Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Questlove on Baraka
Further notes on PoemTalk episode 128
In 2018, PoemTalk's 128th episode was made — a conversation in which Tyrone Williams, Aldon Nielsen, and William J. Harris joined me in the Arts Cafe of the Kelly Writers House to talk before a live audience about Amiri Baraka’s poem “Something in the Way of Things (In Town).” Go HERE for a program note and links to the edited audio recording of the episode and also an unedited video recording. Recently we found a relevant piece published in the New York Times four years earlier. It was written by Questlove, and it refers to the studio session in which The Roots collaborated with Baraka to record "Something in the Way of Things."