In fact, he identified himself entirely with it, even in his own self-reflection. In the reflective poem "leroy," published in 1969 under his newly adopted name Amiri Baraka, a nostalgic comment on his mother becomes a lofty vision of himself as the bearer of black wisdom -- that "strong nigger feeling" (5) -- from his ancestors forward to the next generation. He refers to this legacy that he is passing on as his "consciousness" (11), an indication that he had by this point in his life entirely adopted his race as his identity.
This wholehearted self-identification with race, along with a keen awareness of his cultural power as a poet, combined to create an artist absorbed with his own capacity for social comment and change. After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka became disenchanted with the somewhat passive anti-establishment attitudes of the Greenwich Village artistic community, and moved to Harlem to become involved in black nationalism. There he established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School, and threw himself into developing the role of poetry, drama, and music in the formation of a modern black social consciousness.
His conception of the power of art to inform and even create this black consciousness is most clearly revealed in his poem "Black Art." In this poem, his long-held belief in expressionism, influenced heavily by William Carlos Williams, lays the foundation by asserting the direct link between true art and the reality it represents: "Poems are bullshit unless they are / teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step" (1-3). Since poems have the power not just to represent but in some way to be the reality they describe, Baraka goes on to indicate the type of poems needed to create the social change...
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O Brother, Where Art Thou? Homer in Hollywood: The Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? Could a Hollywood filmmaker adapt Homer's Odyssey for the screen in the same way that James Joyce did for the Modernist novel? The idea of a high-art film adaptation of the Odyssey is actually at the center of the plot of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Contempt, and the Alberto Moravia novel on which Godard's film is
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Creative Writing Portfolio Over this course, I have learned a fair bit about analysis. I have looked at poetry, in my metaphor analysis, a visual analysis of the South African flag, and I conducted a discourse analysis of Emerson's "Self-Reliance." These steps taught me three key things. First, they taught me to look at things from different perspectives. Second, they taught me to examine the underlying arguments found in all works
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