New Baraka digital ad follows his poetry roots

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is spending $100,000 on a new digital ad that asks, “Are there any American poets in here?

“American Poem” features Baraka’s voice that echoes his spoken word included during in a video at Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour that began in April.  Baraka was featured on a Lauryn Hill 1998 album.

Script: “Are there any American poets in here? I want to hear an American poem. You know, something made in the USA. Something American and Afro-Cuban. Nuyorican Latin tinge, beaten bone by plena, sprawling out of wide open tenement windows in the middle of winter, on the verge of East Harlem or North Newark. Poems of brown colonies of Albizu being tortured for breathing Taino blood, screaming African tongues, dialoguing in Spanish for being Puerto Rican, and worst of all, loving it. My God, where is all the American poetry? You know, American. Something that represents us: a colorful rainbow, a big bright fist, an uncorrected sentence, improper English, you know, an American poem. A poem by the beautiful Black boy colored into the night. His eyes, the stars, his hands. Our will. Can’t you see him? Hey, you. Yeah, you, yeah, you.  You.  You.  Something American USA, American USA, American USA. As American as the Garden State and the land of the free. You know, something strictly American. Something that represents us.”

Baraka faces Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) and Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair), New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller, and former Senate President Steve Sweeney in the June 10 Democratic primary.   His father, Amiri Baraka, was a famous poet and political activist from Newark.