Hey king of spain, check out this poem, hon. Its called: “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.” I’d be interested to know what wyou think of it. And y’all, please excuse any typeos in this post as I’m excessively drunk. 
Enjoy.
To me, the irony is that if Jerry Fallwell were the Reverend of New Jersey, and he made a sermon that Muslims or African-Americans found offensive, Baraka (and possibly EasyPhil) would be denouncing him and calling for him to be fired. (Please ignore obvious church-state issues in this analogy. I already recognize them.)
As for his rebuttal, might I mention that I hate when people look at all the information in 20/20 hindsight and talk about how obvious everything was? Do I have to mention that Baraka would suck as a intelligence analyst, and miss everything. Do I also have to mention that if the government had reacted to these warning by drastically increasing security at airports and other public places prior to the 11th, Baraka would have been right out there decrying the police state? In my opinion, this guy just can’t take what he dishes out.
Also, I like how he pretends to know what he’s talking about because he was apparently in the Air Force decades ago.
Well, genius, let’s see. How about, there are NO SURFACE TO AIR MISSILES! That’s right, they are at their bases. Or in Saudia Arabia or South Korea. But we don’t deploy them all around the country anymore because we aren’t worried about Soviet bombers. And for the same reason, air defense fighters in America equals about two fighters on alert for something like each quarter of the country. And I think the alert is probably like a 15 minute alert, though I don’t know for certain. And even then, it’s not something that was rigorously maintained since there was no reason to assume an air threat of any significance since the Soviet Union fell, and keeping people on alert is expensive. You can’t expect a peace dividend and still wonder why more than a decade later, the country isn’t bristling with missiles and fighters, ready to blow a rogue airliner out of the sky. If anything shows the uselessness of his knowledge, I believe the ADC he references is a Cold War command that hasn’t existed for a very long time. That’s right, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Stick to what you know, dumbass. Which appears to be shitty poetry and not much else.
Rossarian, Baraka is a poet, not a priest, and Rev FallAlready has already made statments disparaging Mohammed and he’s still doing his thing. You don’t like his poetry? Fine. Are you a poet? Probably fucking not, and who gives a shit anyway? Nice piece about the planes and the military, but guess what? Something like that couldn’t happen today, because we are all the more wiser and aware.
So because I’m not a poet, I’m not qualified to judge Baraka’s poetry? Is that what you’re trying to say?
EXACTLY, the only thing you can do is like it, or not like it.
Oh, bullshit. What, do I have to be initiated into the Sacred Mysteries of the Muses before I can express my judgement of a poem? I have a college education; hell, I’ve even taken courses on literature where we analyzed poems.
Furthermore, my main beef with Baraka isn’t an aesthetic one, that I don’t like his poems as poems. It’s an ethical judgement, that I don’t like his lies and bigotry. You don’t have to be a 32[sup]nd[/sup] Degree Wordmason in order to have a well-formed opinion of people who spread poisonous lies and slander entire groups of their fellow human beings.
You can judge whether you like it or not, but you can’t determine whether it’s good poetry or bad poetry unless you know poetry. You may love a Ford Pinto, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good car.
EasyPhil, that theory might work if all poets were educated in poetry. There are a lot of poets out there, many succesful, who have never learned how to analyze poetry in any way, shape or form.
Likewise, there are a lot of people out there who know a lot about poetry, know how to break it apart, and how to critique it, who are not, in fact, poets. That’s one of the things a person learns in a poetry class.
So not being a poet does not disqualify you from being able to critique poetry, just as being a poet does not automatically mean that you’re the authority on the matter.
The credibility of the critique is what is at issue here. I contend that the people offering up the critique here, don’t know jack-shit about poetry and are just parroting what they’ve read(yawn) in the media. They’ve taken the anti-semitic ball and have run with it-oh how original. Do any of them read poetry, listen to poetry, write poetry on a regular basis? Do they even know any poets personally?
Then please enlighten us ignoramuses as to why this is good poetry and not just poorly-metered vague accusations founded on lies.
HA! Y’all got it easy. California’s first-ever poet laureate, Quincy Troupe, just resigned last week after it was discovered he had erroneously claimed a bachelor’s degree he never earned.
Esprix
I came across that when I first went looking for Baraka’s poems. And I didn’t quite get it at first, but having had a few weeks to digest it now, yes, it’s really lovely. And very interesting for seeing how Baraka’s work has changed over the years!
I still prefer “Incident,” though, which really gets me with its language and rhythm - “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 halt.” The way the repetition mimics the motion of the body falling down stairs…and it reminds me of some Biblical poetry (Judges 5:27 - “He sank, he fell, he lay still at her feet; at her feet he sank, he fell; where he sank, there he fell dead.”) I do have some problems with it - “his spirit sucks up the light” strikes me as rather a trite line - but overall, well, it’s a damn sight better than “Somebody Blew Up America” at least. 
Seriously, I’d like to hear what you found compelling about “Somebody Blew Up America” (if it’s the sort of thing you can explain), since it really doesn’t do much for me, antisemitism or no antisemitism.
This may be the first Pit thread ever to degenerate into a nice civilized Cafe Society poetry discussion.
Sorry for the double-post - this’ll teach me to read the whole thread before replying to somebody - but having read EasyPhil’s comments now, I see that he suggests I “don’t know jack-shit about poetry.”
Well, normally I despise these dickwaving I’m-smarter-than-you arguments people get into on messageboards, but since you think it’s so important, Phil: yes, I do read poetry regularly. Here are some of my favorite poets: Eliot, Auden, Donne, cummings, Thomas Hardy, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney. I am currently strongly considering a major in English. I got 5’s on both the English Literature and English Language AP tests, an 800 on the verbal portion of the SAT, and during high school I went to the state literary rally in English twice. I’ve participated in several poetry threads here on the SDMB, as you can verify for yourself:
Analyze This Poem
Poems or lines that bring a lump to your throat.
Poems about love in youth and old age
Your favorite poem?
Turn your favorite poem into haiku.
…which I surely wouldn’t have done if I didn’t have a standing interest in poetry.
Interestingly, a search on “EasyPhil” and “poetry,” “poem,” “poems,” “poet,” or “poets,” yields…this thread. So perhaps by your own theory you should consider shutting up and listening to the people who know what they’re talking about.
For what it’s worth, it is my educated opinion that one does not need to be initiated into the Sacred Poetic Mysteries to have a valid opinion about poetry. It is also my educated opinion that “Somebody Blew Up America” both sucks on a literary level (though perhaps celestina will enlighten me there) and is antisemitic.
I also note that these arguments about the poem’s literary merits have very little to do with whether or not it’s antisemetic, or whether Baraka should remain NJ Poet Laureate. I think this is a very good poem on a purely aesthetic level, but if Kipling lived in my home state today I still sure as fuck wouldn’t want my tax dollars paying him to write shit like that.
There, that’s more like it!
Well, I definitely don’t have the credentials of king of spain, but hopefully in time I will. Aspiring English major (I’m only a first year, though, so give me time). But in High School, I took a number of poetry courses, including Modernist Poetry and Rennaissance Poetry, both of which were amazing courses. I dabble a bit in poetry, and have had some poetry published, though it’s mostly prose poetry, and I write more regular prose anyway.
I was head of the literary board of my school’s fiction magazine, meaning that I was in charge of the group that picked from student submissions. So I think I know at least something about analyzing poetry. And I definitely think I know enough to realize that “Somebody Blew Up America” is a crap poem that goes on for much longer than it should, gives me no emotional response whatsoever, and uses antisemetic commentary and made-up “facts” for shock value. I’d love to hear your analysis, though.