http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/baraka/baraka.htm
One of the most controversial poets of the Black Arts Movement, then and now, is Amiri Baraka. His political and social views have run a varied and interesting course, from bohemian Beat poet, to Black Nationalist playwright/poet, to Marxist/Leninist Third World Socialist poet.
Throughout the sixties, Baraka's work was more and more radicalized in terms of racial and national identity. While early poems dealt with death, suicide and self-hatred, after the death of Malcolm X, he adopted a Black Nationalist racial separatist view. Around 1974 his socio-political ideology underwent another sea-change, and he abandoned Black Nationalism to embrace Marxist Leninism, supporting a complete revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system.
Very much in keeping with the griot tradition, Baraka has held a continuous recitative on events of the Black community, sometimes to the outrage of both black and white readers. His poems are distinctly oral, and like the sermons of Johnson's God's Trombones, "these poems would better be intoned than read." In his poem "Black Art" he calls out for more functional poetry; poetry that has the power to change the world:
We want poems like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. (12-15)
……
…We want "poems that kill"
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out… (19-23)
……
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly. Let Black People understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of lovers and warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world
We want a black poem. And a
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD (43-55)
Clearly in Baraka's view, the community Sasa is filled with insufficiency, and as griot he reminds all assembled that there was a time, a time long before in the Zamani, when this was not true. He simultaneously sends out the call and suggests the response.