Dit is in die VSA dat een van die deurlopende temas van Kgotsitsile se poesie beslag kry, die verwysing na die swart Amerikaanse Civil Rights-beweging met sy prominente figure soos onder meer Malcolm X, Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael), Amiri Baraka (
LeRoi Jones) en Gwendolyn Brooks, asook die Pan-Afrikanistiese denkers en leiers soos Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba en Cesaire.
In addition to Ginsberg, contributors included the Beat luminaries Diane di Prima,
LeRoi Jones, and Ted Joans, as well as neighborhood kids such as Jonas Mekas, Ray Johnson, and photographer Norman Solomon.
In 1961, she and
LeRoi Jones began The Floating Bear, a mimeographed literary newsletter for young, experimental poets that, according to Jones, "was meant to be 'quick, fast and in a hurry'" and aimed to capture the "zigs and zags of the literary scene as well as some word of the general New York creative ambience" (Baraka 169).
LeRoi Jones and his Family (1964) is intriguing in its embedding of this cultural figure into the domesticated setting of his family, and in the semi-abstracted figure at the bottom right of the canvas.
Spivey describes his approach to the play as a "stylized mix of agitprop movement and multimedia woven between the written monologues about Tamir." For Spivey, the appeal of working on the play stemmed from "the angle from which the dialogue is coming—from the community." He notes that "in addition to creating fictional characters, it is our job [as theater artists] to reflect the just and unjust in the real world as they did back in the days of Clifford Odets and
LeRoi Jones. In other words, we should be the voice of the people."
Baraka (ne
LeRoi Jones) had been a founder of the Black Arts Movement, Black Power's artistic arm, but had more recently gained notoriety for his Sept.
Playwright
LeRoi Jones (who will later change his name to Amiri Baraka) opens the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in New York City's Harlem district, with the financial assistance of the Harlem Youth Project.
Infante reading Gregory Corso and
LeRoi Jones; Lea Deschenes reading Hettie Jones and Diane DiPrima; Bill MacMillan reading William S.
Leroi Jones has learned--and this has been very rare in jazz criticism--to write about music as an artist."
I brought my first Baraka (originally called
LeRoi Jones) book, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, at a used bookstore that existed slightly south of Dupont Street on Bathurst Street (Toronto) next door to a black barbershop, sometime in the mid-1980s.
No book dealing with such Beat literati as the aforementioned Ginsberg of Howl fame, Jack Kerouac of On the Road, and the likes of Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and
Leroi Jones would be honest without some raffish spice.
Perhaps no writer of the 1960s and '70s was more radical or polarizing than the former
LeRoi Jones, and no one did more to extend the political debates of the civil rights era to the world of the arts.