New Books from Materials: Laâbi, Blavi, el-Wardany

Very pleased to announce three new titles from Materials, now available for pre-order from http://material-s.blogspot.com/.

They are:

—The Eye and the Night, by Abdellatif Laâbi, translated and with a foreword by Howard Slater, with an introduction by scholar Khalid Lyamlahy, a glossary, and Abdellatif Laâbi’s original afterword to the 1982 edition. (We’ve been working on this book, Abdellatif Laâbi’s “literary birth certificate”, for the past three years, so I’m especially pleased to announce it.)

—Acacia by Camila Blavi, translated and with an afterword by Will Rowe.

—Notes from the Marshes, by Haytham el-Wardany, translated by Wiam El-Tamimi and Yasmin Zohdi.

All titles involve translation into English, from French, Spanish, and Arabic.

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ABDELLATIF LAÂBI—THE EYE AND THE NIGHT
Translated by Howard Slater
Published October 2026
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Available for the first time in English translation, The Eye and the Night was Abdellatif Laâbi’s explosive debut book. Written in Rabat between the popular uprisings of 1965 and the Six Day War of 1967, and first published in 1969 during Laâbi’s involvement with the radical anti-colonial journal Souffles-Anfas, Laâbi’s itinéraire”, a poetic novel or poem in prose, combines Surrealism’s spirit of revolt with the influence of Arabic literary, oral and musical traditions, the innovations of the Nouvelle Vague and Third Cinema with the soaring songs of Umm Kulthum, their tales of enormous feeling and impossible love.

From Casablanca to Hiroshima to Franco’s Spain, The Eye and the Night takes places in the squares of public defiance and the shadows of clandestine revolutionary gathering. At once novel, poem, pilgrimage and escape route, it is a classic of Francophone decolonial literature comparable to Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal and Etel Adnan’s L’Apocalypse Arabe. And it is living proof that, as Laâbi writes in his most recent collection, “poetry is invincible”. Published with new introductions by scholar Khalid Lyamlahy and translator Howard Slater, a glossary, and a 1982 preface by Abdellatif Laâbi.

Jamil Buthayna, Majnoun Laïla, necklaces of migratory doves.
Al Hallaj suffering the Truth and his millionth pyre [...]
Pass. This night is ours. Our final test.

ABDELLATIF LAÂBI (عبد اللطيف اللعبي) is one of the most important authors to have emerged from the Arab world in the twentieth-century. A founder member of the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas (1966-1972), a radical journal which played a key role in a renaissance of left-wing, anti-colonialist, and internationalist Maghrebi culture, he was imprisoned and tortured for “crimes of opinion” when the journal was banned in 1972. Released in 1980, he went into exile in France in 1985, where he has published numerous books of poetry alongside plays, novels, essays, children’s books and translations, and been awarded numerous honours, including Commander of the Order des Arts et des Lettres, the Alain Bosquet Prize, the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie, the Académie française’s Grand Prix de la Francophonie, and the Mahmoud Darwish Award for Culture and Creativity.

HOWARD SLATER is a writer and translator and former mental health support worker whose work has appeared in small press magazines, independent publishing initiatives and websites since the early 1980s. The author of Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings (Mute, 2012) and Anti-Wall (Kudaorg, 2017), he was the editor of Break/Flow and a founder member of the radical history archive May Day Rooms, London.

A5, perfect-bound, colour covers, illustrated, 168 pages.

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HAYTHAM EL-WARDANY—NOTES FROM THE MARSHES
Translated by Wiam el-Tamimi and Yasmin Zohdi
Published October 2026
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“After the genocide, language must become a means for striking fascism and overcoming property relations.”

Haytham el-Wardany is one of the most compelling writers of our moment. Following The Book of Sleep (2021) and the recent pamphlets Gaza 2035 (2025) and The Difficulties (2025), Notes from the Marshes contains two prose texts and a sequence of poems. In the title sequence, written in English, verses from Refaat Alareer are read amidst military bases in Cyprus, turtles lay their eggs in an alley, a sister asks: “What is fascism?” Alongside these stanzas are two prose texts, translated from Arabic. ‘What if the word we’ ask questions about the possibility of collective voicing, when “the grammar of revolution” is “cut by the syntax of the state”. In ‘Needle in the Eye’, the author walks with a severed hand in their pocket down a Kreuzberg street, seeking for the language beneath the rubble of Gaza, for the wounded vowels and wounded words among the bodies; for a way to keep communion with the dead intact. Notes from the Marshes asks: Where now?

A5, perfect-bound, colour covers, 64 pages.

HAYTHAM EL-WARDANY is an Egyptian writer and translator. He lives and works in Berlin, and writes short stories and experimental prose. His praxis focuses on fiction, especially short stories, and nonfiction formats, like essays, and fragmental prose.

WIAM EL-TAMIMI is an Egyptian writer, literary translator, and editor whose work has been featured in publications such as The Paris Review, Granta, AGNI, Ploughshares, Freeman’s, Literary Hub, ArabLit, and The Common. She is an editor-at-large at The Avery Review, and is currently writing a nonfiction book.

YASMIN ZOHDI is a writer, translator and film critic based in Cairo, Egypt. She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, New York. A former culture editor at the independent news website Mada Masr and an alumna of Berlinale Talent Press, Zohdi is interested in the intersections between literary and cinematic forms, and how they continue to inform one another.

“Haytham’s exceptional prose and remarkable originality make him one of literature’s most distinctive voices today. Across fiction, creative nonfiction, and experimental writing, he unsettles genre boundaries and reinvents storytelling with each new work.”
—Iman Mersal, author of The Threshold and Traces of Enayat

“I think the greatest writer I have met, quite frankly, is the Egyptian modern writer Haytham el-Wardany.”
—Siddhartha Lokanandi, Wasafiri

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CAMILA BLAVI—ACACIA
Translated by William Rowe
Published October 2026
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Acacia: genus. Acacia: flower. Acacia: a thousand species. Acacia: oryx and mother; Acacia: plant, person, poem. This book-length poem has from the start abandoned the form it was given and must proceed: through the burning of roots and the swelling of buds, the flow of flesh and the flaming inside; hunger and plunging, tendrils and shoots, the sea and the shore, the house and the flood, actions echoing across a landscape in constant metamorphosis and constant collapse. In Acacia, Camila Blavi asks what allows a person to say “I”, what it means to give birth and to be born. Acacia: spider crab, wren, seagull. Acacia: oryx, tern, plover, branch. Acacia: to find that “love is not what they said”, in bitterness, anxiety and howling, in drowning and living, observing what it is that organises us in the world. Acacia: everything you can see.

CAMILA BLAVI (Santiago, Chile, 1988) is the author of Contaminaciones (Komorebi Ediciones, 2022), Puna (Bokeh Press, 2025; Provincianos Editores, 2026) and Acacia (Provincianos Editores, 2025). She studied at the University of Santiago de Chile and Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. She has twice received a grant from the Chilean Ministry of Culture.

WILLIAM ROWE’S Collected Poems were published in 2016 by Crater Press. He has translated a number of Latin American poets, including Raúl Zurita, Néstor Perlongher, Magdalena Chocano, and César Vallejo. He is Professor Emeritus at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a co-founder of Veer Books.

“Acacia is poetry returned to its original, genuine, stripped-down form, crafted from precious words awakened by a reborn alchemy.”— Edgardo Dobry

A5, perfect-bound, colour covers, 112 pages.

Opera's End Times (Preview)

On Substack, an essay on György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre and its (semi-)staging at this year’s Musikfest Berlin. The link is here.

Also in the essay (among others), an operatic cast of: Boulez, Berio, Ghelderode, Henze, Schönberg, Oliveros, Nono, Monk, Pousseur, Zimmermann.

Subscribers of all kinds—but especially paying!—are welcomed. Here’s a quick preview:

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If love, even in its triumph, is sad rather than happy, what of the laughter that—far more than love—characterises this opera? Does it express joy, relief, release, or in itself a reaction to and of fear? Laughter, this escape valve and this trap, escapes easy definition. A reviewer at a website named ‘Wagner, Heavy Metal’ writes: “People laugh, but are not happy. People tell a joke, but are not funny. Here, irony strips satire of its various layers”. The opera’s absurdity is, Ligeti suggested, “more demonic than humorous”. Such humour celebrates misfortune and death, the satisfaction of individual appetite, the destruction of weaker others. It’s an affect familiar today. And yet Ligeti’s music itself has something generous about it. It inhabits these forces of the negative but is not subsumed by them. And while it refuses to counterweight them with a sincere hope or sentimentality, its laughter is not only that of the cynic or the sadist. In this, it leaves something open, something that cannot quite be pinned down: a laughter neither full nor empty, a laughter that echoes enigmatically; not—quite—the last laugh.

"If we can say 'this is the worst'": The Sturm und Drang of Aribert Reiman’s Lear (Preview)

 

A couple of nights ago, I went to see the opening night of the new Komische Oper production of Aribert Reimann’s opera Lear, directed by Barrie Kosky and staged in the Oper’s temporary location in a hangar at Tempelhof Airport. I reviewed it for Bachtrack, and you can find that review at this link. On Substack are some s further reflections on the opera and its staging, along with storms, tone-rows, Romanticism, bombardment, and howling. An excerpt here:

Reimann’s is “music that admonishes”, wrote the critic Stefan Amzol of the composer’s settings of Paul Celan, who had requested him in the 1950s to set his work. “Forces are suddenly released you never even knew existed”, Reimann remarked of his experience of wartime bombardment as a six-year old child. Last night in a bar, I overheard someone declare himself a “Nazi” to awkward silence. It was, it seemed, an act of provocation, a kind of empty gesture, but one backed up with real consequences: the man also declared his intention to vote for the AfD at the weekend’s elections.

The Nazi-era violence that was a kind of primal scene of Reimann’s creativity is, too, the legacy of the years of Fascism as they raise their head once more today. Such violence, and everything that led to and from it, is not necessarily the overt “subject” of Lear, but, perhaps, Reimann’s opera still has something to tell us about it: a warning, a haunting. For if there’s one thing we’ve learned of late, it’s to say, with Shakespeare’s Edgar: “the worst is not / So long as we can say ‘this is the worst’”.

Lee $cratch Perry Black Ark (Preview)

Just out in Issue no.264 of Aperture magazine is my capsule review of the photobook Lee Scratch Perry Black Ark (Edition Patrick Frey, 2026), a visual inventory of what remains of the producer’s legendary Kingston studio. To read the review, see the print and digital versions of Aperture. I've posted an altered and extended cut for subscribers on Substack, of which here is a preview.

Rarely has a single space been so productive in such a short span of time as Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark. Here, in a studio compound located in the front garden of his family home at 5 Cardiff Crescent, Washington Gardens, Kingston, Perry produced hundreds, if not thousands of records, released and unreleased. Perry’s ear for eccentric sound effects and mysterious production techniques on basic electronic equipment opened up hitherto unknown dimensions in what musicians would play around him, swathed in clouds of ganja smoke, as Perry mixed, exhorted, encouraged, blessed proceedings with Bible verses or obscure rituals of his own devising. Singers like Susan Cadogan and Max Romeo called to lovers or called down Babylon or chanted down the devil, while Perry, the self-proclaimed “Ghost Captain” or “Mad Scientist”, alternated between resonant solemnity, prophetic fervor, and madcap humour, sometimes at the same time, providing sound effects of crying babies and mooing cows, sampling British sitcoms by holding the microphone up to the TV, turning reverb and echo into new constructive principals remaking ideas of rhythm and space.

As Kodwo Eshun writes of Perry’s work in More Brilliant than the Sun: “As soon as you have echo, listening has to completely change. Your ear has to chase the sound. Instead of the beat being this one event in time, it becomes this series of retreating echoes, like a tail of sound. The beat becomes a tail which is always disappearing round the corner and your ear has to start chasing it.” The music wrongfoots. Where one might expect to find a cymbal splash, instead a gaping void. Yet it all seems contained within a cavernous single entity, that, like the Black Ark itself, expands into mysterious rooms, corridors, voids: beneath it all, the thickness of a bass so resonant it came to seem a holy principle, the church on which Jah might build his rock.

New sign, new mind, echoplex [...]
With that echoplex, Ethiopia
With that echoplex, Africa [...]
With my echoplex, anything can happen
Who knows what coming next? 

In the ritual space of the Black Ark, the line between visionary experimentation, eccentricity and mental instability became increasingly blurred. In 1978, when a truce had been briefly brokered between the rival gangs supporting the political parties, the conservative JLP and the democratic socialist PNP, Perry had become involved with the Nyabinghi Theocracy, a Rastafarian offshoot ocused on theological discussion who conducted intensive drumming sessions that could last hours or days at a time, and with whom Perry planned a never-completed album. Millenarian imagination abounded. Through music, not only peace in Jamaica, but world peace might be achieved. Perry emblazoned the entrance to the Ark with the words “THEOCRACY MUSICAL GOVERNMENT”. By the following year, however, the truce had broken down. Consumed by paranoia, and amidst the backdrop of Jamaica’s political turmoil, Perry had evicted almost all visitors from the compound. As David Katz recounts in his comprehensive biography, People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee “Scratch” Perry, he now refused to allow in anyone with dreadlocks, and insisted to the Black Star Liner record label that he would work only with white musicians.

Perry was increasingly uninterested in treating the Ark as a musical space. Instead, he seemed intent on turning it into a kind of private art installation. Musical instruments and audio equipment—pianos, keyboards, guitars, basses, speakers, mixers—became objects used in private rituals of his own devising, organised around the natural elements—earth, air, fire, water. Electronic equipment filled up with sand or rocks, instruments were painted and repainted according to internal mystical symbolism, and, in bursts of graphomania or “hypergraphia”, covering every inch of the Ark with graffitied text and symbols deriving, in part, from Nyabinghi symbolism (in which, for instance, X stood for the Devil and D for Death). Visiting Perry in 1979, photographer Dave Hendley recalled that Perry “had written on absolutely everything”, from the objects within the space to the space itself. When singer Susan Cadogan asked him why, he replied: “Well, if you don’t write, you wrong!”

Graffitied wall from Lee Scratch Perry’s Black Ark. 

Photograph from Lee $cratch Perry Black Ark © Edition Patrick Frey.

“I am a madman”, Perry declared in a later song of the same title. “I am a cultist / I am a badman [...] The heart is a drum / my mind is the bass”. As scholar Michael Veal writes in the foreword to the new photobook Lee $cratch Perry Black Ark, a documentation of the space as it stood in 2021, “it became increasingly unclear whether Perry viewed the Black Ark as a recording studio, a religious shrine, a nature reserve, the command module of a space capsule or, at the most extreme moments, a mental health ward”. “The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself”, Perry remarked. In what Veal calls “his increasingly eccentric attempts to force the hi-tech sound technology around him into a more organic relationship with nature”, Perry let the equipment decay, dug holes in the floor so that the drumkit would be suspended over the element of water. He miked up a palm tree to record “the living African heartbeat”, buried tapes in the soil for protection. Enacting a constant fusion of modern technology—electricity, fire, light—and soil, earth, roots, for Perry, metaphor and reality constantly crossed over.

In spring 1982, one of the elements with which Perry was obsessed—fire—took ever, when the studio control room burnt down. Over the years, Perry repeatedly claimed that set the fire himself as a kind of “sacrifice” or exorcism of the bad energy that had accumulated in the space. Did Perry burn it down himself as a “sacrifice”, frustrated at the gangsters who’d infiltrated his circle and attempted to extort him? Or was it, as family members claimed, the result of an electrical fire while attempting to revamp the space? One interpretation has the Black Ark fire as catastrophe, the logical endpoint of a period of destructive decline; alternatively—an interpretation Perry himself sometimes leaned towards—the fire was a cleansing force from whose ashes Perry arose, phoenix-like, to reinvent his art from within its ruins. Whatever the truth, it would form a key part of the myth Perry would build around himself and others would build around him in the remaining four decades of his career. As in the fire in the Dante Hotel which, in 1979 burned poet Bob Kaufman’s possessions and manuscripts—charred pages of which editor Raymond Foye rescued from the flames—the barrier between symbolism, metaphor, literary imagination and life itself seems to have been definitively removed.

The Changing Same (Part 2) (Preview)

Preview of a post on Substack: a second book chapter (on jazz poetics), and a survey of the critical field--jazz/poetry, critical legacies, collective remembrance.

 

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.

The Wire magazine feature on jazz/poetry from 2023.

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.

The Changing Same (Part 1) (Preview)

Preview of a two-part Substack post on jazz and hip hop poetics.

The next two posts here will explore some background to two book chapters I worked on in the past few years, both just published in edited collections. In the next post, I’ll write more about “A Question of Form: Jazz in Joans, Kaufman, and Cortez”, a chapter in The Cambridge History of African American Poetry, a monumental volume edited by Keith Leonard. This first post, though, focuses on “Nation Time(s): Jazz and Hip-Hop’s Changing Same”, published in Hip Hop and American Culture, also from Cambridge University Press, and edited by academic and Wire magazine columnist Rob Turner. The book chapters themselves will also be available to subscribers behind the paywall.

It is—or should be—uncontroversial to say that the criminalized treatment of contemporary hip hop artists is hardly different in content to that of the blues and jazz artists of the past—in itself a continuity, though hardly of a desired or desirable kind. Nonetheless, the question of whether hip hop, half-a-century since its inception, fulfils or negates various traditions, radical or otherwise, can be the subject of some controversy. At stake in hip hop’s use of jazz as lyrical and sonic trope is the status of cultural heritage, perceived relations to history and community and the question of what this music, what any music, does, the question of what it can or could or should do.

The chapter focuses on the relation of jazz to hip hop via Amiri Baraka’s notion of the “changing same”, and proceeds through some close readings of lyrics and jazz samples from “Golden Age” hip hop. Baraka’s 1966 essay caps off Black Music, that still-foundation survey-statement on the jazz of the decade’s first half, and the New Thing, the New Black Music, free jazz in particular. As Baraka started to conceptualise how the Black Arts might expand, political coalition-making had its artistic equivalent. Popular art, so a simplified version of the argument might go, had a social appeal that the New Music lacked; the New Music had a political content or focus that popular music lacked. Each could infuse the other: a coalition aimed at challenging the economic, aesthetic and political structures within which Black music and Black musicians were presented and exploited. Baraka himself put this into practice not only in his criticism but in his own artistic work, recording his own poetic-musical collaborations across doo wop—Black and Beautiful, Soul and Madness (1968)—free jazz—A Black Mass (1968), with the Sun Ra Arkestra, and ‘Black Art’ (1965), with Sunny Murray et al—and the combination of four separate groups, each within a different genre, on It’s Nation Time (1972).

Such work is, in turn, fairly regularly cited, along with that of Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, and the Watts Prophets, as a key precursor to hip hop. So the story goes, a form of poetry-with-music that grew out of, and often had as its subject, the heritage of blues and jazz, evolved into what would ultimately become a multi-million dollar industry, shaping the global sound of popular music.

But there is, of course, some ambivalence here. In his later writing on music collected in books such as Digging, Amiri Baraka himself espoused the position, fairly standard among those of the Black Arts generation, that hip hop was of value when more politically outspoken, when continuing the specifically political frameworks associated with Black Art. The artists of value were Public Enemy or The Roots, with the latter of whom Baraka recorded that astonishing version of ‘Something in the Way of Things (In Town)’. Not party music, but Party music (“and when you asked what truths their party taught…”) As with the coalitional impulse of R&B, free jazz, blues, and oral poetics espoused in ‘The Changing Same’, it was the more niche forms of art—as jazz had become, as the New Music had generally remained—in which aesthetic and political values were enshrined, while popular music was too easily susceptible to capitalist capture, to the self-perpeutation of stereotype, and to a-political hedonism or nihilism. When not guided, it went off track—which was precisely when it became popular.

Baraka turned to Marxism-Leninism a few years after recording It’s Nation Time, and the Leninist strain to this argument is aesthetically prefigured in its Nationalist iteration in ‘The Changing Same’ era. The Advanced Workers, the Vanguard, emerging from within the masses, have to direct the masses away from the distractions of disco or gangsta rap and towards consciousness, towards revolution. At the same time, they must work within those forms to shape them, and the aesthetics of those forms rub off. Pleasure and its precise direction becomes hard to happen, libidinally wayward. Perhaps nowhere is this better illustrated than it Baraka’s attempt to make a disco record, the 45” recorded with the Advanced Workers and the Anti-Imperialist Singers in the later ’70s, in which he literally gives a speech in the middle of the record, while, over danceable beats, singers chant that their listeners should not be dancing at all, but “marching in the street”. It’s a dialectical move, and in itself, a clever twist on the way that Martha and the Vandella’s ‘Dancing in the Street’ was repurposed as an anthem of urban protest in the previous decade. But can the dialetic be guided this way? Is this how art works?

The rest of the essay is available to subscribers via Substack here.

Stolen Moments, Broken Epics (Preview)

Preview of a subscriber post on Substack on Nellie Wong and Harmony Holiday.

In the past month, two articles of mine on two quite different poets appeared in The Poetry Foundation and the newly founded Hythe Review. This post goes into a bit more detail on the background to those pieces and serves as an additional tribute to the late Nellie Wong, who passed away earlier this year.

It’ll be followed in the next while by material relating relating to two further recent publications, on jazz poetics and on the relation between jazz and hip hop. More on those in due course.

Nellie Wong: Typing Back

Based in San Francisco for many years, Nellie Wong features in a chapter of my 2024 book on Boston and Bay Area queer poetry, Never By Itself Alone, focused on her comradeship with fellow poets and activists Merle Woo and Karen Brodine. Wong wrote of labour, of class struggle, of family history. Her first book appeared in the late 1970s, when Kelsey Street Press published Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park; her final book will appear posthumously in this new century, now moving beyond its first quarter.

Employed as a secretary, typing others’ words, Wong used her own poetry and prose to write back, to write over the words of bosses. To write, Wong reminds is, is also to be involved in labour—physical labour, or labour that removes traditional, hierarchical distinctions between intellectual and manual labour, that attempts to deny the workings of the mind within the workings of the body and of the body within the mind. Poetry, activism, and education were a way out of those frames and into herself, into the fullness of her own life, but using precisely the means of that gendered labour—the typewriter, reproducing the words of others as a way of reproducing oneself for a wage, become now a weapon, a way into words and language and struggle.

To type back, Wong discovered, is to fight back, to discover and invent, to transmit. There is a friction here, and it is this friction that poetry operates like a lever. To type back is not the current invisibilising process of automation, of Large Language Models which anticipate and erase waged labour without any alternative recompense. Rather than the erasure of bodies, such writing attests to their presence within the system, insisting on their agency, their potential for sabotage, and their own inherent worth.

An early draft of Nellie Wong’s ‘Stolen Moments’, published in the Freedom Socialist newspaper in Spring 1980. A revised version forms the title poem to Wong’s 1997 pamphlet.

Last year I was privileged to attend an online discussion with the socialist feminist organisation Radical Women. Wong was involved with both RW and the affiliated Freedom Socialist Party until her passing, and was there herself on the Zoom call. I was deeply honoured by her presence, and struck by her modesty. Here’s the conclusion to the Poetry Foundation piece:

An individual writer’s work makes a contribution toward something whose contours will exceed those of their own life. “You will not survive the work that still needs to be done,” Wong wrote back in 1981. “You will be gone when the questions of the future arise like wildflowers on the plains of this earth.” To write is to live, but also to accept death. Wong’s late poems reconcile themselves to transience in the belief that human struggle might build a better world. As she wrote in “Under Our Own Wings” in 1979:

If you begin I begin
If you sing I sing . . .
In death our bodies regress to the innocence of bones.
In love we work to live in America under our own wings.

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Nellie Wong reading at the Generations of Power festival in 2022. Photograph © Mark Shigenaga, via The Oaklandside.

Beyond the introductory work of that article, readers should head straight to the source. There are multiple rare recordings of Wong available at the invaluable Archive.org, among them:

—a 1978 reading with Susan Griffin (including the unpublished dialogue ‘The Interrogation of Ms. Security-Runs-A-Risk’);

—speaking on Asian American writing for KPFA radio the following month;

—Allie Light’s 1981 film Mitsuye and Nellie: American Poets, featuring Wong and Mistuye Yamada, who is at the time of writing an astonishing 103 years old;

—reading her comrade Karen Brodine’s poems in Washington for Radical Women in 1991, as well as delivering a lecture on ‘Racism, Sexism, and War’;

—interviewed on the KMVT15 Community Media TV channel, in a programme entitled ‘A Banquet of Poems’;

—and speaking on family and creativity with her siblings Flo and William at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 1996.

Wong’s illuminating 2017 reading and conversation with Genny Lim at the San Francisco Poetry Center can also be accessed via the Poetry Center website. In July 20025, she read with the Laborfest Writers Group at Bird and Beckett Books: the full reading can be viewed on Youtube, as can the memorial reading held in January 2026. A lovingly-maintained website can also be found here. And the organisations with which Wong was involved—a part of her life just as important to her as her writing, and inseparable from it—can be found at their respective websites: Radical Women here and the Freedom Socialist Party here.

In these traces, in her work, in her impact on many lives, Nellie Wong lives on.

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Harmony Holiday’s broken epic

Also just published, a review of the expanded UK edition of Harmony Holiday’s epic poem Maafa, on The 87 Press’s new open-access journal The Hythe Review. For those who don’t know, Holiday’s Substack, Black Music and Black Muses has been running for several years and documents her ongoing writing on music. But music suffuses almost everything Holiday writes: her essays, her ongoing biography of Abbey Lincoln, her collections of poetry.

Maafa’s soundtrack would be Prince; it would be Pharoah Sanders; it would be the music of Holiday’s father, Jimmy Holiday, of Billie Holiday, to name some of Holiday’s touchstones, those named within its pages and the pages of her other books. 

The rest of the post can be read by subscribers on Substack here.