Organization: Law Offices of Christopher Hays
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Al & 88ers:

Baraka uses unrhymed free verse, repetition (a la Stein,) and wild
variations in meter to, I believe, much greater ultimate effect than
Cullen's use of the rhymed ballad form and rigid iambic meter. 

The thing Baraka repeats are not insignificant: 

       He came back and shot. He shot him. When he came
       back, he shot, and he fell, stumbling, past the
       shadow wood, down, shot, dying, dead, to full hault.

       At the bottom, bleeding, shot dead.

Every time he says it, we get a new picture of a human being taking a
bullet.  It doesn't get old; it gets scarier.

Baraka drops into iambic meter at only one place in the  poem, and what
a use of iambic this is:

       after the fall, the speeding bullet, tore his face
       and blood sprayed fine over the killer and the grey light.

The iambic last four feet of the first line, because they appear out of
nowhere, instead of appearing tired and old fashioned make the cadence
SEEM like a speeding bullet.  And the three consecutive accented feet in
the next line "blood sprayed fine over the killer," put this grim image
in stark relief. 

Baraka uses both simile and metaphor in ways that could hardly be called
tired:

       .  .  .  And his spirit
       sucks up the light. But he died in darkness darker than
       his soul and everything tumbled blindly with him dying 

And what a frightening way he conveys the anonymity of the killing: that 

       Other than . . . the caked sourness
       of the dead man's expression, and the cool surprise in the fixture

       of his hands and fingers, we know nothing.

Talk about powerful imagery!  Powerful poetry. 

-Christopher

Al Filreis wrote:
> 
> 88'ers:
> 
> To our discussion of Cullen's "Incident," let's now add a poem by Amiri
> Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) called "Incident."
> 
>         http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/baraka.html
> 
> For those of you who voted DETRACTS on Cullen, what do you think of
Baraka's
> poem? Does it offer an alternative to the inappropriate ballad form Cullen
> chose to convey the daily horrors of racial life in the city? What
different
> aesthetic approaches does Baraka take when he considers how to tell about
> violence, race, urban life, etc., in a poem?
> 
> (Do note, please, that this is a poem of 1969 and by talking about it we
> break a bit from our usual chronological pattern. The other poems in this
> chapter really do date from the time of the Harlem Renaissance - 1920s and
> 1930s. [Another exception is the poem by Gwendolyn Brooks.])
> 
> --Al