SOURCE: An interview in The Sullen Art: Interviews by David Ossman with Modern American Poets, Corinth Books, 1963, pp. 77-81.

In the following interview, Baraka discusses his magazine, Yugen, his poetry, and his various literary influences.

Jones published only two more issues of Yugen after his interview was recorded early in 1960. Since then, he has co-edited The Floating Bear and has seen Corinth's publication of his first book of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, in association with his own Totem Press. Morrow has scheduled his study, Blues, Black & White America and Grove will do his System of Dante's Inferno. He continues working on prose, plays and on poems for a second collection.

[Ossman:] Yours seems to be one of the three or four "clique" magazines around today, in that if publishes a fairly restricted group of so-called "beat," "San Francisco" and New York writers. Why do...