We have a poem here by Countee Cullen. It's called Incident. I thought what we would do is just go around starting with Max, everybody just say something twice. We'll go around twice and see if we can do that. You can respond to what someone has said ahead of you, or you can bring in a new point, and then we'll see where we are after that. To frame the conversation, I thought I would just throw out a couple of really obvious questions and concerns that one could have about this. One, of course, is how does the speaker of the poem relate to his eight-year-old self? How much past that time is the speaker? We don't have to identify that speaker as Cullen. If it's an autobiographical poem, we're talking about Cullen remembering something that happened, a traumatic experience of racist hatred when he was eight. But my question is, where's the speaker standing, and why does the speaker choose this form? The second is, why does the poet choose the traditional rhyme meter and stanza form, and what effect does that have on the content of the story being told? The third is, how does the deployment of the N word function? That is to say, it rhymes with bigger. How does it function in the poem as originally written, and how does it function separately differently distinctly today when the poem has the N word in single quotations or double quotations? As an ancillary to that, how does the poem that is this sayable. It is a very sayable poem. It's so clear. It's remarkably clear. How does a poem this sayable have in it a profoundly unsayable word? What's the tension between those two? Fourthly, what's the poem saying about memory? What is this poem saying about remembering? Because that last stanza is not just memorable, but it's about memory. All right. Max, those questions or anything else. Sure. I hope I can start to answer some of those questions though. I was struck re-reading it this time about the fact that the speaker is very mobile in space. He says that he sees the whole of Baltimore. He's riding through Old Baltimore. He seems to have no problem getting around this rather large space, especially at a time when transportation was probably not as developed as it is now. I don't get the sense that he's riding around in a car, for example. I wanted to think about that in relation to this very restrictive situation he finds himself in at the end of the poem, in that last stanza where he really feels this. He says it's all he can remember, this word, this category that's been foisted on him. I want to think about that a little bit too in terms of how readable the poem is as you were mentioning, Al. We, too, when we first start reading the poem, we're just rolling along, riding through, we're seeing all of Old Baltimore until we trip on this word, and then everything just shuts down. Wonderful. Good way to start. Molly? I think that that really is a mirror for the experience itself. That word at the end of the second stanza functions as a turn in tone. Even though the rhythm doesn't change, it does slow down a little bit it seems. The language doesn't necessarily change. But because we get tripped up on that, we feel how the speaker also gets tripped up on that, and that interrupts the whole experience, that eight months that the speaker was there, all trips on that moment. Terrific. Thank you. Lily? I've been thinking about how this poem puts work on the reader to understand the impact of the incident for themselves because he calls the poem "Incident" which sounds innocuous. An incident doesn't seem like an emergency, for example. Or it's a neutral coded word. It's an understated word. Understated, yeah. It could contain something really bad, it could contain something really, whatever, it's an incident, and then he says that's all that I remember in the final line. You actually have to work pretty hard. We understand that what has happened is bad, but he's not saying it was bad for these reasons, or that's I remember when my life changed in that moment. He's not imbuing that moment with any meaning for my whole life, he's letting it stand as this awful thing, and we have to know that was a horrible thing for a child to experience. We assume that the speaker continue to experience racists incidents in his life after that. It's cool to me that he doesn't create this as that was the day that my whole life fell apart. You're saying that in Cullen's case, the poet, he resisted the temptation to make just a big, big thing out of it. Yeah. He could have said like, "I need to tell you about how my identity formed at this moment" in more prosaic language or something. He could have spelled it out a lot more by saying that, "The worst thing that ever happened to me when I was a child was this time when I went to Baltimore, and here's what happened," but he doesn't. Structure though. Thank you. Amber Rose? I really appreciated Lily's points, and I was thinking about that word impact actually just before you said it. To your question, Al, about memory and what this poem is teaching us about memory. It's about impact, it's not just experience, right?. I'm also interested in the way that memory collapses time in this poem. He's doing this traveling from May until December. This wasn't just a week or a couple of days that he was in Baltimore. But out of all of that time, this is all that he remembers. It's clear that the speaker is much older than eight, describes himself as very small is much older, and yet the memory still feels very present, even if it might not be plaguing him, right? But that there's the collapse of time between May until December. But there's also this collapse in time between when he was a child and now, and that the impact of that moment, that incident is still so present with him. Terrific. Thank you. Hannah? Just building on that. The way that the form of the poem itself is very much like a function of memory. It's a ballad poem, that's using ballad meter and ballad rhyme. A rhyme is A-B-C-B, right? Believe me. Yeah. ABCB. It sticks to it all the way through. Yes. I think the use of the ballad meter is really important but really fraught and really complicated. I think you could think both like thinking that a lot of different ways about how Cullen might be using form here, and I'll just throw out one, which is that ballads are traditionally used as nursery rhymes, hymns, drinking songs. Ballads blend themselves really well to memory. There's this self-fulfilling form. Song helps memory because you're drunk, and it's easier to have a song that rhymes. Right. Because not everyone can read, so you need to be able to memorize. The origin of the hymn is, okay, and then now to the child, the third survey nursery rhyme. The reason we need this is. Because a lot of kids really like nursery rhymes. They really like. Why? Because they're easy, and they're sweet. Sweet, right? Yeah. Its harmony. I mean, this is all putative and alleged. There's a lot of garbage neuropsychology going on about how, "It's so much better if you give your kids rhyming." I don't believe any of that, but the assumption is that this poem is going to be appropriate for children. Yeah? There's also something about children are learning so much. So it's about calling something up quickly in this moment when they're taking in so much information. There's a lot of information that both of these kids are learning in this moment. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. You wouldn't finish the point because I interrupted you. Then I did. We got to start it double. We got it from the left and right. Now, I guess that's all I was going to say really is that as Countee Cullen has chosen this particular form for very particular reasons. One of those might be to say something about the fact that if memory and poetry go together, one of those ways that they go together might be using this particular form. Therefore, calling attention to the fact that it's through, and lots of nursery rhymes and lots of kids nursery rhymes have really scary content, right, like Ring Around the Rosie song but the black plague. That's like a [inaudible] that we teach. Yeah, right? Rock-a-bye baby, the kid falls out of the tree. That's not. Do you know any others? Probably. What happened to Mary's lamb? I don't know what happened. Jack and Jill? Jack and Jill, they fall down the hill. Oh, my God. Are we saying that our, Nursery rhymes are actually not good. We should not teach them to children anymore. We've always assumed that this poem creates a form content contradiction. But maybe this is just like any of these other little children's poems. They're all tragic and are very interesting. Ally, what do you want to do? I think also the kind of not flip side, but other aspect of its easy to remember is that you can't get it out of your head, which introduces this obsessive-compulsive element to this type of poem, and particularly, this poem-intrusive thoughts. The inward functions as an intrusive thought. Completely. The peer-review establishes that this is just the full extent of that intrusion. Wow. That's really a great point Debbie. To build on what Ann and Amber were saying about a ballad as an opportunity for kids to learn, but it strikes me that what a kid is learning in a ballad is the music of the poem and the content comes with it. So you're learning it because you have a musical facility with it, and you're absorbing all of the content. It makes me curious about the way that this poem is a study in what kids learn and how. I was thinking about what are the circumstances that taught the other very small boy to engage in acts of racial bias, where's that coming from. If this were autobiographical, its moment is the early 19-teens and that's a moment where in Baltimore, which has a strangely robust public transit system at that time. You would know stuff [inaudible]. Sorry [inaudible] No. You're in a way following up what Max was saying. Its not a matter of things, I stood corrected, which of course David does to everybody [inaudible]. It's not about you being a smartass which is definitely the truth, but you're actually agreeing. There's something you can't help but think about how this kid is getting around in this city. Well, what's interesting about Baltimore this moment, is that housing restaurants and public establishments are all segregated but the transit system isn't. Which is crucial to the story. Which is crucial to the story that this is a context in which if the other child is a Baltimorean and another child who is moving through segregated spaces all the time, and is learning racial logics from growing up in segregated space. I think there may be a relationship there, between how did these two kids learn racial scripts and racial codes, and how is the ballad form a way of teaching children music and content together. Yeah, and if you are a kid of color in Baltimore, you can see the whole Baltimore from inside the streetcar. That is the way to do it. Especially because you can't go in lots of the buildings, but you can go past them in streetcar. Dave. I like the word Baltimorean, the way it's used it. Fits the scheme. It's not an identifying characteristic based on race or anything. It seems fitting it first until we get into the events of what happened and then we can look back and say, well, that's not how people see the world. That's not other people see the world that's actually really naive and idealistic and even hammers the point that this happened after a gesture, a good-faith gesture of kindness was extended. So it reinforces what happened, the anger that it's created it almost ultimately suggests abandoning this entire approach of reaching out. Interesting. Gabe. Yeah. What I want to say about this poem is that I think one of the things that it's very good at managing the relationship between the whole and the p's. So that's a Baltimorean thing. The way in which both the child, the Baltimorean, and Countee Cullen as a child are interpolated as a class of person. But it's also in the title, an incident being a moment in a life. But I think that we've been talking so much about the way the N-word fits into the rhyme scheme, and I think this is an extension of that relationship between the whole and the p's. Because like N-word works as a particle of the rhyme scheme, but it's also a moment that's particularly heated compared to say Gly and me, which pass quite much more easily say like there's something in this poem about the apiece and pattern or an individual in a class arising in a violent way. Great. You people are so good that we don't need to go a second time around. But I would like to invite two final thoughts on this. I guess I'd like to just toss out maybe to Tobias here, choice of your final word. Shape it, guide it. This idea, I think we all feel that this is a very powerful poem. It's really an unforgettable poem, in ways that are strategic to the choice of rhyme and meter. It's unforgettable. So whenever you have a poem that does what it says, what it says is, this unforgettable thing happened, and what it does as a poem is an unforgettable thing. I would invite anybody to talk about the power of that relationship because poetry does what an article about, you know, the rise of racism in Baltimore or some sociological treatise as good as they are can't do because those forms of writing do not oblige themselves as forums to say what the contents is. They take a distance sociological in the case of a traitor's view and they can't indulge in a formal replication of the dramatic politics and emotions. So does anybody want to take me up on talk about how it feels to encounter this poem as a powerful statement or for those of you who've lived with it for a long time, in what way is it in your ear or under your skin? I will just point to how small the poem is on the page. Especially on your page. Mine is much bigger. I've a very small page. It's compact, it's short, and that it's appropriate to the duration of the incident, but not the scope and effect, and reverberation of the incident. Yeah. Nice. One more final thought? I'll offer a final thought to two halves. One is to say that I think the balance of desire and expectation against reality are really important for this poem. So the expectation and the desire, I smiled. I didn't just see this Baltimorean looking at me and I just look back, I smiled. I made it invitation. I expected something of this child that I felt that I could relate to, and what I got in return was something that scarred me and is still staying with me. I think that relates to the experience of reading the poem, and how that experience changes throughout time, from when county [inaudible] to when we're engaging with it now because poems don't exist outside of the real-world, right? And poems aren't suspended outside of real-world. So there's this sort of pressure when you get to the rhyme there's this poem is sort of tugging on that pressure to say the word, to not say the word, to hear it in your mind, to think about the whole historical context, to try to structure your self in relation to saying it, to think about the other people in the room, that know you're saying, you're thinking it or not saying or whatever. And there's this constant tension of expectation and desire, in reality, that is made and remade every time you engage with this poem. Really beautiful and profound point. There are two kinds of unsayable I think, the one is the unsayable that is based on the unsayable word that is based on the idea or the concept that is itself indecipherable unsayable. This is different. This is an unsayable word that is based on a very concrete and specific thing. So the concept is very sayable. The Word is not. Cullen goes ahead and says it, although offsets it in quotation marks. We don't say the word and the relationship we have with Cullen and is very complicated in that regard. But unsayability is a hard thing because the hatred that is the reason why the N-word gets used in the poem. That is unsayable because we don't understand it fully. You're looking at me like you have another thought? My only other fact is just to keep in mind the various ways that we are differently positioned to engage with that word, and to engage with any sort of racial slur. But I think this one has a particular history in the United States. But I mean [inaudible] thinks a lot about teaching the poem, and I could imagine if you were teaching this poem in an all-black classroom, it would be a very different experience. Not just with engaging with it and thinking about it but speaking it saying it out loud versus if you're in a racially diverse classroom versus if you're in an all-white classroom, and just that we can't make any blanket statements about how one relates, and that's precisely what the poem is bringing our attention to. Yeah. One of the good things about what we're doing is to retrieve or to respond to poems written long ago in languages that have changed and to respond as honestly as we can to the poem that appears on the page respect the history of it, but respond to it as we must respond to it. This poem is about that. It's about looking back from 25-years old or whenever he was when he wrote the poem, to eight years old and responding to the precise history of that. So there's all kinds of nasty things going on. Thank you all. This was great.
