During his career of nearly thirty years he has endured vitriolic attacks from pioneers of the New Black Aesthetic such as Addison Gayle Jr. as well as from patriarchs of white liberalism such as Irving Howe, who, in
Harper's Magazine, December 1969, characterized Reed's prose as "the commercial cooings of Captain Kangaroo." In a 1978 interview Reed remarked that in the literary world "the status quo has a vested interest in meally-mouthedness ... and making things seem like they're serene."
Reed's aesthetic, what he calls "neoamerican hoodooism," flies in the face of the literary establishment. Interviewer Robert Gover describes neohoodooism as a modern Americanization of voodoo, a syncretic religion that "has no argument with any other theology and has absorbed Jesus and the Catholic saints as easily as it could any other religion's pantheon. It has a place in its system for any way of perceiving man's relation with the unknown. It is flamboyantly undogmatic." Reed merges West African and Haitian influences with such diverse influences as hard-boiled detective fiction, jazz, spirituals, Westerns, and the machinations of American politics. This blending results in poetry and prose that continuously shift between startling realism and confounding surrealism.
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