Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note Themes

Amiri Baraka

Themes and Meanings (Critical Guide to Poetry for Students)

The poem ultimately expresses dislocation and political stasis, implicitly questioning the role of the poet as a social voice. The meaninglessness of routinized life engenders a literary death wish. The uncertainty of direction, the inability to take action, is suggested through the poet’s construction of a “suicide” note as an ongoing literary act, a “twenty volume” discourse. The poem itself is a search for meaning and spiritual wholeness in the face of an existential quandary and malaise. Despite the personalizing of the context in the reference to his daughter, the poet also speaks for a generation of Americans facing an era of upheaval and doubt. When the speaker considers that the “groundenvelopes” him when he walks his dog, the emphasis is on the patterned regularity of the experience. Although there is little context around which to establish the speaker’s lifestyle, there are hints as to its repetitiveness, as in “when I run for a bus,” suggesting either hectic routine or keeping pace with the times.

The first stanza introduces a motif of music in a metaphorical and imagistic sense: “the broad edged silly music the wind/ Makes.” Perhaps the notion of running for the bus connotes the rapid social transformations in American culture, a transition that entraps the poet as well. This theme is echoed in the second single-line stanza, “Nobody sings anymore,” a comment that implies a turning point in an era or epoch and a...

(The entire section is 497 words.)