Uploaded January 2013 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
David Henderson reads the first section of 'Ruckus Poem', recorded in New York December 1968, released on the LP 'Totally Corrupt' by the Dial-a-Poem Poets in 1972. The poem as a whole plays a central role in 'The Lousiana Weekly', a section of Henderson's 1970 collection 'De Mayor of Harlem'. Written in New Orleans in Summer 1967, it would seem to engage in particular with the Newark riots (or rebellion) of July 1967, over the course of which the poet LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) was arrested for the possession of fire-arms and beaten by the police. Viz.: "THEY GOT ROI they got roi they got roi / stomped him good / said he had two loads 32s two 32s / roi wasnt ready roi wasnt ready / he could at least have had some 45s some TOMMY GUNS some TANKS / but who's ready for broadway when she gets funky." Henderson's poetry of this period, as collected in 'De Mayor', frequently deals with the 1960s race riots which led many commentators to predict a black / white civil-war in the US: for Henderson, as for Baraka and many other poets, the riots are insurrectionary, potentially revolutionary acts, deliberate and conscious rejections of the white control of money which flows out, but never into the ghetto (storekeepers who live outside the area make their profits and then leave at the end of the day; drug-dealers & sellers of cheap alcohol maintain addiction as a way of life, a means of ameliorating the suffering of poverty & misery (addiction itself as metaphor for the operation of the commodity culture as a whole)). Yet there is an ambivalence here: in these works, the first person observer, often functioning as something of a modern-day flanuer, traverses the streets, building up a collage of fragments - newspaper headlines, exhorations, exclamations, descriptions (Henderson is particularly interested in the idea of the 'documentary' poem) - fragments which do not pretend to 'impartiality', a mere recording of what one sees, but which acknowledge the constructed, mediated nature of social consciousness within urban environments and whose own formal mediations both echo & attempt to resist such forms of social control. (Thus, for instance, the sarcastic inclusion of the racist commentary of white media which characterizes rioters as 'animals' and thugs - "A GANG OF MONKEYS HAVE SURROUNDED THE SHOPPING CENTER"). One is reminded a little, in certain elements of the poem's flow, of the 'walking' poems of Frank O'Hara; yet Henderson is far more directly politicized, for while he celebrates aspects of city culture, particularly in later poems of the 1970s and 80s in which jazz, Latin music, and the poetry scene of the Lower East Side suggest cultural possibilities for shared affirmation and resistance - what he calls "the third world / in the fourth dimension" - he is also acutely aware of the real injustices which descriptions of New York as a sexy, bohemian cultural melting pot sometimes tend to elide. Thus, any 'flaneur' elements tend to be self-critical or deliberately uncertain in tone; self-conscious registrations, one might argue, of the poet's bohemian 'disinterest' and separation from the lives of the oppressed working-class of the ghetto - those elements which preoccupy Baraka in his move from Greenwich Village to Harlem and then to Newark - against which fragments of popular song, jazz, and allusions to voodoo gods strive to present a collective alternative. Perhaps the most notable instance of this latter element occurs in the earlier poem 'Keep on Pushing', a response to the Harlem Riots of 1964, fragments of the song of the same name by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions serve as a contrast to the smooth-talk of radio DJs, racist university professors condemning black unrest, and the ghetto's daily whirl of commerce. Such allusions are nonetheless part of a complex, multi-faceted whole in which their status is never secure; they might be used as songs of liberation, but they are nonetheless bound up in the same economy which daily oppresses the people of the ghetto. Henderson's poems thus offer no easy solutions, and it is this balance between revolutionary desire and a realization of the complexities and intermeshings of poetic construction, individual subjectivity, and the possibility for collective resistance that gives them a vitally important role as political and poetic works of continuing relevance. Henderson's reading here is very different to that one might expect from the poem's capitalized appearance on the printed page: instead of the explosive humour and anger that tend to characterise the oral poetics of Baraka's Black Nationalist work, we are presented with a subdued, almost mournful recitation more similar in tone to Baraka's earlier recording of 'Black Dada Nihilismus' or Joseph Jarman's 'Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City': poetry of rumination and uncertainty as much as, if not more so, than poetry of collective solidarity and hope.
David Henderson reads the first section of 'Ruckus Poem', recorded in New York December 1968, released on the LP 'Totally Corrupt' by the Dial-a-Poem Poets in 1972. The poem as a whole plays a central role in 'The Lousiana Weekly', a section of Henderson's 1970 collection 'De Mayor of Harlem'. Written in New Orleans in Summer 1967, it would seem to engage in particular with the Newark riots (or rebellion) of July 1967, over the course of which the poet LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) was arrested for the possession of fire-arms and beaten by the police. Viz.: "THEY GOT ROI they got roi they got roi / stomped him good / said he had two loads 32s two 32s / roi wasnt ready roi wasnt ready / he could at least have had some 45s some TOMMY GUNS some TANKS / but who's ready for broadway when she gets funky." Henderson's poetry of this period, as collected in 'De Mayor', frequently deals with the 1960s race riots which led many commentators to predict a black / white civil-war in the US: for Henderson, as for Baraka and many other poets, the riots are insurrectionary, potentially revolutionary acts, deliberate and conscious rejections of the white control of money which flows out, but never into the ghetto (storekeepers who live outside the area make their profits and then leave at the end of the day; drug-dealers & sellers of cheap alcohol maintain addiction as a way of life, a means of ameliorating the suffering of poverty & misery (addiction itself as metaphor for the operation of the commodity culture as a whole)). Yet there is an ambivalence here: in these works, the first person observer, often functioning as something of a modern-day flanuer, traverses the streets, building up a collage of fragments - newspaper headlines, exhorations, exclamations, descriptions (Henderson is particularly interested in the idea of the 'documentary' poem) - fragments which do not pretend to 'impartiality', a mere recording of what one sees, but which acknowledge the constructed, mediated nature of social consciousness within urban environments and whose own formal mediations both echo & attempt to resist such forms of social control. (Thus, for instance, the sarcastic inclusion of the racist commentary of white media which characterizes rioters as 'animals' and thugs - "A GANG OF MONKEYS HAVE SURROUNDED THE SHOPPING CENTER"). One is reminded a little, in certain elements of the poem's flow, of the 'walking' poems of Frank O'Hara; yet Henderson is far more directly politicized, for while he celebrates aspects of city culture, particularly in later poems of the 1970s and 80s in which jazz, Latin music, and the poetry scene of the Lower East Side suggest cultural possibilities for shared affirmation and resistance - what he calls "the third world / in the fourth dimension" - he is also acutely aware of the real injustices which descriptions of New York as a sexy, bohemian cultural melting pot sometimes tend to elide. Thus, any 'flaneur' elements tend to be self-critical or deliberately uncertain in tone; self-conscious registrations, one might argue, of the poet's bohemian 'disinterest' and separation from the lives of the oppressed working-class of the ghetto - those elements which preoccupy Baraka in his move from Greenwich Village to Harlem and then to Newark - against which fragments of popular song, jazz, and allusions to voodoo gods strive to present a collective alternative. Perhaps the most notable instance of this latter element occurs in the earlier poem 'Keep on Pushing', a response to the Harlem Riots of 1964, fragments of the song of the same name by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions serve as a contrast to the smooth-talk of radio DJs, racist university professors condemning black unrest, and the ghetto's daily whirl of commerce. Such allusions are nonetheless part of a complex, multi-faceted whole in which their status is never secure; they might be used as songs of liberation, but they are nonetheless bound up in the same economy which daily oppresses the people of the ghetto. Henderson's poems thus offer no easy solutions, and it is this balance between revolutionary desire and a realization of the complexities and intermeshings of poetic construction, individual subjectivity, and the possibility for collective resistance that gives them a vitally important role as political and poetic works of continuing relevance. Henderson's reading here is very different to that one might expect from the poem's capitalized appearance on the printed page: instead of the explosive humour and anger that tend to characterise the oral poetics of Baraka's Black Nationalist work, we are presented with a subdued, almost mournful recitation more similar in tone to Baraka's earlier recording of 'Black Dada Nihilismus' or Joseph Jarman's 'Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City': poetry of rumination and uncertainty as much as, if not more so, than poetry of collective solidarity and hope.
