ABSTRACT
The precept that Amiri Baraka articulated for the New Black Music of the mid-1960s "Find the self, then kill it" is also the key to his own aesthetics, founded as it is on his self-reshaping according to the improvisatory demands of being-through-becoming. The poem "Leadbelly Gives an Autograph" offers insight into Baraka's jazz poetics and the importance accorded to the line as carrier and shaper of verbal momentum through the poetic field. Baraka reveals that the true standards for a black poetry are to be found among the blues people; by writing their "need" into the poem, he reaches beyond his hesitation and attains a sense of rhythmic kinship which inspires him to explore, in the next section of the poem, "the possibilities of statement". In the search for such possibilities, Baraka confronts his own alienation, the wounded kinship expressed by Clay in the play Dutchman: "My people".
