Amiri Baraka’s Adventures with the Out & the Gone

I want to explore Amiri Baraka’s idea of the Out and the Gone which he articulates in “The Author’s Introduction” to his 2007 short story collection, Tales of the Out & the Gone. The Out is “out of the ordinary” because the artists are “just not where most other people” are, and the Gone is “even farther ‘Out,’ crazier, wilder, deeper, a ‘heavier’ metaphor, a deeper parable” (10, 12). In essence, Baraka is striving to create an art which is as invocative and as original as bebop or free jazz: he wants to inhabit the same world where a great cutting-edge work can be called “Out to Lunch” (1964), a simple title declaring a radical aesthetic by the great alto saxophonist, Eric Dolphy. Amiri Baraka’s aesthetic has always demanded the extreme, the outrageous, both in art and life. From boyhood on, in every art form he sought the Out and the Gone. Later these pleasures helped him shape his own art. Even though he loved the Out and the Gone for itself, he always felt the extreme was the best way to the real.

Therefore it is not surprising he ended up an avant-garde artist, a member of the Beat, Black Mountain, and New York Schools, collectively called the New American Poetry, a post-World War II predominately white innovative literary movement. He was close friends with the poets Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Ed Dorn, and the grand old man of the group, Charles Olson. They provided examples of the out and the gone. However, before he sought the out and the gone in the post-war American avant-garde and such European writers as Kafka and Artaud, he found it in 1940s radio, science fiction, rhythm & blues, and 1950s commercial fantasy movies. In Newark in his teen years, this was the only avant-garde available.

In “In Memory of Radio” from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) the poet asks, “Who had ever thought of the divinity of Lamont Cranston? / Only Jack Kerouac, that I know of & me,” (12). Lamont Cranston is The Shadow, radio crime fighter with hypnotic powers and a double identity. Only the Beat novelist Jack Kerouac and he understood the importance of this character for suggesting different possibilities. Radio taught him to pretend but didn’t let him be a prophet poet, someone who could change the world with words. It is not until later when he is an adult reflecting back on the radio programs he says: “They taught us that evil needed to be destroyed… And I believed that—impressionable as I was at those young ages—but the trick is that I still believe it!” (Autobiography 21). He will have to move beyond this Beat vision to become a political poet, make a trip to Castro’s Cuba to learn alternatives. Science fiction also provided an alternative world, an alternative way to look at the world. He read Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and the annual sci-fi anthologies. Baraka has written sci-fi stories such as “Answers in Progress” where spacemen come looking for Art Blakey records, from the 1967 short story collection Tales, and “Heathen Technology at the End of the Twentieth Century” where people are “dismetaphored” by the powers that be so they can’t think. The antidote is “Trane and Aaron Douglas eight times a day” (Tales of the Out & the Gone 158). He has transported science fiction into the world of black culture.

In the short story “Screamers” from Tales he finds the out and the gone in rhythm and blues. In Newark the young Roi attends concerts featuring honkers, far out saxophonists, more interested in screeching, moaning, and honking than making beautiful music. In this story the representatives of this sound are Jay McNeely and Lynn Hope. “Jay had set a social form for the poor, just as Bird and Dizzy proposed for the middle class. On his back screaming was the Mona Lisa with the mustache, as crude and simple” (Tales 77). So McNeely...