"Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"

I found the poem titled “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” by Amiri Baraka to be incredibly interesting. The title of the piece, in my mind was the most controversial when juxtaposed to the poem itself. The dense yet ambiguous theme of the poem makes the title feel somewhat ominous, irrelevant, and even threatening. In the first stanza, he discusses the monotony of everyday life, and how the thought of death sort of consumes him even when taking his dog for a walk. Moreover, he states that he has become accustomed to it: the monotony and thoughts of suicide, which alludes to his numbness to both life and death. In the proceeding stanza he mentions counting the stars, and also counting the holes they leave when they have not come to be counted. The stars perhaps represent his blessings or positive aspects of his life, while the holes represent the negative side of these blessings, and the potential for them to become rotten or decayed by the evils in the world, such as racism. The fact that he counts both the stars and their holes, then, is representative of his inability to fully celebrate the beauty in life due to his pessimistic attitude of the potential that the evils have to taint these things. These stanzas sharply contrast to the final stanza, in which he witnesses his daughter praying in her room by herself. Though he feels that there is no reason to live anymore, the naivety of his daughter’s actions make him question his own intentions of suicide. Though he never comes out and says it, the ambiguity of the final stanza really connects the poem to its title. The fact that the suicide note is twenty volumes, complete with a preface shows just how torn he is about leaving these “blessings” behind, and perhaps jealous of his daughters naivety, yet also weary of what this characteristic could bring for her future.