Baraka's 'Sermon For Our Maturity.'

An archival recording of a poem of Amiri Baraka's that never made it into print

When Baraka’s selected poems came out in 2014, I noticed it was missing his recited poems from LPs and live readings, films he’d made, radio interviews, lectures that spiraled up from linear logic into chant and song. Reading, oratory, often improvising on his written text while reading as if he was a jazz musician and the text the score for his version of “Epistrophy,” was as vital to Amiri as the written word, and after he was siloed and neglected on the page for decades, sometimes even more important than what a book or essay could contain.

I just found a heap of new recordings of him reading live that didn’t make into my transcriptions but will be in the audio archive I keep at 2220arts in LA and elsewhere.

This sermon is a prayer, make the invisible, visible, that he answers with the sound of his voice as he delivers it. Toward the end he chants Om Mani Padme Hum, Sanskrit for praise to the jewel in the lotus, or I in the jewel lotus—the rarified center of an endlessly unfolding bloom. Baraka was a mystic, one who forfeits his tongue to sing, one faced with the silence so profound it’s profane to name it and yet he must sound it out. This praise song of a poem glitches to black and static in the center and returns to declare your growth is our own. It should be noted that Baraka started college at Howard studying theology before his professor, the poet Sterling Brown, expanded his faith and taste in music by introducing him to his jazz-heavy record collection. Failing out of Howard and joining the Air Force (which he later referred to affectionately as the Error, Farce) might have been one of the best things that could have happened to him, creatively. He would not become a boring respectable negro afraid to stand alone or against the tide of the institutions gentrifying minds like his. He’d turn his exile into an ethic of rebellion that would take him home to Newark and then back to the lotus-center where he burns eternal now.