• African American Review

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LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and the limits of open form.

Publisher	African American Review
Publication	African American Review
Subject	Ethnic, cultural, racial issues/studies
Format	Magazine/Journal
ISSN	1062-4783
Issues per Year	4
Volume	37
Issue	2-3
Published	2003-06-22

Role	Type	Name
Person	n/a	Amiri Baraka
Author	n/a	Ben Lee

   Only ideas,
   and their opposites.
   Like,
   he was really
   nowhere. ("A Poem for Speculative Hipsters," Transbluesency 110)

In a well-known passage from his autobiography, Amiri Baraka--then called LeRoi Jones--remembers a moment in which his own fascinations run headlong into the sort of ill-defined ideological wall with which culture can tend to divide us. Jones at this point is not yet a published poet, playwright, and critic, but rather a twenty-two-year-old college dropout stationed in Puerto Rico, a "weather gunner" in the U.S. Air Force. Just as feelings...

[This journal article is 10020 words long]