"Hunting is Not Those Heads": the Jones/Baraka Critic as Taxidermist.

Everything mortal dies, beautiful language is easily broken. Dead words shall live and live words shall die, and only the mouths of men can decide, only what's said is said and therefore alive. (Horace, "The Art of Poetry")

I always had to team to run fast, because (laughing) you'd say certain things to people you didn't know would provoke them to such an extent. You have to get in the wind. (Baraka, qtd. in Reilly 194)

"Error Farce," "Air Force" (Autobiography); "raise," "race," "rays," "raze" (Raise Race Rays Raze); "wise," why s," "Y's" (Wise Why's Y's). Repeat these sequences aloud to understand the difference between what LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's homonyms are on the page and what they are "in the wind." Aloud, his words bring a fusion and confusion of sound and beat and meaning. Read silently, they bring intellectual delight. The title of this essay is "'Hunting is Not Those Heads': The Jones/Baraka Critic as Taxidermist," but it could just as easily be called "Baraka Wails/Whales," because when I say Amiri Baraka wails/whales I'm talking about giant living forces in constant motion, I'm talking about music, I'm talking about hunting a white enigmatic beast, and I'm talking about something that, if it isn't handled right, can wash up on the beach and start to smell. The critic and reader of Baraka must understand that the inherent ambiguity of spoken words like/wl/ or /rs/is only a small part of the subtle word play Baraka employs to exploit the tension between the spoken and the written word. Many of Baraka's poems can be read as actions that reach far beyond the limits of the page. They are self-conscious efforts to thwart the confinement of written language and its semantic limits. Indeed, the expansive and elusive quality of the language performed and written by this "wailing" and "whaling" poet is intrinsically connected to the living man who has continually refused the certainty of staying in a single place or identity.

In his 1964 essay "Hunting is Not Those Heads on the Wall," Baraka (then Jones) makes clear what would be a constant in his aesthetics throughout his opus--art is action, verb, hunt (Home 173-78). Art is founded in "thought" which, he states, "is more important than art" and certainly more important than artifact (173). He implies that the aesthete, the academician, is like a deist worshiping the art, the static thing, without understanding that the thing is a function of its creation by a creator. Jones writes:

   The artist is cursed with his artifact,
   which exists without and despite him....
   The academic Western mind is the best
   example of the substitution of artifact
   worship for lightning awareness of the
   art process.... The process itself is the
   most important quality because it can
   transform and create, and 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. (173-74)

When I think of these words and the metaphor of the title "Hunting is Not Those Heads," I imagine the academy not as a deist's temple, but as a taxidermist's shop, with the scholar as the taxidermist. It is our job to handle dead things. We do taxidermy, which means we arrange skin; we try to put the appearance of life back into what was destroyed in the hunt. If we play out the metaphor further, we can assume some artists, some poets are excellent shots who leave us with an abundance of skin to shape--and others are not. Some poems seem bludgeoned on the page while others seem still to be brimming with life.

The reason that we are celebrating Baraka in the new millennium is that he is a poet who not only knows how to hunt, who shoots straight to the heart, but who also understands that the poems he gives us are only glimpses of something that has already happened. It is he, often within the very poems themselves, who challenges us to look to the source, to see the process and not the product, to see that the "only form is possibility."

Baraka's poems live, or seem to live, because of his keen and constant awareness of their potential to be dead. From his earliest poems, his use of ellipses, unclosed parentheses, white space, homonyms, and puns make reference to a place off the page always alive and without limits or, as in "A Poem for Willie Best," to an undefinable place "neither / front nor back" (Transbluesency 63). In the final gesture of that poem, Baraka enacts a number of these techniques to refuse closure, and in so doing plays out the tension between confinement and freedom that inheres in both the form and meaning of the poem. The poem both identifies with Willie Best, confined by the white stereotype of "sleep'n'eat," and undermines the limits of that confinement. The last word and phrase of the poem--"(Hear?"--in the sense of the poem enacting the dialect of "sleep'n'eat," places us inside that stereotyped identity by having us voice the simple word that punctuates his speech. But through typography, syntax, and the semantic play of the homonym, the poem becomes a conduit into a space that is in unlimited motion. We are neither "Hear"/here nor there. We are asking a question in an aside that refuses to end. We are called to listen to the speaker, while asking to "hear" ourselves.

This early poem from Dead Lecturer shows how Baraka's use of the open forms of modernism and the avant-garde of the fifties undergoes what William J. Harris calls "Jazzification" in his seminal book The Jazz Aesthetic. Baraka's sheer virtuosity of language and technique allows him to "invert this white form" and move the poem into "postwhite" space (Harris 92-93).

The first time I heard Amiri Baraka read his work was in New Jersey at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1986. This is what I remember: My friend and I had been to a number of readings already. It was late afternoon and under a large tent a very forgettable white poet mumbled his poems and I began to fall asleep, and then my friend nudged me when a small black man stood up behind a podium. That man wailed. He performed a poem found in Eulogies called "Wailers" as an elegy for Larry Neal and Bob Marley. In this poem the sounds /wl/ and /wler/ repeat continually. Baraka's reference to Melville in the poem's seventh line sets up the homonym that carries the poem on its big whale back. On the page the word "w-h-a-l-e" appears only once, but the notion of "confronting the white mad beast," of killing whales, of being "w-h-a-l-e-r-s" is implied in every "w-a-i-l" shouted out.

It is perhaps the homonym, the sound that sends us in several directions at once, the pun that leads to a reevaluation of the word, that is most central to Baraka's poetic. Surely he is not alone in his use of the homonym, but in the titles and phrases I quote above, it is apparent that Baraka is a particular virtuoso of this kind of verbal play, where a single sound or phrase can become, with Baraka's writing or uttering it, what Stephen Henderson almost forty years ago called in a slightly different context a "mascon--a massive concentration of black experiential energy" (44). Say this poem aloud:

   Hey, Bob, Wail on rock on Jah come
   into us as real vision and action
   Hey, Larry, Wail on, with Lester and
   the Porkpie, wailing us energy
   for truth. We Wailers is all, and on past
   that to say, wailing for all
   we worth. Rhythm folks obsessed with
   stroking what is with our
   sound purchase. (Eulogies 21)

It is this "sound purchase" that is so much a part the subtle depth of Baraka's play. It is, of course, a wonderfully potent phrase when we realize that the root of "purchase" is chase. So a "sound purchase" might be a perfect pursuit, a sensible chase, a solid hunt, as well as an economic exchange--"a wailing for all we worth," for sound, itself, the very stuff of poetry and song. And it is a chase for a measurement of depth as well.

Baraka tells us that he and Larry Neal and Bob Marley and perhaps all we readers purchase rhythm and sound to get to depth, vision, action, and truth. You "hear"? Speaking and thinking about these poems in certain ways helps us to discern their purchase. To see the chase. To make the sound become something more than sound, but reality and action.

Baraka does, of course, what many great African American writers do, he destroys the language--"razes" it, as it were, and then builds it back up again in a new way--he "raises" it. The dead skin we are trying to arrange and stuff is both a symbol of that destruction and a living, breathing animal performance of the rebuilding.

I turn now to what can be perceived to be the "deadest" of Baraka's work, the poem "It's Nation Time," which appears in The Jones/Baraka Reader but is absent from Transbluesency. This poem, so embedded in Baraka's early Black Nationalist phase, seems in some ways bound intensely to the context that produced it. I quote only one or two words from the poem. And that's the crux--is it one word or two?

   be
   come (It's Nation 21)

This phrase, we can call it a kind of ad hominem homonym, appears five times in the poem, several times in a row toward the beginning, and Baraka builds on it as he repeats "come out" later in the poem. The poem calls me to do something I personally can't do--"be come / black genius rise in spirit muscle." In 1970 when this was published I was a seven-year-old white boy riding my bike through my white suburb of Cincinnati totally unaware of any black world around me--downtown or back east in Newark or New York. Nevertheless, this poem, bound deeply in time and race, still has this potent phrase that tells me, a white "taxidermist" in the new millennium, that it is also about "home" and about the movement toward home. The poem is about the present and the future. It is in some ways a dead poem because that present is in the past, but that future, that will "come, come, come out," is still happening. The poem, it turns out, isn't as dead, or wrong-headed, or agit-prop, as one might argue. It is that piece of language split in two that is the mantra for the birth of a nation to "BE," and it remains powerful for what it "BE COMES"--a signifier in which a single word is destroyed, razed, to be come a word that builds and raises.

I conclude with train and not a whale, a reference to a fellow Ohioan, John Parker, and not a dead old skin one can get caught in and caught up in, but a jail. In each "Y's" of the Griot's Song Wise, Why's, Y's, we find a parenthetical reference to musical accompaniment.

In "History-Wise #22" it is the "Black Mountain Blues" of Bessie Smith (famous in Baraka's opus for what Clay says she's saying when she sings). There in Bessie's song about Black Mountain, we find the jail (and we also find in the very title, "Black Mountain Blues," a reference to a poetry movement which was, in a way, a jail from which LeRoi Jones sprang). And in the fourteenth line of the poem we find John Parker, a fearless engineer on the underground railroad, and it doesn't take much thought to figure out what t-r-a-i-n(s) / t-r-a-n-e(s) we might be riding. This is just one more poem where we see in the poem its own making. We can see what happened before the poem in the white space and the history referred to, and in the words and their form; we can see the poem's history and process and performance.

Now, imagine Bessie Smith singing about a horrible upside down place. A place where everything is violent and terribly wrong,

   Back in Black Mountain
   a child will smack your face.
   Babies crying for liquor
   and all the birds sing bass. (Cole in
   Harry's Blues Lyrics)

while the poet transforms the poem into a train:

   The
   real
   sub
   way
   Ms. "Moses" Streamliner
   John Parker's Darker
   Sparker (83)

The underground railroad is put on the rails and hurtles along the tracks. But the most amazing thing about the poem is the way it ends. The poem ends with one of the biggest "Why's" of all: W-H-Y-Y-Y-Y-Y is wailed out as only a train can. It is a profound wail of agony, questioning, and celebration. It is a poem easily made alive by any taxidermist. It is a poem in constant motion. It is a poem of slavery, a poem about getting out of prison, but, most importantly, a poem that asks profoundly: Why the prison? why the train? at all.

And what is the taxidermist's purchase in all of this? It is that Baraka's poetry, when discussed and written about, involves arranging skin, seeing and being the hunter and the hunted, understanding that the name of the man who wrote the poem has changed and changed and changed again. That the poem is simply the artifact of a process still in motion. That when reading Baraka's work, we must take perhaps the most potent play of language he's given us to heart. Imamu suggests, "I'm am You"--Imamu--"I'm am You." Whether we are white, black, brown, red, or yellow, we must read his work as if we wrote it, say it like we mean it, and sing it like we think it should be sung.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amid (LeRoi Jones). Home: Social Essays. New York: Morrow, 1963.

--. It's Nation Time. Chicago: Third World P, 1970.

--. Transbluesency. New York: Marlilio, 1995.

--. Wise, Why's, Y's. Chicago: Third World P, 1995.

Cole, H. "Black Mountain Blues." Harry's Blues Lyrics & Tabs Online. 21 Jan. 2002. <http://blueslyrics.tripod.com/lyrics /janis_joplin/black_mountain_blues.htm>

Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985.

Horace. "The Art of Poetry." Trans. Burton Raffel. The Crtitical Traditon: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David Richter. New York: St. Martin's P, 1989. 69.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Reilly, Charlie, ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

Joseph Heithaus is a poet and associate professor at DePauw University. His work has recently appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, North American Review, and Poetry.