Hard Facts is a self-consciously communist poetry book, right down to the red cover with the silhouettes of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao on the back. Baraka's consciousness is committed to class struggle and his poetics is materialist, but it too often falls short of dialectics…. [There] is the bad mouthing of the phonies with a hot stream of scream-of-consciousness hip talk mixed with revolutionary exhortations. All of which breaks our ear rather than sings to our needs. An atheist preacher is still a preacher, and one wonders how much respect for the multinational masses is really there. I'm reminded of a line from Baraka's earlier Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note: "Nobody sings anymore."
Song is what's missing from Baraka's list of what the people need from poets.
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