Amiri Baraka: October 23, 1984

The Poetry Center, in collaboration with Associated Students Performing Arts, co-presents Amiri Baraka, reading his poetry and talking with the mostly-student audience at San Francisco State. Baraka reads from poems a book he indicates is called To Raise the Roof (playing off the homophones "Raise, Race, Rays, Raze" as used in the title of his 1979 collection of essays) and other poems, including "Class Struggle in Music II" and "Wailers (for Larry Neal and Bob Marley)," both poems having been issued on recordings (plus the latter on film) two years earlier, with saxophonist David Murray and drummer Steve McCall, and the topical poem "How to Beat Reagan." The program takes place on the eve of the re-election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. President. After an introduction from Associated Students Performing Arts, Baraka is greeted and presented with a "Reagan-Busters" t-shirt by two students representing Students Against Reagan, one of whom announces a rally on campus the next day at noon: "The administration thinks they've cancelled it, but they haven't." 

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
César Chavez Student Center, San Francisco State University
Date
1984-10-23
Event Run Time
01:25:10
Contributors
Students Against Reagan
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Amiri Baraka (01:00:39)

Amiri Baraka reads "Already Raised," "Drum," "Seriously," "Morning Song," "Various Chauvinisms Get Raised," "Exchange Lines," "Yeah!", "Death," and "Finale" (all from To Raise the Roof), then reads "I Investigate the Sun," "Wailers (for Larry Neal and Bob Marley)," "Class Struggle in Music II," "Sounding," and "How to Beat Reagan."

Conversation (00:22:05)

Amiri Baraka engages with his mostly-student audience after reading his poems. The event takes place just days prior to the 1984 re-election for a second term of Ronald Reagan, bringing in an extension of the reactionary agenda enacted during his first term by the "right-wing juggernaut" backing the Republican administration, intended to reverse civil and social policies enacted during the prior 15 years. The anti-apartheid movement, aimed at taking down the white-supremacist South African government, is among the multiple struggles engaged in by the poet.

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