According to Bush, “America is successful because of the hard work and creativity and enterprise of our people. When Baraka asks, “Who live on Wall Street / The first plantation,” he takes Bush to task for occluding histories of exploitative labor in an uncritical valorization of American work. Americans are asking, ‘Who attacked our country?’” In direct response to Bush’s falsely unifying address, “Somebody Blew Up America” challenges the hypocrisy of US nationalism with an alternate string of anaphoric phrasings.Īs a primary strategy, Baraka samples-as in records “in order to reuse”-Bush’s use of the word “Who,” recirculating it (nearly 200 times) through disparate political contexts. Thus the family resemblance between The Waste Land and the Cantos lies in issues of not length but technique (collage, literary allusion, what Eliot calls “mythical method”), genre (epic), and intended cultural use (as synoptic guidebooks of literary history and civilization).Īfter the festival, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was notified by a local Jewish newspaper and charged Baraka’s poem as anti-Semitic.Įarlier in the speech, Bush draws on anaphora, one of the most conspicuous rhetorical tropes in “Somebody Blew Up America,” in order to speak for and ventriloquize the American populace: “Americans have known the casualties of war. On the one hand, length per se as a sole criterion obscures the fact that the umbrella term “long poem” often refers to whatever isn’t a brief, self-contained lyric-whether it be an epic, georgic, narrative, sonnet sequence, loco-descriptive, or novel-in-verse.

Eliot’s The Waste Land, which weighs in at a lean 433 lines, often mentioned with Pound’s 800-page Cantos as an exemplary modernist long poem? Is it a long poem? A mid-length poem? Why is T. While longer than a conventional lyric but much shorter than an epic-length poem, “Somebody Blew Up America” raises questions of what exactly constitutes a long poem. In fact, I read “Somebody Blew Up America” as an extension, a sequel, to his book-length poem Wise, Why’s, Y’s (1995), which Baraka calls “an ongoing-offcoming Tale” of the tribe in the tradition of the African griots as well as the American modernists Melvin Tolson, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Charles Olson. The expansive historical and geographical scope of Amiri Baraka’s 243-line poem “Somebody Blew Up America”-which ranges from biblical times to the Bush administration, from colonial America to the Belgian Congo-lends it the ambitious heft of a modern epic.

Amiri baraka poems analysis