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It feels like something of an adventure, then, to pass through this layer of rhetoric and invective and explore this hefty book of "New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006," where it becomes evident that Reed's imaginative project is much more complex than his reputation as a misogynist and misanthrope suggests.
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Sissman accused of writing with "vengeful relish" about "sexual scenes of sadism and torture," and whose fiction the Times book critic Michiko Kakutani labeled "nasty" and "paranoid." Reed's the guy who took note of how much money Anita Hill made on her book deal after the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and musingly concluded, "I wish someone would hit on me." This din of vivid and contentious sound bites, both from Reed and about him, threatens to eclipse his writing itself. The guy who said feminists "pose the most serious threat to African-American men since the Klan." The guy whose second novel Irving Howe described as "the commercial cooings of Captain Kangaroo," whom L. Ishmael Reed? He's the guy who said the media "lynched" O. Yet the first associations many people have with his name are not with his writing per se, but with his more notorious opinions - or at least perceptions of what those opinions are - and with others' reactions to same. In the past 40 years, Reed has published more than 20 books and has also made his mark as an editor, publisher, critic, journalist, songwriter, librettist and fearsome letter-to-the-editor writer. Approaching Planet Ishmael Reed, you encounter an upper atmosphere of weighty scholarship, wanton hearsay, rapturous praise and outraged condemnation so dense, you might easily mistake it for the planet itself.