photo credit the Givens Foundation

Imamu 

After reading Is Always Be readers have asked if I knew Amiri Baraka. I indeed was a friend and associate of Baraka. I was introduced to his writing in undergraduate school in the early nineteen-seventies at a historically black university known as Alabama A & M University, not only in the classroom but in street performances of his poetry on campus. It wasn't until the mid nineteen-nineties that I had the honor to meet him and get to know the man and artist who changed the shape of writing and thinking for so many for more than sixty years. In addition to being a scholar and practitioner of this writing and performances I have written articles about him, taught with him at writers retreats and conference, been his ride to and from the airport when he was in town, made sure he got to a jazz club while he was here and performed with him on stage in his epic poem Wise, Why's Y's. Imamu essentially taught me how to be a poet and I don't consider him reactionary, rather revolutionary, activist, literary and profoundly intellectual. He is/was the smartest person I know. 


As a founder of the Black Arts Movement Imamu taught us the importance of creating from a black experience, to a black consciousness as original people on the planet Earth. I couldn't be myself without learning that and for that I'm grateful to my mentor and beloved role model Baraka. At present Im working with a large panel of Twin Cities artists to create some kind of public memorial and tribute that will pass the baton of his legacy to those who may not yet know the importance of his life and influence. The title of my poem "Is Always Be" is a quote from his mouth that refers to the persistence of every struggle and the need for every struggler to organize, protest and insist on justice because oppressors never stop their perpetual motion... 

I'll end this post with another Baraka quote: …poems give only glimpses of something that has already happened. Look to the source (the poet) to see process to see that the "only form is possibility."

Imamu wrote:

“The process itself is the most important quality because it can transform and create, its only form is possibility. The artifact, because it assumes one form, is only that particular quality or idea. It is, in this sense, after the fact, and is only important because it remarks on its source.” 1964 essay "Hunting is Not Those Heads on the Wall," Imamu Amiri Baraka (then Jones)