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Foreword: From the Archive Out
- University of New Mexico Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Foreword x well) and adding a dense but seamless layer of social and political commentary in her enormously useful headnote sections, Moreno Pisano manages to embed her stance toward the material in a running narrative that contextualizes the work for both then and now. Because she has also taken into account the further trajectories of Baraka and Dorn, beyond the dates of these letters, we are given great insight into some of their later practices. In her opening commentary on letters from 1959– 1960, for example, Moreno Pisano refers to a 1972 interview conducted with Dorn in which he speaks of the importance, for a writer, of “getting assignments.” Given that, at this point, neither Baraka nor Dorn have an audience to speak of, she proposes the letters themselves “to serve as this kind of assignment,” as “Dorn and Jones are proving themselves to one another, testing the limits of their poetry and ideas, and doing so against worthy partners.” The extent to which so many major ideas and forms of the time were explored in letters cannot be overstated and constitutes a primary site for the exploration of the curious inversion of the “public” and the “private” during the Cold War, reaching , perhaps, an apotheosis in the surveilled letters written by imprisoned activist George Jackson. When Dorn characterized the United States in the early 1960s as a “permissive asylum,” his prescience met head on with Baraka’s experience, the kind of experience limned in one of his earliest texts, “Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine,” in which the story of his grandfather’s forced migration due to racism is told through an “enlightenment” that can only become obscure, through the vibrations of time travel in which, as in Baraka’s masterpiece Blues People, “emotional validity” is what everything must be tested against. We are only beginning to come to grips with the still ongoing legacies of the Cold War and the National Security State, particularly as it has affected not just the horizons of our political life but designs of and on the imagination itself. In one ripple effect, the 9/11 Commission Report concludes that “we believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management .” Section 11.1 of the Commission’s chapter on imagination states the following: “Considering what was not done suggests possible ways to institutionalize imagination . . . . It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of the imagination.” Against the expected “Orwellian” scenarios often presented by liberal thought, it might make more sense not to divorce something like the 9/11 Commission Report from the general culture, to see it as following and not leading, as confirming what has already taken place. In this sense, making available this kind of primary material gives us a conduit to begin deinstitutionalizing our imaginations, to return to possibilities both thwarted and realized but certainly imagined. One of the prime pedagogical principles in the Lost & Found project is to put aside labels of schools and movements and conventional literary histories, such as exist of the period, and “follow the person .” By following Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn, guided by Moreno Pisano’s sure [54.87.17.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:47 GMT) Foreword xi hand, we are presented with an alternative universe tracing the formation of 1960s North American thought and culture in ways almost impossible to find elsewhere. Naturally, primary materials are messier than codified studies, but they open worlds usually foreclosed by decorum, disciplinary stricture, dictates of fashion or relative worth, and a host of other containment methods. Finally, it is well worth considering what it might mean to view Baraka and Dorn (and others associated with them) in light of global decolonization. Both Baraka and Dorn fed on the foundational ideas of Charles Olson, the primary North American post–World War II thinker who broke with both institutional academic and political opportunities in order to be a poet and pursue knowledge in radical and new forms but also to be part of a political project, part of an effort to propose and initiate new structures. Dorn’s initial encounter with Olson came as a student at Black Mountain College, as the recipient of Olson’s “program” of study, in the form of “A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn.” This would remain a foundational source for his continued study of the dispossession of Native peoples on this continent. For Baraka, the connection...