The Last Poets

While recognizing that these artists are best consumed through the medium of their recordings, I am here concerned only with the portion of their published work presented in two books. Some of these texts are much later than others and some of the poets on early Last Poets recordings are not included. On a Mission contains considerable prose material including an introduction by Amiri Baraka and lengthy essays from Abiodun Oyewole and Bin Hassan, while The Last Poets Vibes from the Scribes has author’s headnotes for each poem. I concern myself here with nothing but the poetry.

On a Mission: Selected Poems and a History of The Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan with Kim Green, forward by Amiri Baraka

The Last Poets Vibes from the Scribes, London: Pluto Press, 1985 featuring Jalal Nuriddin and Suliaman El Hadi.


     I recall in the early seventies reading in a black neighborhood bar on San Francisco’s Divisadero Street in which I was the anomaly. Most of the poets wrote highly melodic revolutionary race-conscious verse with insistent rhythm and rhyme. The same was true of the residents of a halfway house for ex-convicts who frequently showed up at the open readings at the Starry Plough in Berkeley at Shattuck and Prince during the same era. Their poetic technique was surely in part descended from the style of “toasts” such as “The Signifying Monkey,” but doubtless owed a debt as well to popular music and advertising jingles. Readers were often backed by musicians and recordings of such experimentation includes pioneering work by Langston Hughes in the thirties, Kenneth Patchen in the forties, and Beat poets in the fifties. [1]
     I thought of that experience recently upon reading two books of the Last Poets, the celebrated and, briefly, even popular writers whom I am sure those Bay Area poets knew well. Their thematic preoccupations were shaped by the history specific to that era. There is certainly no doubt that the ensemble arose in a highly specific political context, two years after the proclamation of Black Power by Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) in June of 1966. [2] The Last Poets ceremoniously conceived themselves as self-consciously radical cultural nationalists on May 19, the birthday both of Malcom X (Malik el Shabazz) and Ho Chi Minh at Marcus Garvey Park in East Harlem. They were perhaps the most prominent poetic expression of the Black Arts Movement that arose from Black Power and Black Nationalist ideologies. Among the Last Poets’ immediate predecessors in this tradition were the On Guard and Umbra groups including Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Harold Cruse, Steve Cannon, Ishmael Reed, and the Uptown Writers Movement.
     One of those involved in this last formation was South African Keorapetse "Willie" Kgositsile, an African Nationalist Congress activist in exile. [3] In an apocalyptic anticipation of a bloody upheaval Kgositsile had declared an end to “art talk.” “The only poem you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted in the punctured marrow of the villain.” David Nelson (Dahveed ben Israel) added, “Therefore we are the last poets of the world.”
     Various writers and musicians constituted the Last Poets group in books and recordings. Their albums [4] attracted considerable attention, even attaining a spot on the top ten list, after which they faded from public notice after the early seventies (though most members continued recording albums and writing). Today, In spite of their unquestionable historic role in American politics, the Black Arts Movement, and the renaissance of performance poetry, the Last Poets are virtually unread. Their work is very difficult to obtain. On a Mission: Selected Poems and a History of The Last Poets has long been out of print and my own local library had to borrow a British edition of Vibes from the Scribes from the Library of Congress for me.
     Considering their present obscurity, I think it wise to avoid evaluation and interpretation. I shall not consider the history either of America’s troubled relation to race or to the conflicts among the ever-changing roster of bickering writers that were at different times presented under the Last Poets name. I mean to offer here only a descriptive sketch of the work of some of their number with the hope that they will gain new readers in a later era in which their poetry and their politics remain powerful and provocative.
     Themes common to all the Last Poets include portrayal of American racism and exploitation of blacks and two reactions, which seem altogether opposed, but which are sometimes articulated in more subtle ways. The first is the self-destructive turn by some to drugs, reckless self-indulgence, and crime, but this is balanced by the profound redemptive quality of black art, represented by the poets’ own words on the page but also by jazz.
     Each, of course, has an individual vision and a unique style. Jalal Nuriddin is sometimes called “grandfather of rap” for his work in the spoken word, called in the sixties spieling. He himself referred to his style as "spoagraphics" or "spoken pictures." His usual style is poised between conversation and declamation with three or four beats to the line, occasionally expanding to underline a point. A reserved manipulation of typeface reproduces, or at least implies, the performative aspect of the poem, and the rolling rhymes propel the verses forward. In “Jazzoetry” the poet suggests that his manner can lead to enlightenment, to “dig bop” can lead to a “new birth.” “Dig the sound of our love inside our pride.” [5] In “Bird’s Word” the recitation of a catalogue of names of great artists serves as a charm to uplift the oppressed.
     The confrontation between white and black in “On the Subway” (the setting as well of Dutchman) might seem exaggerated to those who did not experience the peculiar character of American race relations a few generations ago. Setting the problem out in words well served both parties. In Nuriddin’s “Wake Up Niggers” “the cock crows” to bring the listener to full consciousness (the image appears as well in medieval Christian poetry). Here the racial epithet of the title is used neither in its racist meaning nor with the neutral or positive associations it bears sometimes in more modern rap, but to condemn those who fail to recognize the need for change. To the poet complacency can only arise in those who have been taken in by “lies” and “alibis” of “spies” (“Surprises”) but art (here represented by Miles Davis) can bring the truth. The negative consequences of slavery a hundred years after abolition are highlighted in “Jones Coming Down” and “O.D.” (which juxtaposes a “Bird Lives” graffito with a sign admonishing “PLEASE DON’T PEE IN OUR HALL.”
     Suliaman El Hadi writes in the same middle-length lines but with fewer rhymes, more repetition and freer use of anaphora. In his themes he has a predilection the mythic. He quite realistically admires “Ho Chi Minh” for his (eventually successful) resistance to imperialism but also indulges in an imagined Edenic pre-Columbian era in America (“Before the White Man came”). Similarly “Hands Off” presents a mythic Afrocentric view of history and “Blessed Are Those Who Struggle” reads almost like an early 20th century labor anthem with its singable quatrains, listing heroes of the struggle including Drew Ali and Marus Garvey with Dubois and the Panthers. To El Hadi oppression is caused by deceitful Jinn (see “It’s a Trip”) while “Delights of the Garden” provides a description of paradise.
     In his view birth control is an “evil design” and “it is better to use self-control.” (“The Pill”) In fact according to “This is Your Life” science itself is enwrapped in the arms race, the colonization of space, and future rule by “a mechanical race” of robots. “Get Moving” is a call to seek “freedom” in ways little defined but which include “keep your obligations to your Lord.” Here he echoes Nuriddin’s call for people to “wake up, wakeup.”
     Abiodun Oyewole employs short to mid-length lines with much repetition and irregular use of rhyme. Perhaps his line in “When the Revolution Comes” noting that “some of us will catch it on TV” is in part responsible for the erroneous association of Gil Scott-Heron and his poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" [6] with the Last Poets. Oyewole’s “Run Nigger,” like Nuriddin’s “Wake Up Niggers” and and Bin Hadi’s “Niggers R Scared of Revolution” condemns those who fail to move toward liberation. [7] He writes love poems as well (such as “Black Rose” and “Brown Sugar”) while condemning exploitation of women in “Gash Man.”
     “Invocation” provides an identity and history of the Last Poets as a group. Telling the tale of the ritual of their founding and naming, Oyewole describes their truth-telling “mission,” noting that they aimed to be “sassy and funky and sincere,” which is to say stylishly beautiful, yet down and dirty in the realities of everyday life, with a primary loyalty to truth. “Last Rites” is a magic griot charm insisting that the group will survive and grow and be “the light to show them the way” to the apocalyptic change when “the last shall be first,/ and the first shall be last.”
     In the twenty-first century, in the era of Black Lives Matter and the prison-industrial complex and widespread Islamophobia, we might do well to reread the Last Poets. At their best they incarnated what Amiri Baraka called for:


what is needed is what the Griot/Djali provided, information,
inspiration, reformation, and self determination! Mama Sky,
we cried, hook us up with the Electricity. Turn us ON. That city
of our deep desire. [8]




1. I find the performances on Fantasy of the Cellar Jazz ensemble with Rexroth and Ferlinghetti compelling.

2. Ironically Frederick Douglass had used the same phrase in the 1850s referring to the exaggerated political influence of slave-owners. Douglass optimistically predicted that “the days of Black Power are numbered. . . Liberty must triumph.” See Winston A. Van Horne, "Sustaining Black Studies," Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 37, No. 3, (January 2007).

3. Kgositsile later returned to Africa and in 2005 was named poet laureate of South Africa. His son is a hip-hop artist.

4. Right On from Gylan Kain, David Nelson, and Felipe Luciano was released in 1967 and The Last Poets with Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyewole, Alafia Pudim (a.k.a. Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin) and Nilja in 1969. (The Supremes released an album titled Right On in 1970. The same phrase is the title of a 1971 film using these poets on the soundtrack.)

5. Many will recall the posters with Che Guevara’s words “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”

6. On his 1970 album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.

7. In his headnote to the poem Oyewole credits fellow Last Poet Gylan Kain for defining nigger for him in another poem: “Niggers Are Untogether People.” He also credits their colleague David Nelson for documenting the futility of niggers, writing “Die, Nigga, Die.”

8. “Griot/Jali Poetry, Music, History, Message” from Jali Kunda: Griots of West Africa and Beyond ed. By Matthew Kopka and Iris Brooks (Roslyn NY: Ellipsis Arts, 1996), 78-82.