Fifteen years after Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward edited The Cambridge History of African American Literature, and twelve since the publication of The Cambridge History of American Poetry, comes The Cambridge History of African American Poetry. Editor Keith Leonard had a chapter in on the first of these volumes, on Paul Laurence Dunbar: here he’s assembled a sweep of contributors to continue the story. My chapter in the new volume, a very small part of that story—available to subscribers as a PDF below—examines the relation between poetry and jazz via three poets: Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, Jayne Cortez.
I’ve written on these three writers in various other forums over the past few years. (An earlier draft of the chapter also featured Stephen Jonas, who I wrote about in David Buuck’s Tripwire and in my book on Boston and San Francisco queer poetry, Never By Itself Alone; I’m currently working on editing a volume of out-of-print Jonas work to be published along with other, long-delayed new titles by Materials.) Some of the ideas at play here also expand on a 2023 primer on jazz poetry for The Wire and a review of Bob Kaufman’s Collected Poems for Music and Literature, written back in 2020 in the early days of the covid pandemic. Last year, I got to expand on them a little bit in longform essays for The Poetry Foundation on Ted Joans and on Jayne Cortez, reviewing respectively Stephen Belletto’s Joans biography, Black Surrealist, and the Cortez Collected from Nightboat, Firespitter.
The chapter also relates to ongoing work on Archie Shepp’s performance(s) at PANAF in Algiers—where Joans joined him on stage. (I presented on this at the Jazz Futures conference in Amsterdam last year alongside Gabriel Bristow, presenting on Don Cherry, and Siyabonga Njica, presenting on Bloke Modisane). And in turn, it relates to work on Joans and Cortez presented at the International Surrealism conference in Paris the year before.
Here’s how the argument goes, in brief. Within the general—which is to say vernacular, journalistic, numinous—understanding, my sense has often been that ‘jazz poetry’, like jazz criticism, is understood, if at all, as primarily a form in which white poets write about Black musicians: Kerouac or Ferlinghetti rather than Hughes or Kaufman or Cortez or Baraka or any number of African American poets—poets for whom The Music, as Baraka called it with that insistent capitalisation, was not simply inspiration or analogy for writing but a part of the very process and lifeblood of what writing itself is, but of how they understood themselves.
“Any given musical instance”, writes Phillip Brian Harper,
inevitably assumes an indexical function by which it signifies—refers to and so ‘is about’—the material factors from which it has arisen, whether these be the musician’s own physical state at the time of the performance or, more significantly, the prevailing social arrangements that have dictated the mode of the musical production itself. When those social factors are the same ones that have constituted the very people for whom the music in question is a recognized cultural legacy, then the music also effectively references that people, condensing genealogical information about the group that is in turn necessarily adduced as narrative whenever the cultural heritage is invoked.”
To separate jazz from poetry or poetry from jazz, one would have to tear them limb from limb.
This isn’t simply vitalism, any more than the idea of ‘natural rhythm’ has much purchase within the artificial, virtuosic, technical and constructed forms of Black abstractionism—to borrow Harper’s term—which invariably draws attention to its own means of production. Nor is this understanding necessarily separable from apparently vital notions such as ‘soul’—as explored, for instance, in Barbara Simmons’ collaboration with Jackie McLean in their recording of Simmons’ poem ‘Soul’, a poem published in the Baraka/Larry Neal anthology Black Fire. (“I was told that she wrote poems of high sun”, writes Edouard J. Manick in the preface to his 1967 Présence Africaine interview with Simmons. “Because I wrote these words”, says Simmons, “I feel them I believe them to the extent that I am, for that moment of recital, the poem itself.”)
Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Jayne Cortez, so the argument of the chapter goes, “make jazz the self-conscious subject of their poems, a fulcrum with which to interrogate familiar knowns, including notions about jazz itself”. I approach each writer from a slightly different angle: Ted Joans through the framework of “vagabond internationalism”. drawing here in particular on Brent Hayes Edwards’ vital work in The Practice of Diaspora, along with Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley’s work on Afro-diasporic surrealism in the monumental anthology Black Brown and Beige. (The essay was drafted before I’d had a chance to read Belletto’s biography, and for biographical information I was much indebted to Michel Fabre’s still excellent work on Joans from the 1970s, among other that of other scholars like Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, whose 2023 study Maghreb Noir deserves perhaps more attention than it’s thus far received.) The section on Joans focuses in particular on his appearance with Archie Shepp at the Pan African Festival in Algiers in 1969, and his declaration there, in his onstage poem-speech-song that “Jazz is a black power” and “an African music”. It focuses on what those statements might mean—which is, I argue, for Joans, via a metaphorical identification with the Tuareg people with whom he and Shepp performed onstage, “an African identity connected with an aesthetic of movement as much as of landed national belonging”.
I approach Bob Kaufman, meanwhile, through the angle of listening: who listens, how they listen, how this shapes the way music—or a poem—gets made. John Lowney, Mona Lisa Saloy and Amor Kohli offer some important, sometimes contrasting, critical frameworks for understanding Kaufman’s poems on jazz—poems that often exist in a number of version over the years, in ongoing palimpsests, improvisations, graffiti in the pages of the book or the manuscript page burned up in the flames of the Dante Hotel or the white heat, white light of music’s metaphorical energy and the overhanging spectre of the mushroom cloud (“dropping bombs”), with jazz as “historically morphing life-force subject to (cultural) appropriation and available for use as a cultural weapon.”
More so even that Jonas and Kaufman, Jayne Cortez was in the music from the first: as Ornette Coleman’s first wife—and the person who introduced Coleman to Don Cherry—and Denardo Coleman’s mother; as mentor figure and organiser in the Los Angeles Black Arts scene; and then as bandleader-poet for decades with The Firespitters, one of the most dynamic of all jazz-poetry ensembles. Cortez said the following to D.H. Melhem and I think about it a lot since I first read it, in relation to Cortez’s work but also for what it might tell us about the work of poetry in general, its refusal of realism, the given, in the interests of a reality transformed.
I use dreams, the subconscious, and the real objects, and I open up the body and use the organs, and I sink them into words, and I ritualize and fuse them into events. I guess the poetry is like a festival. Everything can be transformed. The street becomes something else, the subway is something else, everything at a festival is disguised as something else. Everything changes [. . .] Voices become other voices.
The essay ends with an incantation of some of those other voices—the work of poets like Thulani Davis, Candace Hill Montgomery, Carolyn Rodgers, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez; Sarah Webster Fabio and Elouise Loftin and Julie Ezelle Patton and Jeanne Lee and Mahogany Browne; Ntozake Shange, Julia Fields, and Giovanni singleton; beyond not only a white canon but a male canon, the majority still writing and still vital.
As Ted Joans wrote on the walls of the Village, on the streets of the city:
As ever with this kind of writing, there’s a whole range of other work I drew on during the research, which this writing is in concert with. More on the critical field available to subscribers at Substack by following this link.
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