Amiri Baraka’s poem Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note revolves around a void in the poet’s life. In the first stanza he speaks of the ground opening up. Being impossible in reality, this statement hints at a void somewhere in his mind. He is somehow unfulfilled, and his somber mood is reflected in his perception of reality. When he cannot see the stars at night, he assumes that holes take the space that the stars once occupied. Common knowledge would let us assume that stars are in the sky, even when we can’t see them. Yet he makes the rather melancholy assumption that they disappear altogether. Another way to look at this second stanza is to assume that he counts stars so deep into the night, that it becomes day far before he is done. This might hint that he is an insomniac, which further suggests that he has a troubled state of mind. Lastly, he mentions that his daughter was talking to someone that he could not see. He writes, I “heard her talking to someone, and when I opened the door, there was no one there…”. It was almost as if he expected to see the person, but was disappointed when he realized that there was nobody there. It is likely that his daughter was praying, with her hands clasped and her knees on the floor. Perhaps Baraka, in this final stanza, is implying that God is missing.
Baraka picks more than just words to get his point across. To show how incomplete he feels, he structures his poem in a very strange way. The first stanza, if read without a pause, sounds complete. Yet when all the lines are read as individual statements, they seem to be somewhat fragmented and unfinished. The second stanza, on the other hand, has lines that are all grammatically correct and completed with either a period or a comma. Perhaps Baraka does this to show the contrast between the two stanzas. I noticed this pattern as I read the poem, and was looking forward to the last stanza, the structure of which would ultimately determine how the poet felt.
Again, the lines of the third stanza were incomplete. There was as much a void in his soul as in his daughter’s clasped hands.
