last night’s amiri baraka reading has me still in a loop. i want to blog as quick as i can here before heading to another reading in order to try to see what (if anything) is different from this reading.
sadly, amiri only read a bit of his work (two short stories from his new collection and an older poem). the readings were beautiful, nuanced, savvy, authentic all befitting the amount of literaryt effort that went into them.
then we move on to the q&a which was the bulk of the evening. while there were a few questions of a literary nature most of them revolved around political currents.
i can indict a whole bunch of fools here, and i will later, but the biggest culprit was me. instead of asking this man about poetics & the rigors of a writer’s life i asked a very naïve question regarding us politics. something that i should reserve for a local alderman or the like. i aint happy with myself about it but its a lesson learned. a hard lesson.