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Your comment, Mark (that Cope is hateful), set me wondering about hateful poems (or at least about poems that pose as hateful). I've been compiling a course packet of poems for a class I'm teaching in the fall (called Hilarious Poetry) and I've run across some poems that border on both hilarity and hate. My point, I suppose, is certain kinds of humor rely on something akin to hate. Wimsatt said most "society wit" is, at heart, derisive. Would you say the Baraka quote below is funny? Let me complicate that: it's obvious why the below +wouldn't+ be considered funny, but can you tell me something about the below that could be called funny? The quote below is on the one hand horrifying, and on the other very slightly comic. If you don't want to comment, that's understandable. fr "Black Art" "We want poems like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews. Black poems to smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches whose brains are red jelly stuck between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking Whores! We want 'poems that kill.' Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff poems for dope selling wops or slick halfwhite politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh . . . rrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . Setting fire and death to whities ass. Look at the Liberal Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat & puke himself into eternity . . . rrrrrrr There's a negroleader pinned to a bar stool in Sardi's eyeballs melting in hot flame Another negroleader on the steps of the white house one kneeling between the sheriff's thighs negotiating cooly for his people. Aggh . . . stumbles across the room . . . Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked to the world! Another bad poem cracking steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets Clean out the world for virtue and love, Let there be no love poems written until love can exist freely and cleanly. Let Black People understand that they are the lovers and the sons of lovers and warriors and sons of warriors Are poems & poets & all the loveliness here in the world." %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%