Correspondence #28: Eliot Katz

Poet’s Baraka memories

AS WE REPORTED very recently in a review of a BBC broadcast, African-American Beat Amiri Baraka controversially left behind the integrated literary enclave of Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s, pursuing a separate political and artistic life as a black nationalist in Harlem and, along the way, sowed some anti-Semitic slurs in his work and public utterances.

Now, the Jewish poet Eliot Katz, a long-time associate of Baraka until his 2014 death, in a letter to Rock and the Beat Generation speaks up on behalf of his mentor and friend to paint an expanded picture of a fellow writer…

Email, June 29th, 2023

Dear Simon,

After reading your piece about Amiri Baraka, which focused largely on the occasionally controversial side of Amiri, and as a great fan of your work on Rock and the Beat Generation, I wanted to send you a note to offer a fuller picture of Amiri, who was a great New Jersey poet and a dear longtime friend.

When Danny Shot and I, two then-young Jewish poets from New Jersey in our mid-20s, started Long Shot literary journal in the early 1980s, Allen Ginsberg did a benefit reading at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, to help us raise funds for our first issue, and about a half-year later Amiri and his wife, Amina, did a benefit reading at Rutgers to help us raise funds for our second issue.

After that reading, Amiri took questions from the audience. After one person in the audience asked Amiri what young people could do to help society, Amiri mentioned the possibility of getting involved with progressive activist groups and he then held up a copy of our first issue of Long Shot, and told the audience of about 500 that they could also do something similar to what these two young poets from New Brunswick had just done and put out a good independent literary journal.

After that night, which was the first night that I had met Amiri in person after talking with him on the phone a few times, we remained friendly for the rest of his life, reading on bills together a number of times through the years in New Jersey and New York, working on a few activist projects together, and having many great long conversations after readings, at parties, over meals, and in his Rutgers office during two years that he taught there, while I was working in New Brunswick as a housing advocate. Amiri was generous, friendly, sharp, and funny. When Amiri and Amina opened up their Newark home basement for a few years as a literary café, I was invited to read poems as part of the three-person bill on their opening night.

At a certain point in the mid-1960s, Amiri had become a Black nationalist, and had helped to start the historic and politically influential Black Arts Movement, working mostly with other Black artists and activists, and distancing himself from many of the Beat Generation writers, although he always remained good friends with Allen Ginsberg. And yes, as your piece notes, during his early Black nationalist years, he did write a few anti-Semitic poems, which he later apologized for in an article in the Village Voice.

By the time I met Amiri in the early 1980s, Amiri had become a Marxist, and he was quite supportive of poets and artists, especially activist poets and artists, of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. As your article also notes, those mid-1960s anti-Semitic poems, which had largely been forgotten, including by Amiri, came back into focus again when Amiri wrote a few silly lines in his long 9/11 poem, ‘Somebody Blew Up America’, lines that said 4,000 Israeli workers at the World Trade Center had been warned ahead of time to stay home on 9/11 (as if nearly 10% of the WTC workers could have been from Israel), a few silly lines that had been based on his momentary willingness to believe a false news story that had gone around the internet after originating in a political group’s newspaper in Lebanon.

That 4,000 number in the original rumor had seemingly been taken from the number of Israelis who had reportedly called Israeli government offices to say they couldn’t reach friends or relatives living or working in downtown NYC by phone at a time when New York City’s cellphone towers had mostly gone down.

There were a few times after that poem was written that Amiri sent around emails to friends acknowledging that news story had been a false rumor, which he also acknowledged to me in a private conversation about the poem, but I don’t think he ever said that publicly. My sense at the time, and I could be wrong about this, was that I don’t think he wanted to write another major public apology, worried perhaps that people might then request even more apologies from him, perhaps for some of his Marxist views.

But, even if I personally thought it would have been best for him to publicly retract those few lines, since this poem was being discussed widely in the press with Amiri in the position then as New Jersey’s official poet laureate, I don’t think that putting a few misinformed lines in a longer poem meant that he had gone back to that short period in the mid-1960s when he did intentionally write some anti-Semitic poems.

In the 2000s, he certainly continued to be supportive of many Jewish writers who I know. And although I don’t know of Amiri ever going back to clearly associating himself with the Beat Generation, perhaps because he saw a range of different political viewpoints among the various Beat writers, he did teach at Naropa a number of times in the poetics department that had been founded by his progressive Beat poet friends, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman; he spoke movingly at Allen’s memorial at the Shambhala Center in NYC after Allen’s death; and he contributed a beautiful tribute piece for Allen in a volume called Poems for the Nation.

When I published my first full-length poetry book, Space and Other Poems for Love, Laughs, and Social Transformation, in 1990 in my early thirties, both Amiri and Allen wrote introductions. Here’s an excerpt from the very generous introduction that Amiri wrote: ‘Eliot Katz’s Space, his second book, ought to make him instantly famous, it is that good….The reason I am making such a broadly celebratory statement is that I have followed the development of “E. Katz’s” work for the last five years or so. In that time he has published in many little magazines as well as publishing a 1st volume, Thieves at Work [which was a chapbook]. What has marked all of his work is a determination to get to the bottom of…the essence of.. what we…all of us…are doing with our lives and why…. Poems like the Dinosaur poems that pose to us our contribution to our own not-fantastic extinction…constantly prod and tickle us so that we can see and feel better. And the continuing laughter in and around many of the poems is neither superficial nor forced, it is part of the powerful natural sweep of the work that it can twist and turn us from the deepest tragic sadness to the high hoarse pump of a young laughter…the laughter of those who laugh to keep from cryin, or laugh cause the stuff need to be laughed at till you can wipe it out. The title poem is one of the most important epic poems I’ve come upon.’

Of course, Amiri’s prediction about me becoming a famous poet never turned out (and was never something I had aimed for), but I share this with you to show you an example of the incredibly generous spirit that Amiri was willing to show to a young, unknown Jewish poet, the son of a Holocaust-survivor mother as Amiri knew. As I mentioned up front, I am a big fan of your Rock and the Beat Generation Substack, and so I would want your readers to know the friendly, generous, intellectual, humorous, and multicultural side of Amiri Baraka, the Amiri Baraka who was willing to keep on evolving in his thinking about how to make this world a better place.

All best wishes,

Eliot Katz

See also: ‘Radio review #2: Controversies’, June 28th, 2023