| Naturally, he's in Venezuela. |
Efforts by former New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka to challenge the elimination of his post hit a dead end yesterday. The U.S. Supreme Court, without comment, declined to hear his case against former Gov. James E. McGreevey, Gov. Jon S. Corzine and other officials. In March, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, ruled that the officials were immune from Baraka's lawsuit.
Baraka, a longtime activist in Newark, lost his post in July 2003 when McGreevey eliminated it amid an uproar after Baraka read his 60-stanza poem "Somebody Blew Up America." Some lines suggested that Israel had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and included a reference to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: "Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed/Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day?/Why did Sharon stay away?"
Baraka denied being anti-Semitic and refused to resign. The governor and Legislature were barred from firing the poet laureate, so McGreevey signed a bill that eliminated the post. Baraka sued, asserting that his First Amendment rights were violated when he lost the post and its $10,000 total honorarium.
The 3rd Circuit also found that the officials did not withhold the money over Baraka's views because the Legislature had not yet appropriated it.
The nation and other states have poets laureate. In New Jersey, the job description was to "promote and encourage poetry within the state and ... give two public readings within the state each year."
McGreevey had appointed Baraka as poet laureate in July 2002. Calls for Baraka's ouster emerged after he read the poem at a poetry festival in Stanhope on Sept. 19, 2002. During the controversy, Baraka said he wrote the poem in October 2001 and had read it all over the world.
Reached at a poetry reading in Venezuela, Baraka said he expected the high courtÂ’s decision and called it "confirmation of the neo-fascist trend in the United States." "I'm in Venezuela now, and that's what I'm going to tell them when I read that poem here," Baraka said. "A lot of people asked questions about 9/11. The question is when will they be answered?"
His lawyer, Robert Thomas Pickett, said they were disappointed but would seek to recoup the honorarium in state court. "The government had no right to terminate his position based on what he said," Pickett said. 
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