GOODBYE, PARAMUS.(New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka)(Brief Article)

Last week was a nutty one in New Jersey. Bob Torricelli stepped down, and Amiri Baraka did not. Baraka, the poet, dramatist, and activist formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is the state's poet laureate. Why he is the poet laureate is a good question, considering that he's a revolutionary, a Marxist, and a conspiracy theorist, who not only goes around calling people "Nazis" but pronounces it "Nazzies" (as in snazzy). There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of these inclinations per se, but they would seem to give a politician pause. Still, in August, Governor James E. McGreevey, courageously or foolishly, proclaimed Baraka laureate, a sinecure worth ten thousand dollars a year, and managed to get in a few quiet weeks before he was made to regret the appointment, on learning that Baraka had written (and read aloud at a festival) a poem about September 11th, titled "Somebody Blew Up America." Baraka's poem suggested, among other things, that four thousand Israelis who worked in the World Trade Center had been tipped off about the terrorist attack and stayed home that day. This, of course, is a version of an insidious but widely discredited rumor that has been embraced in places like Damascus and Marseilles but is beneath the dignity of Trenton and Newark. The Anti-Defamation League went bananas, and the Governor called for Baraka's resignation.

Last week, Baraka used an appearance at an event at the Newark Public Library to respond to his critics. The television reporters, rowdy disciples, and bewildered library patrons who packed the grand panelled hall on the second floor brought a prizefight atmosphere to the musty stacks. When Baraka, hunched, gray-bearded, gray-suited, took the lectern, he said, "This is my statement: I will not apologize, I will not resign." There was raucous applause and cries of "Yessir!" Baraka began reading: "The recent dishonest, consciously distorted, and insulting non-interpretation of my poem by the Anti-Defamation League is fundamentally an attempt to defame me and, with that, an attempt to repress and stigmatize independent thinkers everywhere."

There followed a forty-five-minute diatribe, in which he defended his work, fleshed out his sources (Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the Jordanian newspaper Al Watan, and other such impeccables), and pressed his case that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were part of a global white-supremacist ...