began organizing politically.

He became the arch foe of Anthony Imperiale, Newark's self-described "Italian-American civil rights leader."

Baraka helped elect Gibson but later broke with the mayor and the black power movement because he felt that Gibson promoted business interests over the needs of the poor.

"We thought naively that all we had to do is get rid of white people and get some black faces in there and we'd get some real change,'' Baraka said.

It was then that Baraka fully embraced Marxism.

He only recently made peace with Sharpe James, the current mayor of Newark. Baraka's son Ras Baraka, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council last spring, is a deputy mayor. His daughter from his first marriage, Lisa Jones, is a widely published writer who for many years had a column in the Village Voice. Baraka has six other children.

This year, Baraka was appointed the state's second poet laureate. "Somebody Blew Up America," which he wrote in October 2001, got him into hot water last month.

Baraka read the poem at festivals worldwide but it was not until he read it at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival in Stanhope on Sept. 19 that he sparked the anger of Jewish groups. The offending lines were:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed

Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day

Why did Sharon stay away?

Baraka insists he is not an anti-Semite but clings to a theory that Israel, President Bush, and other Western leaders knew about the impending terrorism but did nothing to stop it.

The Zionist Association's Klein said Baraka's beliefs are rooted in the anti-Semitic diatribes of radical Muslim imams in the Middle East who started spreading the lie of Israeli involvement shortly after 9/11. The imams said Israel's goal was to make Arabs look bad in the eyes of the world.

The Anti-Defamation League has a Web page cataloging what it says are Baraka's other anti-Semitic statements.

"This first lie came out of the same newspapers that promote the most vicious anti-Semitism we've seen since the Nazis," Klein said. He also dismissed Baraka's claim that he is criticizing only Israel, not all Jews.

"You think if I condemned Italy as a vicious human rights-abusing country, would I have some antipathy toward Italians?'' Klein said.

Although the focus has been on the 9/11 passage that is considered offensive to Jews, "Somebody Blew Up America" is a stream of rhetorical questions about imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and genocide. Among its lines:

Who put the Jews in ovens, and who helped them do it

Who said 'America First' and ok'd the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt

Who murdered the Rosenbergs

Baraka's supporters hope the conflict over his poem dies down soon.

"It's really unfortunate that people have become polarized like this. I think the situation is unwarranted, and I say it smacks of a degree of political opportunism," said Hamm, of the People's Organization for Progress.

"I think it is legitimate for this to be debated and argued in the public arena, but once you start taking it at the political level and pass laws that are aimed at one person, you're getting yourself into constitutional quicksand. I think people will wish, when this is over, they had handled it in a different way," Hamm said.

The controversy reminds Baraka of the reaction to his friend Ginsburg's poem "Howl," which was banned for its obscenity in the 1950s and was the subject of a widely publicized trial.

After "Howl" was published, Baraka wrote Ginsburg a note on toilet paper asking simply, "Are you for real?" Ginsburg responded - also on toilet paper - "I am tired of being Allen Ginsburg."

Baraka understands the sentiment.

"I know what he means now.''

***
Works by Amiri Baraka
Poetry

Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961)

The Dead Lecturer (1964)

Black Art (1969)

It's Nation Time (1970)

Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Tale (1995)

Funk Lore: New Poems (1984-1995) (1996)

Drama

Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays (1964)

The Baptism and The Toilet (1967)

Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself (1967)

Home on the Range (1968)

Police (1968)

The Death of Malcolm X (1969)

Rockgroup (1969)

Four Black Revolutionary Plays, All Praises to the Black Man (1969)

Junkies Are Full of (SHHH...) (1970)

Jello (1970)

BA-RA-KA (1972)

Black Power Chant (1972)

The Motion of History, and Other Plays (1978) includes Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant and S-1

Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979)

The Sidney Poet Heroical, in 29 Scenes (1979)

General Hag's Skeezag (1992)

Fiction

The System of Dante's Hell (1965)

Tales (1967)

Three Books by Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) (1975)

Non-Fiction Essays

Home: Social Essays (1966)

Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984)

Jesse Jackson & Black People (1996)

***
BIO
1934: Born Everett Leroy Jones in Newark, the son of Colt Leroy Jones, a postal supervisor, and Anna Lois Jones, a social worker.

1952: Attended Rutgers and then transferred to Howard University. He dropped out of Howard to join the Air Force.

1958: Married Hettie Cohen, who is Jewish, and co-edited the poetry journal Yugen. Adopted the name LeRoi Jones.

1961: Published first volume of poetry, "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note," traveled to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro, wrote the essay "Cuba Libre," and had his play "Dante" performed at the Bowery Theater.

1964: His most famous play, "The Dutchman," premiered at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York City. The play won an Obie award for best off-Broadway play.

1965: In the wake of the murder of Malcolm X, he left his wife and moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts/Theater Repertory School. Performed poetry and drama throughout Harlem. Left Harlem and moved permanently to Newark.

1967: Founded Spirit House Players and other political and cultural organizations in Newark, such as United Brothers and the Committee for a Unified Newark. Riots devastated Newark.

1968: Dropped name LeRoi Jones for Swahili name Amiri Baraka.

1970: A slate of candidates backed by the Committee for a Unified Newark won citywide elections. Kenneth Gibson elected city's first black mayor.

1972: Served as secretary general of the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind., which adopted a nationwide black agenda.

1974: Abandoned black power movement and embraced Marxism.

1984: Published "The Autobiography of Leroy Jones."

1990: Denied tenure by Rutgers University.

2001: In wake of attack on the World Trade Center, wrote poem "Somebody Blew Up America."

2002: Appointed New Jersey poet laureate.

Paul H. Johnson's e-mail address is johnsonp@northjersey.com

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