Jazz

Jazz Prosodies: Orality and TextualityAuthor(s): Meta Du Ewa JonesSource: Callaloo, Vol. 25, No. 1, Jazz Poetics: A Special Issue (Winter, 2002), pp. 66-91Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300385Accessed: 09/06/2010 23:08

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JAZZ PROSODIES Orality and Textuality

by Meta Du Ewa Jones

How does literature "write music"? How do the graphic tech- niques of black literacy translate, or transport, the particularities of black orality onto the page?

Brent Edwards

The above questions posed by the scholar Brent Edwards capture the core of the

enduring and engaging critical debate within African-American literary study over the nexus between orature and literature, or orality and textuality. Edwards' exhorts scholars of African-American poetics to refocus our critical lens so that it blurs the facile dichotomies made between "orality/literacy, craft/politics, and (inarticulate) music/ (articulate) writing" (Edwards 580). Such an adjustment might successfully yield an appropriate sense of the dynamic interplay between vocal and visual characteristics in musically influenced Black poetry. A scholarship that recognizes the oral and textual as imbricated, not disparate, elements in African-American

poetics would enrich our understanding of how the vocal and visual are performed across the geographic space of the page. In fact, some of the most prominent African- American practitioners in the craft of verse have called attention to the intrinsic interconnection between orality and literacy as an essential element of a Black aesthetic. For example, in an interview in The Furious Flowering of African-American Poetry, Michael Harper marked the presence of "a certain kind of intelligence" and a "certain kind of literacy which is not necessarily written down ... which is always in

dialogue because we're always participating in what I call a long dialogue" (Gabbin 85). More succinctly, in the introduction to Soulscript, An Anthology of Afro-American Poetry, June Jordan declared, "poems are voiceprints of language"; they are "soul-

script." The concepts of "voiceprint," "soulscript," and unwritten literacy as metaphors for

the presence and performance of Black poetry are compelling. They associatively link the technology of writing with the sign of racialized speech, what the African- American linguist John Rickford characterized as "Spoken Soul." As scholars, we would do well to heed the cue for interpretive possibilities that these metaphors open up in our readings of African-American literature in general and poetry in particular. One of the dangers of the traditional reading-in the sense of critical interpretation-

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of the orally inflected features of African-American literature is a tendency to overlook its textually specific resonance. The poet Harryette Mullen rightly notes that "any theory of African-American literature that privileges a speech based poetics, or the trope of orality, to the exclusion of more writerly texts will cost us some

impoverishment of the tradition" (670-71). Furthermore, as Mullen explains, African cultural traditions of developing "indigenous writing or script systems" are over- looked in scholarship by Henry Louis Gates and others which argues that "black literary traditions privilege orality" and that "the quest for freedom and literacy" is a motif "that informs all black writing" (671). It is true that a racially inflected "speech based poetics" can be found in much African-American literature, from the slave narratives to modern variations of the "speakerly text." Yet it is also true that the sound of language has a visual dimension and that the "speakerly" and "literary" characteristics of African-American literature are interconnected.

This essay examines poems within the tradition of African-American jazz poetry and focuses on both its oral and textual elements. I intend to focus on the visual

performance of jazz-influenced texts as indicative of poets' unique approaches to scripting African-American musical and verbal sound. My goal is four-fold: 1) to discuss the debates concerning orality and textuality as they relate to an aesthetic of and evaluative criteria for jazz poetry; 2) to describe a prosody of jazz poetry that accounts for its visual and vocal characteristics; 3) to delineate a textually-based criticism of an orally-inflected text; and finally, 4) to engage in a comparative analysis of jazz-influenced poems by Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Elizabeth Alexander, and Michael Harper. I will examine the range of textual evidence within poems by each of these authors that exhibits the influence of jazz. I will do so by studying these writers' engagement in what the scholar Kimberly Benston has classified as "an unmistakable genre in black poetry," the John Coltrane poem (qtd. in Feinstein 315). My thinking has been stimulated by the excellent historical, socio-cultural and

musico-political analysis of this category of Black poetics in scholarship by Benston, Sascha Feinstein, and Gerald Early, among others.1 These scholars have posed probing inquiries into the relevance and reverence of Coltrane as a jazz musician and archetypal muse for Black writers and intellectuals, particularly during the Black Arts Movement. I aim to revise the scholarship on this genre of jazz literature so that critical emphasis on its cultural and political import does not preclude adequate attention to its formal dimensions. My explication of individual poems thus high- lights poets' strategic use of typography and orthography as signatures in poems to suggest improvisational techniques that Coltrane deployed. Furthermore, my anal-

ysis seeks to make evident the synchronous intertextual and intermedial nature of African-American jazz poetics: to show how the poems refer to Coltrane and his musical influence through textual references to a plethora of literary sources both inside and outside of the jazz idiom.

Why do I want to stress the concomitant visuality and intertextuality in a body of literature that ostensibly engages a medium of phonic performance external to the text-jazz music in live or recorded contexts? Because the physicality and referenti-

ality of the language in the jazz poetry I survey here demands such an emphasis. The scholar Robert Parker's lament that too many reviews of Michael Harper's writing

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discuss his "musical influences" and "the oral tradition" while neglecting the eclectic

variety of literary and poetic traditions Harper also draws upon could be extended to the reception of most jazz influenced poetry (Parker). By focusing on the graphic aspects of each author's poetics I hope to prevent "the great wailing of jazz" from

drowning out the presence of other artistic influences that structure their work. Furthermore, a broader political and artistic agenda undergirds my efforts to delin- eate the divergent visual and textual forms of jazz poetry. I would add to Edwards' critique of the craft/politics divide in explorations of Black poetics, that a criticism/ craft divide must be redressed. Specifically, my interest in investigating the formal structures of jazz-inflected poetry-the prosodic element-is motivated by the dearth of this kind of sustained critical inquiry. As Edwards has observed in a discussion of the lyric, "in poetic criticism, an attention to form has been largely lacking" (584). Similarly, nearly a decade ago, Benston noted that "criticism specifically devoted to

poetry" within the tradition of African-American literary study "is less theoretically compelling and practically instructive than the critiques offered in the realm of narrative and dramatic studies" (165). Commendable studies of individual Black

poets exist; yet even today, most theories of the development of the tradition of African-American literary and expressive culture are grounded in works of fiction, nonfiction prose and other media. There are encouraging exceptions to this critical

commonplace. This essay aspires to join the constellation of recent work by scholars such as Aldon Nielsen, Harryette Mullen, and Nathaniel Mackey that provides rigorous inquiry into the aesthetics of African-American poetics while also challeng- ing conventional notions of just what sound, shape, or even language such a poetics might contain.

Each of the terms I am using-"textuality," "prosody," and "orality"-signify a

variety of literary, social and theoretical meanings. Textuality, with its denoted

emphasis on the structure of written forms of language, marks my focus on visual and

graphic elements in the formal structure of jazz-influenced poems. By "prosody" I mean its traditional use in poetics in accompaniment with the term scansion, which involves calculating the rhythmic units-metrical or not-in a given poetic text. In the introduction to the Jazz Poetry Anthology, Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa insist that

jazz poetry can be understood in terms of "standard poetic sensibilities" and the conventions of a prosody which accounts for syncopated rhythm and meter (xviii). While I agree with their observation, following the poet Charles Bernstein, I would add that jazz poetry "prosody is too dynamic a subject to be restricted to conventional meter" (14). The composition, organization and performance of jazz poetry-with or without musical accompaniment-compels students of this genre to consider alterna- tive ways of accounting for its structuring principles.2 I am interested in the influence of the sounds of jazz performance on patterning procedures in a poem such as syllabic arrangement, word count, stanza length, and orthographic variance.

Sound and speech are the focal points in my use of the term "orality" in an examination of the jazz inflections of African-American texts.3 I will examine

divergent critical views of the nature of linguistic representations of speech in poetic texts as markers of racial and cultural identity. My analysis will not, however, address in full the critical anthropological and linguistic debates surrounding "oral-

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ity" and "culture" which divorce oratory from a textual or literate context. Walter

Ong's frequently cited book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, exemplifies the essence of such debates. I introduce a few tenets of Ong's theoretical

premises here in order to contextualize my critical divergence from prevalent theoret- ical notions of a discrete orality. Ong's work, on the one hand draws an epistemolog- ical link between writing and orature, when he asserts that "written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings" (8). On the other hand, Ong's restrictive definition of "orality" excludes the domain of "writing" while implicitly yielding to that same domain epistemic privilege. "Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not 'study' . . . Study in the strict sense of extended sequential analysis becomes possible with the interiorization of writing" (Ong 9, italics mine). Ong defines "study" in such a way that it only becomes possible with the advent of

writing. Moreover, Ong's binary between "oral" and "literate" in primary oral cultures is problematic because it contributes to the frequent privileging of traits

corresponding with African oral rituals in an analysis of African-American writing.4 This critical tendency occurs at the expense of acknowledging a tradition of historical

recovery of African script in graphic reproduction that also exists among African- American poets such as Julia Fields, Stephen Jonas and Nathaniel Mackey.5

Nathaniel Mackey, whose work demonstrates the tantamount influence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson as well as Langston Hughes and Bob Kaufman, illustrates the ways in which innovations in orality and textuality work in tandem in jazz- inflected verse. For example, Mackey entitled the compact disc recording of his Song of the Andoumboulou poem series with post-bebop jazz and world music accompani- ment, Strick. In the album's liner notes, Mackey spells out the aesthetic criteria involved in his word choice. The literal meaning of "Strick" is found in strands, in

"pieces of fiber or hemp before they are made into rope" (Naylor).6 For Mackey, however, Strick's significance lies less in its denotation and more in its aural conno- tation. As he explains:

But I hear in the word more than that. I hear the word stick, I hear the word strike, I hear the word struck, and I hear the word strict. I hear those words which are not really pronounced in that word, but there are overtones or undertones of those words, harmonics of those words. The word strick, then, is like a musical chord in which those words which are otherwise not present are present. (Naylor)

The simile Mackey draws between "a musical chord" and the word-tones within "strick" provides a fascinating visual component as well. With the mere addition or subtraction of one consonant or vowel, an "r," "t", "e" or "u," a significant variation in the meaning of the words occurs. Mackey's comments concerning his selection of the title illustrate the ways that his critical and poetic language enacts a visual and a verbal music.

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The neglect of the graphic in favor of the oral points to another lacunae in the

scholarship examining African-American poetry. When Steven Henderson cited black speech as a source for poetic reference in Understanding the New Black Poetry, he included in this category not only the speech of the "the majority of Black people" in America, but also the language used by "so-called educated people" (31). This is a

significant distinction because scholarship on orality in African-American literature is too often bonded to the notion of the "vernacular" as the authenticating stamp upon the critical packaging of Black poetry. Representations of orature that are not

ostensibly "vernacular" in origin or appearance are posited as less authentic in

linguistic and racial terms. Houston Baker, for example, asserts that "Jazz poetry, blues poetry, vernacular signifying in the arts of America were at their highest order of achievement during the Black Arts Movement" of the 1960s (Baker 199-200). He insists that it was because participants in this Movement "turned their backs on the

bourgeois longings of their immediate ancestors by picking up on the dialect, mores, rhythms, intonations, and style of the black majority." According to Baker, "black artists crafted the voices of the black masses since they knew that dialect poetry was the only kind of poetry that truly counted (at least in their view) as black" (199-200). Baker's comments illustrate the kind of validating gesture by which critics confine the

scope of orality in the African-American literary imagination. Moreover, a close

correspondence is assumed between "black speech" and its instantiations in the black

print of the page. Recent scholarship, however, has taken a more nuanced approach to examining

orthographic depictions orality in African-American poetry. Fahamisha Brown, for

example, attests that "when we read African American poetic texts ... we can hear that, while they are taken from vernacular speech, they do not mimic that speech; rather, they create a written analog for it" (28). Similarly, the scholar Aldon Nielsen cautions against unqualified endorsements of the authenticity of linguistic represen- tations of "black speech." He exhorts the reader to "recall that realism of linguistic representation ... is a carefully constructed literary style, not a scientific recording of actual speech. It is a fictive orthography adopted for the purpose of conveying an entire literary ideology via style (9). Nielsen justly notes that the roots for the range of orthography and syntax used to t8gnal to readers the sounds of black speech, were

ironically textual-found within the written poems of others-as well as aural, or, heard.

"Even at the height of the Black Arts movement's calls for a poetic diction rooted in black speech and black music," Nielsen explains:

the typographic representations of that speech were formulated in accordance with poetic practices already worked out by poets such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, and David Henderson, black poets whose confrontations with modernist poetics on the ground of language established the formal practices followed by subsequent African-American writ- ers intent upon locating a black aesthetic in traditions of black orality and musical improvisation. (9)

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What Nielsen calls black poets' "confrontations with modernist poetics" is more aptly referred to as a collaboration with them. In attempting to establish a self-conscious revision of each other's work, one should note that these "black typographical techniques" are not hermetically sealed any more than "black speech" is sealed off from what is called "standard" English. Henderson underscores the integrated nature of influence with convincing clarity, noting that:

one must admit that typographically, at least, contemporary Black poets have been greatly influenced by white poets and frequently admit it... Baraka has said on several occasions that he owes a great technical debt to William Carlos Williams, and his early poetry embodies many of the attitudes and utilizes many of the techniques of the Beats who were also indebted to Williams. Much the same can be said of Bob Kaufman, who is considered by some to be the greatest innovator among the poets of that generation. (31)

Lorenzo Thomas likewise observes that while the Black Arts "movement rejected mainstream America's ideology, deeming it inimical to black people, Black Arts poets maintained and developed the prosody they had acquired from Black Mountain and the Beats" (309). A circular relationship exists in this exchange. While Black writers reflected the Beats' influence (Kaufman notwithstanding), writers such as Allen

Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, whether they acknowledged it or not, were benefiting from the technical innovations-in live jazz poetry performance and its written

counterpart-established by Langston Hughes and others who had experimented with the translation of a jazz ethos into a poetic aesthetic. Henderson adds that "the Beats themselves were enamored of jazz in particular . . . and at times sought to communicate what has to be called a "Black feeling" in their work. Often their formal model was alleged to be jazz, in their writing [they] were striving to capture the

rhythms and phrasings of Black music, to notate somehow those sounds on the

printed page" (31-32). This attempted notation of sounds suggests that in transla- tions of jazz into poetry, graphic and sonic innovation can go hand in hand.

An emphasis on the visual aspects of two poems penned during the Black Arts Movement by Sonia Sanchez and Sarah Webster Fabio shows similar connections through their representations of language. Fabio uses colloquial speech, metaphor and apostrophe in her tribute to Louis Armstrong ("For Louis Armstrong, A Ju-Ju"), of whom she writes:

Jazz was yo' art. Jazz was yo' life. From waif to world impresario, you winged it, befo' there were fets, rockets to the moon, you entered the Cosmos on notes blown from yo' horn; got yo' SOUL in minor key befo' you were born, like a mojo, turned the blues of yo' life into a Black tune, yo' self into a thing of beauty and envy, the heavy way you singed it. Jazz was art to you. Jazz was life. (56-58)

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What Amiri Baraka called the "changing same" is apparent in Fabio's poem, moving from "Jazz was yo' art. Jazz was yo' life" at the beginning of the stanza to "jazz was art to you." Moreover, the rhyme in her use of vernacular expressions such as "you winged it," "you singed it" is deliberate, calling attention to attempts by African- American poets at that time to "legitimize their own communicative medium," by using language "as a whole that is not formal or proper Anglo-Saxon English" which "carries its own syntax, which is not conventional" (Lee, "Toward" 216).7 Similarly, evidence of repetition with slight grammatical or visual variation is apparent in Sonia Sanchez's "a/ coltrane/poem":

my favorite things is u blowen

yo/favorite things...

but I saw yo/murder/ the massacre

of all blk/musicians. planned in advance.

yrs befo u blew away our passsst and showed us our futureeeeee screech screech screeeeech screeech

a/love/supreme, alovesupreme a lovesupreme. A LOVE SUPREME

scrEEEccCHHHHH screeeeEEECHHHHHHH (Feinstein and Komunyakaa (183-84)

Sanchez's use of "yo"' in place of the pronoun "you," and "befo' in place of the adverb "before" is remarkably similar to Fabio's use in "Louis Armstrong, A Ju-Ju." In addition, her slight variation in punctuation and spacing, the insertion of slash marks "/" in the second line of "my favorite things" and "a /love/ supreme" indicates that not only do black poets read and revise each other's "typographic representations of Black speech," but they also form a relationship with each other such that the poetry refers to the music, in part, through the poetic conventions established by other poets.

Sanchez's play on the meaning of "my favorite things" in her "coltrane / poem" provides an example from which to examine the relationship between sound and text in poets' translation of jazz instrumentation into written form. One of the most influential tenor and soprano saxophonists in jazz history, Coltrane's most famous performance is of the tune which shares the same title on his 1960 best-selling album, My Favorite Things (Coltrane 1361). The title track is based on a well-known tune from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's Broadway show "The Sound of Music."8 What's significant about Coltrane's performance of "My Favorite Things" is his loosely modal construction; for his soprano saxophone improvisation, he draws liberally from a single scale that compatibly suits the accompanying pianist McCoy Tyner's two chord repeating pattern. Coltrane's new approach for improvisation became especially popular and was used as the model for scores of improvising

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musicians during the late 1960s and early 1970s (Gridley 257). His use of the soprano saxophone is also significant; My Favorite Things contributed to the rejuvenation in

popularity of this instrument. I highlight Coltrane's exemplary performance as stellar model and novel technique in order to index two features of jazz poetry of this period. The first is that much has been made in critical studies of the Beat movement of the 1950s and the poets' attempted imitations of the be-bop melodies of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and pianist Thelonious Monk. This is at least partly attributed to their

distinctively innovative playing styles. Likewise, one could argue that by the mid 1960s and early 1970s, poets such as Sanchez, Baraka and others were particularly attuned to Coltrane's unique and consummate skill as a saxophonist. Baraka may well have served as a bridge between these different periods in poetic development; his association with poets from the Black Mountain School as well as the Beats is well known. Most importantly, his poetry reflected black musical influence long before his involvement in the Black Arts Movement. In either case, each of these poets' attempts to approximate the riffs, rhythms and sounds of Coltrane's playing, strike a chord, to use a musical metaphor, that reverberates in musicological as well as textual analysis.

Two other distinctive elements of Coltrane's playing technique were his use of

pedal points, the repetition of a single low-pitched note in a drone-like manner, and

multiphonics, a term that refers to the practice of making multiple tones sound

simultaneously on a wind instrument such as a clarinet or saxophone (Gridley 253). During the mid-1960s both Coltrane's adept deployment of multiphonics and his controlled screeches and squawks contributed to "peaks of musical excitement" in his

performances (Gridley 253,255). Examples of this style of playing can be found on his solo in "Chasin' The Trane" on the album Live At The Village Vanguard. I'd like to draw an

analogy between Coltrane's use of "multiphonics " for controlled screeches and Sanchez's use of what I am calling "multiphonemics"9 to capture, orthographically, a sense of the

intensity and layered texture of this sound on the page. I see a textual parallel between Coltrane's causing distinct tones to emit simultaneously from his horn and Sanchez's

elongation of the "ee" in the word "Screech," her extension of the "silent" e in the word "future," and her typographic lengthening of the consecutive consonants "s," "c," and "h," when she proclaims that "yrs befo u blew away our passsst / and showed us our futureeeeee / screech screeech screeeeech screech" (183-84).

In the later half of "a / coltrane / poem," Sanchez's repetitive arrangement of individual letters and alternation of lower and upper case characters becomes even more pronounced:

screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeCHHHHHHHHHHHH SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECHHHHHHHHHH screeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EECCCCHHHHHHH SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

EEEEEEEEECHHHHHHHHH BRING IN THE WITE/LIBERALS ON THE SOLO SOUND OF YO/FIGHT IS MY FIGHT

SAXOPHONE. (185)

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Sanchez links Coltrane's "solo sound" on the saxophone here and elsewhere in the

poem to African-American agency and empowerment. At one point she even gives instructions to her ideal readership: "rise up blk / people.... move straight in yo / blkness ... step over the wite / ness / that is yesssss terrrrrrr day." The lines "yo / fight is my fight" exemplify the expressly political approach that many poets describ-

ing Coltrane's music took during this period. In an essay exploring "the evolution of the John Coltrane poem," Feinstein details African-American writers' interpretations and appropriations of Coltrane's music as revolutionary and particularly his "scream" as "the angry expression of African-American demands for justice, [and] equality of

opportunity" (6). Feinstein also observed the shift from such a militant tone in poems written in tribute to Coltrane in the 1960s and 1970s to a more elegiac one during the 1980s and early 1990s. As I will demonstrate later, this tonal shift is evident in Elizabeth Alexander's poem, "John Col," which was published in 1990. It seems fair to say that homage to John Coltrane became an expected piece in the repertoire of the Black poet, in part because Coltrane "epitomized the serious and committed Black artist" (Lacey), in part because his iconographic status within Black communities

virtually required it.10 Sanchez was indubitably aware of contemporary poems such as A.B. Spellman's "Did John's Music Kill Him?", Michael Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane," and Haki Madhubuti's "Don't Cry, Scream." Hence, she self-consciously entitles her piece "a/coltrane/poem"; the indefinite article "a" suggests her poem is a generic one among many.

I brought out the critical and literary context within which Sanchez composed "a/ coltrane/poem" because it suggests that the source for the poem's alphabetic dance

parroting Coltrane's sound is not merely musical. In fact, one could argue that it is anti-musical; her punctuation, capitalization and other typographic devices are seen

by some critics as evidence of a lack of aesthetic appeal at best and at worse as evidence of poor craftsmanship. Yet when reading Sanchez's poem alongside others of the same

period, her use of excessive orthographic alteration can be seen as an attempt to

engage in a period specific poetic practice. Amiri Baraka's "AM/TRAK" exhibits a

comparable protraction of vowels and consonants in his echo of Coltrane's "scream":

Yes it says blow, oh honk-scream (bahhhhhhhhh - wheeeeeeeeee)

(If Don Lee thinks I am imitating him in this poem, this is only payback for his imitating me-we are brothers, even if he is a backward cultural nationalist ...

Trane was the spirit of the 60s He was Malcolm X in New Super Bop Fire Baaahhhhhh Whccccc ... Black Art!!! (5)

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In addition, Baraka's address to Haki Madhubuti (Don Lee) playfully illustrates these poets' use of poetic text as a forum for engaging in a dialogue. Baraka's parenthetical aside to Don Lee employs colloquial speech and carries the aura of a conversation. Yet Baraka's reference is textually specific, recalling-in tone, stanzaic patterning across the geographic space of the page and orthographic renderings of Coltrane's sound- Madhubuti's "Don't Cry, Scream." A relevant excerpt from Madhubuti's tribute, which begins, "into the sixties / a trane / came/ out..." makes the comparison to both Baraka and Sanchez clear:

your music is like my head-nappy black/ a good nasty feel with tangled songs of:

we-eeeeeeeeeee sing WE-Eeeeeeeeeeeee loud & WE-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE high...

the blues exhibited illusions of manhood. destroyed by you. Ascension into:

scream-eeeeeeeeeeeeee-ing sing SCREAM-EEEeeeeeeeeeee-ing loud & SCREAM-EEEEEEEEEEEEE-ing long with

feeling. (Lee 27-28)

In this sense, the poem is highly literary-saturated with allusions to other works. An obvious point, perhaps, but one worth making given, with some exceptions, the predominant treatment of Black Arts poetry as primarily political and cultural artifact instead of as poetry.

One final feature ripe for comparison between Sanchez's and Baraka's respective poems is their carefully constructed textualization of sounds and syncopation in specific jazz tunes. Baraka's effort to achieve what Lacey termed an "onomatopoeic approximation of the characteristic sound of the idiosyncratic Thelonius Monk" possesses a striking similarity to Sanchez's representative scripting of Coltrane's playing. In the fourth section of "AM/TRAK" Baraka, describing Coltrane's collab- orations with Monk, writes:

There was nothing left to do but be where monk cd find him that crazy mother fucker

duh duh-duh duh-duh duh duh duh

duh duh-duh duh-duh duh duh duh

duh duh-duh duh-duh duh duh duh

duh Duuuuuuuuuhhhhhh

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Can you play this shit? (Life asks Come by and listen (4)

Baraka's representation of Monk's unorthodox melodies is visually appealing be- cause his structural arrangement in the alternation of long and short lines of "duhs"

appear parallel, yet his use of hyphens at specific intervals linking some "duhs" to form "duh-duh" and not others evokes both the uniqueness in the symmetry of Monk's tunes and his adeptness at placing accents in an irregular order.1 In a comparison of elements of Monk's piano style with his predecessor, Duke Ellington, musicologist Mark

Gridley observes that the resemblance between Ellington and Monk lies in the "percus- sive way he strikes the piano keys, the dark and rough tone quality his extracts from the piano, and the way he allows notes to ring long after the keys are struck" (150). Gridley's observations provide a suggestive frame for viewing Baraka's selection of the

phrase "duh." I propose that Baraka particularly chose the consonants "d," the vowel "u" to the consonant "h" because, when combined, they effectively elicit a dark, low-pitched and rough tone quality. Skeptical? Try sounding the word aloud at this moment: "Duh." You'll notice that the "u" vowel precludes sounding this word in a high- pitched register. Moreover, the phonetically soft "h" at the end produces an ironically rough, slightly raspy timbre when pronounced. One could also consider Baraka's conclusion of the passage on Monk in "AM/TRAK" with the phrase "Duuuuuuuuu- hhhhhh" as imitating Monk's manner of often allowing notes to ring long after the

keys were struck (Gridley 150). The final feather in Baraka's cap is his ironic use of the phrase "duh." Surely Baraka, a proficient parodist, was aware of the colloquial expression "duh" used to imply non-sense-as in "duh, I don't know, or duuuhhhhh, I really don't know"-latent in the word. A self-styled blues and jazz historian, Baraka was also keenly cognizant of initial reactions to Monk's way of playing and fingering the piano keys as "backward," "illogical,"-in other words, nonsense-ical. A pull on the edges of practical interpretation, perhaps. Yet, considering Baraka's poetic career, his consistent and keen interest in the elasticity of words, this analysis seems suitable.

What is remarkable about what the poet Yusef Komunyakaa would call "language and notes made flesh" is the way Baraka's spatial arrangement of the "duh's"

suggests stresses that correspond to the first few measures of Monk's "Criss-Cross."

Despite the critic Charles Hartman's description of the limitations of "the mute, unifying facade of print" in Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song (133), Baraka's arrangement was suggestive enough to summon the melody of Criss- Cross into my mental ear's memory. Likewise, when Sanchez parenthetically instructs her readers to sing "slowly to the tune of my favorite things" in "a/coltrane/poem," I found myself humming along, recognizing the particular section of Coltrane's "My Favorite Things"-as well as the tune's triple meter feel-that Sanchez's spacing and

stressing of "dums" and "das" seemed to invoke:

(softly da-dum-da da da da da da da da da/da-dum-a till it da da da da da da da da da builds da-dum- da da da

up) da-dum. da. da. da. this is a part of my favorite things. (185)

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To be fair, one could argue that the tune recognition I described is purely a personal reading or hearing into the poem, not a sound drawn from it. Indeed, Hartman contends that "written poetry has no physical voice to act directly on our hearing, and no immediate sensory recognition takes place. Voice, in poems, has to be constructed or reconstructed by a reader's imagination. The relation between the reading imagination and the printed material on which it dwells is dynamic and ambiguous; and so is the result"(133).12 Yet I would extend the boundaries of Hartman's remarks to encourage us to consider, not just the reader's imagination, but the writer's

imagination. I believe Baraka, Sanchez, and other poets attempting to evince oral effects from a textual medium assume a readership that is familiar enough with these

particular jazz performances so that the effectiveness of their orthographic techniques can be fully realized. One fact that would support this particular viewpoint is their choice of tunes that are particularly well known-even beyond the world of jazz aficionados. For example, public reception of My Favorite Things was remarkably high-the album sold nearly fifty thousand copies during the first year of its release in 1960, an exponentially higher number than usually anticipated for a successful jazz album (Monson 106-7).13

To consider the typographical techniques Baraka and Sanchez employ in their

poems as purely orthographic, as opposed to prosodic would be, I think, misleading. While clearly both poems do not rely on traditional meter or tightly controlled stanzaic forms, they do logically employ the use of stress, variant repetition and other

prosodic features in organizing their texts. Moreover, that some of these textual

arrangements at the very least mimic, in their view, the pulse of jazz suggests features of what I am calling a jazz poetry prosody. Indeed, Bernstein's remark that "many prosodists have insisted that the (musical) phrase provides a more useful way of

understanding poetry's sound patterns than do accentual systems, whether quantita- tive or syllabic, that break poetry into metrical feet" (13) usefully suggests listening to actual musical phrases that can reveal sound patterns in jazz poetry not plainly audible or visible. Ironically, Ezra Pound's exhortation to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase might seem heeded by writers espousing a "Black Aesthetic" that eschewed linkages to a "literary mainstream" Modernism.14

Perhaps because many-though not all-of the jazz-inflected poems penned by Black Arts writers during the mid-1960s and early 1970s were composed with the intent for oral recitation in public community spaces such as theatres, neighborhood centers, church parish halls, and yes, coffee shops, the achievements of their compo- sitional effects on a textual level have not been sufficiently appraised.15 Even Hend- erson, a consummate scholar who clarifies both the "folk" roots and contemporary sources for poetry of this period, pays scant attention to the aesthetic and prosodic aspects of typographical and other solely visual components of the poems. Such

neglect possibly stems from the belief that some of these poems did not meet the criteria for evaluation as expressed by the poet and scholar Lorenzo Thomas:

All poetry is incomplete until it is read aloud. Nevertheless, the poem printed on the page is effective when it functions as a memorandum to excite the reader's recall of a previous perfor- mance, or serves as a score for future vocal reproduction. If the

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poet has done the job of preparing that alphabetic transcription well, she can be sure that the poem will live. (320)

The litmus test lies in Thomas' last sentence. The pivotal question is: Has the poet "done the job of preparing that alphabetic transcription well?" Henderson answers

by outlining the limitations of poetic transcriptions of jazz performance:

In their insistence upon jazz as a model and inspiration for their poetry, these writers were and are confronted with enormous technical problems, some of which may be insoluble if they continue to write that poetry down. For their model is dynamic, not static, and although one can suggest various vocal and musical effects with typography, an extensive use of these rather mechanical devices may be ultimately self-defeating. (30)

Part of the cause of such potential failure, Henderson adds sensibly, is "that the kind of typographical stylistics which were popularized by e.e. cummings," when used

maladroitly, beg the patience of "the reader's eyesight" and appear as witty yet ineffective artifice. The chief challenge lies in confronting the "cold technology" of "the printed page" (29). One possible critical solution is to consider the printed version of a jazz inflected poem as "a single possible form" among other variations in

performance. Another plausible solution, I would add, is to regard more rigorously the formal aspects of the poem in any of its instantiations.

What are the bases used to compare the formal structure of different jazz poems? Many jazz tunes are built upon the structure of twelve or thirty-two bar blues. Can we witness a parallel development of jazz poems from the tight arrangements of blues

lyrics themselves, or from the blues poems of Langston Hughes, for instance? Though many poets who write jazz-inflected verses also compose poems carved from a blues ethos, a correspondent analogy cannot easily be made concerning the evolution from blues to jazz poem. An unfortunate parallel, however, can be drawn between early jazz criticism and jazz poetry scholarship in terms of its neglect of the formal aspects upon which the poem is built. The musicologist Ted Gioia points out that early jazz scholarship viewed "the jazz artist as a creature of inspiration who, in his [sic] own

rough and unskilled way, would forge a musical statement," particularly through improvisations that were "of the heart and not necessarily of the mind" (29, 31).16 It is now, however, a given that to play jazz well requires skill and knowledge of musical structure.17 In contrast, when jazz poetry is compared to other poetic forms such as those influenced by the sounds and structure of the blues and the spirituals, the label "formless" is proffered as a compliment. The scholar Onwuchekwa Jemie, for instance, writes that "unlike the blues poem, the jazz poem is without form" (56-57). This viewpoint is in part a result of the proliferation of jazz poetry during the early to mid 1970s, that visibly-and deliberately-broke from more traditional metrical forms. Avant-garde "free jazz" of the late 1960s and 1970s that was closely associated with the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and the pianist Cecil Taylor was seen as a model for poetic experimentation. This music's departure from "straight-ahead"

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jazz conventions such as creating improvisations without preset chord progressions, suggests a better parallel than blues forms offer for attempts to transform jazz through poetry during this period. While it is true that the bulk of jazz poems written during this period were in free verse, the absence of set metrical patterns does not necessarily indicate the absence of a pattern.

The assumption that the poetry modeled after jazz is necessarily amorphous is not

compatible with the evidence at hand. Indeed, the contemporary poet Elizabeth Alexander's poem "John Col" demonstrates the contrary. I quote Alexander's poem in full because its carefully embroidered pattern revolves around the title from the first to the final verse in the last stanza:

John Col

John Col- trane's "Central Park West" from the first

the point where

this is not enough untested pain

imagined shred-

ding of my heart

this poem snipped from paper Or a battered brass

blood-blowing horn

the bloody foot-

lights cup the dark where red and black

are beautiful

a terrible beau-

ty a terrible

beauty a terrible

beauty a horn

And this brass heart- beat this red

sob this this John Coltrane Col

trane song

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In contrast to the "sheets of sound"-a description Ira Gitler used to describe Coltrane's rapid fire succession of streams of notes in his playing style of the 1950s- Alexander's poem is pared down to a minimal number of words. In fact, because these

highly evocative words "beat," "heart," "blood," "terrible," beauty" and "brass" are

repeated with syntactical variance, the total number of unique words in the poem is less than it appears. Word count is crucial to understanding the poem's structure; Alexander arranged the number of words or word fragments in each line of each stanza with mathematical precision. Even the variance has computational symmetry. To get a sense of the logic of her pattern, it is helpful to see a visual chart of the poem's total word count per line and per stanza:

Stanza Number Pattern Total Word Count WordsPer Line Per Stanza

1st 2-3-4-3 12

2nd 4-2-2-4 12

3rd 3-3-3-3 12

4th 3-4-4-2 13

5th 3-3-3-3 12

6th 4-3-3-3-2 15

Note that not only are there no more than four words/word fragments per line but also there are no less than two. Also note that each stanza has at least one "doubled pair" of lines with an equivalent number of words (i.e. "3, 3;" "2, 2;" "4, 4"). The two stanzas with the exact same word count, "3-3-3-3," are the third and the fifth stanzas; they are also the only two stanzas in the poem in which Coltrane's horn is mentioned. The fourth and the sixth stanzas, by comparison, vary the total word count pattern of 12; they contain 13 and 15 words, respectively. The last stanza is the only stanza with five lines instead of four; this fifth line functions as a poetic equivalent of the "tag" in

jazz. It extends the poem's opening theme; "trane song" circles back to join the

opening line, "John Col" which is also the poem's title. The elegance of Alexander's structure is its near-invisibility. Unless the reader is counting specifically for a numerical pattern, she would not necessarily be fully aware of its existence. And yet it serves as a guiding principle for the poem; it is the frame upon which each line is built.18 In this, Alexander's poem parallels the tapestry of a skillfully executed jazz solo: the casual listener may hear only a flurry of well-paced notes or well-timed silences that seem purely "spontaneous;" unless the listener dissects the improvisa- tion, note for note, he or she may not be aware of the chord progressions upon which the improviser builds.

If many poets of the 1960s and 1970s approximated the musical expression with

typographical excess, then Alexander's verbal scripting of Coltrane's sound is char- acterized by syntactical restraint. Both the tone and the text of "John Col" verifies

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Feinstein's observation that the genre of Coltrane poems in the 1980s and 1990s became less explicitly political and "visually aggressive on the page" than those of the Black Arts era (6). You will notice that "John Col" contains no commas, semicolons, or periods, no punctuation to indicate grammatical pauses, stops or starts. Instead Alexander achieves a syncopated, alternately jarring and fluid rhythm in the poem by letting the silent spaces between the words speak. The only extralexical marks in the

poem, significantly, are the quotations placed around "Central Park West," and between the hyphenated words "Col-trane's," "shred-ding," "foot-lights," "beau- ty," and "heart-beat." Moreover, the fourth stanza-

a terrible beau-

ty a terrible beauty a terrible beauty a horn

-is the poetic equivalent of a musical riff. Alexander breaks apart and rearranges the

phrase "a terrible beauty" as a jazz soloist would fragment and "worry" a melodic line. A standard procedure in jazz entails borrowing from other songs-that are not

necessarily jazz tunes-and folding them into a restructured melody, often trans-

forming the original tunes' rhythmic framework and chord patterns. Similarly, Alexander's manipulation of the phrase "a terrible / beauty a horn" builds in a sample which echoes crucial lines from Yeats' poem "Easter 1916," while transforming Yeats' recurrent verses. Alexander's borrowing is structurally significant. The concluding couplets for the first, second and final stanza's of "Easter 1916" are, respectively: "All

changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.," "Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.," and "Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born."19 In addition, Alexander's truncation of Coltrane's surname in the poem's title, "John Col", suggests she interpolates not only Yeats' verse, but also Audre Lorde's

often-anthologized poem, "Coal." The homophone is not coincidental; as the varied

repetition of "words," "open" and "diamond" in Lorde's poem indicates:

There are many kinds of open. How a diamond comes into a knot of flame How a sound comes into a word, colored

by who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open diamonds on a glass window

singing out within the crash of passing sun other words are stapled wagers in a perforated book

buy and sign and tear apart. (21)

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Alexander's reference to an "imagined shred- /ding of my heart / this poem snipped / from paper" in "John Col," echoes "Coal's" words that are perforated, to "buy and

sign and tear apart." Alexander's transformation of Lorde's and Yeats' verses illustrates the striking

effects of structural change to a few similar lines. In The First Book of Jazz, Langston Hughes declares that "Jazz is a way of playing music even more than it is a composed music. Almost any music can become jazz if it is played with jazz treatment" (46). Similarly, Alexander's poem indicates that jazz poetry can be seen as a way of playing with words, even more than it is a genre of poetry composed about jazz.

Alexander uses two epigraphs at the beginning of "John Col which place her

squarely within an African-American jazz poetry continuum. The first epigraph is

excerpted from a poem by Michael S. Harper, a dominant figure in jazz poetry of the 1970s. The line reads, "I reach from pain to music great enough to bring me back." The second epigraph, which proclaims that "trane's horn had words in it," evokes June Jordan's concept of the "voiceprint" in poetic language, the idea that instruments can, in fact, "speak" to listeners, and signifies the oral and textual coherence present in jazz texts. Not insignificantly, this second epigraph is excerpted from another generic Coltrane poem, "Did John's Music Kill Him?" penned by the jazz critic and poet, A.B.

Spellman, author of the critically acclaimed Four Lives in the Bebop Business. These two

inscriptions are important; Alexander clearly draws from them for the tonal and verbal content of her poem. Furthermore, the use of epigraphs and dedications is a characteristic feature in jazz poetry; numerous poems are dedicated to both living and deceased jazz musicians. Many refer to African-American poets who have worked

extensively within the jazz idiom, including Harper as well as Langston Hughes, Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka. Alexander's poem is, in this manner, saturated with

literary and musical echoes. The epigraphs are not a part of the poem's tight formal structure, yet they extend the visual field of the poem and can potentially impact the reader's interpretation of the poem. Thus, I read the lines in "John Col," "this poem snipped /from paper Or / a battered brass / blood-blowing horn," as an allegory of the poem's literary and musical origins. For example, Alexander explicitly pays homage to John Coltrane in her verse, but through her epigraph structure and use of

imagery within "John Col" she also pays an implicit tribute to Michael Harper and A.B. Spellman.

If, as Kimberly Benston contends, the Coltrane poem is a species of "modern black

poetry in which the topos of performed blackness is felt most resonantly" (176), then Alexander's "John Col" illustrates that the performance of this blackness is "a mediated, socially constructed and gendered practice" (186). Alexander's descrip- tion of a dimly lit jazz club's stage in the stanza "the bloody foot- / lights cup the dark / where red and black / are beautiful" evokes the Black Arts / Black Power slogan, Black Is Beautiful, while highlighting the performative nature of such pronounce- ments.20 Moreover, her fragmenting of the word, "beauty" in the stanza

a terrible beau-

ty a terrible

beauty a terrible beauty a horn

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subtly underscores the gendered and sexualized nature of the hagiographic depic- tion of "Trane the man, the archetype" in most jazz texts. The reader can both hear and see how "sound comes into a word, / colored" by Alexander's fracturing. Her

rendering of Lorde's perforated, "open word" transforms the phonetic long "e" and "u" (b-i-) in beauty, to the long "o" sound in beau ('bo'). This slight sonic shift makes sense when one considers the primary and secondary meanings for beau: a) "a dandy, a man greatly concerned with his personal appearance and with fashion," and b) "a man who devotes himself to a lady; a sweetheart, a suitor" (Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Deluxe 2nd Edition). That Coltrane was indeed "a terrible beau" is noted in the jazz scholar Greg Early's commentary on the musician's limited art and style. According to Early, Coltrane did not possess the sartorial flamboyance of a Dizzy Gillespie or a Duke Ellington. Nor did he "embody any sense of masculine cool or Hemingway bravado like Miles Davis." Instead, in stinted praise, Early depicts Coltrane as a "brilliant" but "flawed artist," "a rather dull man, certainly a

shy, reticent one ... who seemed to do nothing but practice his instruments when he was not actually playing in performance." Such obsession, Early opines, "does not

suggest a very balanced or integrated personality" (6). Nor, I would add, does such devotion to art above all else mark the makings of a terrific suitor.

I would like to turn to Michael Harper's poem "Brother John" for a concluding discussion of prosody in jazz poetry. It is an exemplary model for explication because it resonates on a structural, syntactical and lyrical level. "Brother John's" adept intra-linear shifts in syntax and phrase change between stanzas-his riffs-and draw on the power of repetitive iteration, what Aldon Nielsen, following the poet Ed Roberson, has termed the "Calligraphy of Black Chant." In addition, Harper playfully alters the extra-lexical marks in each verse in a manner that is only "audible" within a visual context. Thus, the

poem brings together the motif of orality and textuality explored in this essay. Despite what its title might imply, "Brother John" is not a prototypical "Coltrane poem." The

poem's content at first seems to have no ostensible connection to music in general or Coltrane's sound in particular. The speaker in the opening stanza proclaims:

Black man: I'm a black man; I'm black; I am- A black man; black- I'm a black man; I'm a black man; I'm a black man; I'm a man; black- I am-

On one level, the statement is a simple one, comprised of merely five monosyllabic words. Yet the complexity of its utterance lies in Harper's variation in punctuation marks and word arrangement. For example, the first verse contains a generic noun modified by a plain adjective-"Black man." Harper extends this description into a declarative sentence: "I'm a black man."21 Like Alexander, Harper manipulates a

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minimal number of words to achieve the maximum aesthetic effect. Unlike in Alexander's "John Col," however, the extra-lexical marks are more pertinent to the

poem's design than word count. A colon punctuates the ending of the first line; subsequent semicolons and em-dashes are placed in an asymmetric pattern which

helps create a syncopated cadence when reading each line aloud. Harper's semantic modification of the phrase "I'm a black man" contributes to the effect of what one scholar characterized as "the mythologizing beat of 'Brother John"' (Parker 810). Moreover, the poem also manifests Harper's characteristic use of both the "savored" and the "demonstrative" colon; according to Robert Parker, they each complement the other by moving in opposing directions. Thus, Harper "knots the inward with the outward" and turns the inward outward (810). The inky dots, curves and dashes of

punctuation shape each line of verse while creating a visual rhythm as well.

Harper's irregular punctuation and word inversion reads as a poetic visualization of a particular improvising technique that Coltrane employed. To understand the source for Harper's structuring techniques, it helps to consider Coltrane's style of

playing during the early to mid 1960s, a period contemporaneous with Harper's composition of "Brother John." Coltrane "developed solos by repeating the same

rhythm with different pitches, changing the notes without changing the rhythm, sometimes placing the same rhythm at different spots in the measure, occasionally inverting a phrase, as though peering at it from several different angles and sharing each view with the listener" (Gridley 257-58).22 Coltrane's improvisational method

appears to directly correspond to Harper's punctuated word play. Harper places a semicolon at different spots in the line, "occasionally inverting a phrase," to share with the reader different slants on the same phrase. Instead of altering pitch, however, he alters words. Or reading in a less verbal and more vocal register, Harper's alteration and alternation of the same set of words transforms the tone of "Brother John" from a simple statement at the poem's opening into an emotive utterance by the poem's conclusion.

Comparing Harper's organizational scheme for "Brother John" to Coltrane's

methodological approach for constructing an improvised solo befits Harper's poetics. In an interview, Harper detailed the marked impact that listening to Coltrane and other jazz musicians had on the development of his writing style. Because his influences "were more musical than poetic," he remarked that he was "writing in

phrasing" while all his colleagues in a Masters in Fine Arts program he participated in at the University of Iowa "were writing in rhyme and meter." This, he recalls, "gave me my own sense of lineation, the increments of stanzaic progression, and thematics as my own invention" (Harper "Interview"). Such patterns of incremental stanzaic

development are evident in "Brother John." Each successive stanza introduces new

phrases and ideas (much like the introduction of a musical phrase) while still

maintaining a rhythm that both resembles and builds upon the first stanza's cadence. Witness the displacement of the word "high" in the stanza embodying Bird, into "Miles high, another bird" below:

I am Bird baddest night dreamer

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on sax in the ornithology-world I can fly-higher, high, higher Miles, blue haze, Miles high, another bird, more Miles, mute, Mute Miles, clean, bug-eyed, unspeakable, Miles, sweet Mute, sweat Miles, black Miles; I'm a black man; I'm black; I am; I'm a black man-

The above lines depart from the initial stanza's refrain, "I'm a black man," then return to it again-each time in varied forms-as modification of "black Miles" and "black Trane." Repetition, alliteration and slight variation create a multi-layered effect that is based on manipulating and extending the basic word pattern and syntactical arrangement established at the poem's beginning. Gridley's descriptions of Col- trane's developmental practice are pertinent to the poem's form and content. He

explains that "Coltrane also developed his solo improvisations in the logical manner he had learned from a famous book of practice patterns and compositional devices by Nicolas Slonimsky that demonstrates how to vary note choices in an enormous number of ways and still remain related to a fundamental chord of scale." The name of musician switches from Miles Davis to Charlie Parker in the above stanzas

excerpted from "Brother John" and to John Coltrane in the verses below. Still, the fundamental structuring principle-statement, echo, restatement, and extension of the theme-remains the same. In one of the few aspects of the poem that is typical for this subgenre, Harper weaves the titles of specific Coltrane compositions and albums into the following stanza:

Trane, Coltrane; John coltrane; it's tranetime; chase the Trane; it's a slow dance; it's the Trane in Alabama; acknowledgment, a love supreme, it's black Trane; black; I'm a black man; I'm black; I am; I'm a black man- (181-82)

The penultimate stanza in "Brother John" includes the lines from which the title of the

poem is drawn:

Brother John, Brother John plays no instrument;

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he's a black man; black; he's a black man; he is Brother John; Brother John- (182)

Harper's use of irony in the poem, "Brother John / plays no instrument" is key. Here, he obliquely alludes-I would write "speaks"-to Sonia Sanchez's "a/coltrane/ poem" in which three lines refer to Coltrane's death with the query "are you sleeping / are you sleeping / brother john?" Sanchez's repeated "are you sleeping" and

Harper's "Brother John" refrain invoke the French musical round that children are

taught to sing: "Fr6re Jacques, Frere Jacques, dormez-vous?"23 Hence the stanza's

singular reference to Coltrane is questionable. It is the only stanza in the poem in which the "I'm a black man" chorus shifts from the first person singular to the third

person singular pronoun-"he's a black man" who "plays no instrument." Is Brother John without an instrument because he is not Coltrane, or because Coltrane is no

longer alive? If the latter is true, then the switch to use the more distant "he" instead of the more personal lyric "I" could suggest the poet's use of language in the poem as a means to cope with and negotiate the meaning of the musician's demise. In either case, the question remains unresolved. Resolution occurs by the poem's conclusion

through its cyclical return to the opening stanza, modified by additional variation in

punctuation and phrasing:

I'm a black man; I am; black; I am; I'm a black man; I am; I am; I'm a black man; I'm a black man; I am; I'm a black man; I am:

If the opening stanza's use of punctuation signals a visual rhythm, then the conclud-

ing verses mark an aural syncopation. The insistent chant-"I am; / black; I am; I'm a black / man; I am; I am"-is shortened by the appended semicolons; the form blends the visible phrasal fragmentation with a sonic connotation: that of a relentlessly curtailed utterance, the stutter (Benston 179).24 The stutter, like Alexander's "red / sob this this" is an emotive echo with a visual parallel of repetition. Likewise, the intricate beginning-to-ending structure of Alexander's "John Col" parallels Harper's chain-like conclusion. The final phrase "I am" circles back to join the poem's first line "Black man."

Of critical importance are the tone, texture and tradition behind the poem's speaker's recurrent, emphatic, phrasing-I am a black man. In this instance, the limits of a strictly formalist analysis in an evaluation of Harper's poem become evident. "Brother John" is the first poem in Harper's collection, Dear John, Dear Coltrane, published in 1970, and echoes the masculinist slant of the Black cultural nationalist

period during which it was composed. Hazel Carby's critique (specifically quoting Phillip Brian Harper) of a "dominant consensus that 'conceives of African American

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society in terms of a perennial "crisis" of black masculinity whose imagined solution is a proper affirmation of black male authority"' aptly suits the tenor of the poem (Carby 6).25 Carby rightly asserts that it is "necessary to recognize the complex ways in which black masculinity has been, and still is, socially and culturally produced." One of those socio-cultural productions of black masculinity, indeed a heterosexual black masculinity, is the archetype of the jazz musician. Following Carby's lead, I would add that a closer look at Harper's poem suggests that the "black masculinity" which appears to be on such emphatic verbal display is actually destabilized. Harp- er's use of the "savored colon" at the end of the poem--"I am:"-could indicate a long pause, a hesitant reining in of the very assertion of blackness and masculinity that the

poem seems to engage in. Furthermore, because the phrase "I am a black man" is

constantly fractured by punctuation and reframed by inversion, the poem also yields a potential challenge to the notion of a monolithic racialized male identity.26 There is not one black man, only an always shifting, unstable subjectivity of a black masculinity mediated by language. In either case, such close textual analysis reveals that the cultural registers of Harper's poem are just as compelling as its formal structure.

Scholarship in African-American poetry has begun to give increased attention to the tradition of the historical influence of sound in the written aspects of African- American poetry. The Norton Anthology of African-American literature's inclusion of a selection of work songs, blues, spirituals, jazz standards and rap lyrics makes this clear. Furthermore, the anthology's accompanying Audio Companion compact disc, replete with excerpts of artists delivering lectures, reciting poetry or reading from

prose passages that correspond to the written text underscores this expanding auditory appreciation. More recently, Rhino Record's released the compilation audio

anthology Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like The Rivers: Black Poets Read Their Work. The album included Harper reading his hallmark poem "Dear John, Dear Coltrane," as well as Baraka reciting "Freedom Suite (for Sonny Rollins and Franz Kline)." Yet this critical focus on the musically influenced sounds within African-American poetry must be consistently linked to their signs-their visual dimensions. The jazz-inflected poems by Sanchez, Baraka, Alexander, and Harper surveyed in this essay all illustrate that an adequate analysis of prosody in jazz poetry must account for its intricately interwoven visual and aural contours. It must look, listen, and learn.

NOTES

I would like to thank Sharon Holland, Diane Middlebrook, and Marjorie Perloff for their constructive criticism and suggestions for revising this essay. Additional thanks goes to Aldon Nielsen for his invaluable feedback. Finally, this article was workshopped with fellows at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia.

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1. See Kimberly Benston's "Performing Blackness: Re/Placing Afro-American Poetry," Greg Early's "Ode to John Coltrane: A Jazz Musician's Influence on African American Culture," and Sascha Feinstein's "From 'Alabama' to 'A Love Supreme': The Evolution of the John Coltrane Poem."

2. Moreover, even in the case of jazz poems that have not been recited in a public arena, the ethos of jazz performance as a primary guiding principle still holds sway. This is because in most cases the poet's access to jazz is not through reading the musical transcriptions of a solo or ensemble performance, but through the experience of that performance, either live, on a recording, or via a description of such an event.

3. Fahamisha Brown's observations about the epistemological component of sound suitably apply to this essay's analysis. Brown points to an African-American "vernacular tradition that particularly values the sounds of language" from which poets write, noting their keen awareness that "the style of sounding the language, as much as the language itself, communi- cates meaning" ("Orality: Language and Voice" 27-28).

4. See Aldon Nielsen's Black Chant: The Languages of African-American Postmodernism (19-20). Nielsen cautions against the current critical construction of a trajectory in African-American literary criticism that begins with the early slaves' acquisition of the European-American English as the originary point for a transition to literacy from an allegedly African-derived primarily oral transmission of culture. He cites a 19th-century interview between Theodore Dwight and Lamen Kebe, an enslaved African in America who had been a scholar and teacher in West Africa. According to Dwight, Kebe's account of the pedagogical practices for West African instruction of the Qur'anic Arabic revealed that "memorization was practiced by graphic reproduction, rather than oral presentation ... What is most noteworthy about Kebe's discussion of the pedagogical method is that the written and not the heard word is memorized through recitation. The students are taught to be readers before anything else, and above all readers who can decipher." Nielsen suggests that this account is just one among many that indicate "traditions of graphic reproduction and improvisation are part of an iterative contin- uum with orality, not a secondary or elitist and pale reflection of the spoken" word in African- American poetry.

5. See, for example, Nathaniel Mackey's visual reproduction of "petroglyphs inscribed in an ancient Libyan alphabet known as Tifinagh, a form of script used throughout North Africa and the Sudan" as an epigraph for the poem "Passing Thru." Mackey provides a translation for the inscription that informs the substantive content of the poem (77).

6. In a longer version of this essay, I discuss the dynamics of Mackey's recital with Hartigan and Modirzadeh at greater length.

7. See also Fabio's "Tripping With Black Writing" (1971), in which she asserts black writers' need to establish themselves as "integral beings not having to compromise integrity" by bringing "black perspective, black aesthetic, black rhetoric, [and] black language to add authenticity to the felt reality."

8. The musicologist Ingrid Monson usefully points out that although Julie Andrews' rendition of "My Favorite Things" in the film version of The Sound of Music was not released until 1965- five years after Coltrane's recording-Andrews' version is the one with which most listeners make comparisons to Coltrane's improvisation, not the 1959 Broadway composition (106-120).

9. Actually, the term "multigraphemics" might be a more accurate description of what is taking place during the poem's dance across the white space of the page. Yet the alliterative word-play in the multiphonics / multiphonemics pairing is par for the course in a jazz tradition that inverts subverts, takes as its province the playful manipulation of words, sounds, and the like.

10. See Scott Saul's discussion of Coltrane as cultural icon in "Loving a Love Supreme: Coltrane the Icon Black Blower of the Now," Freedom Is and Freedom Ain't: Hard Bop and the Movement of American Culture (Harvard University Press, 2001),forthcoming.

11. One might consider that at the time Baraka composed "AM/TRAK," large-scale anthologies of Concrete poetry had appeared. Hence, Baraka might also have intended his visualization of Monk's sound to invoke the ideogrammatic symbolism of concretism, albeit in a diluted form.

12. I should point out that Hartman's reference to "printed material" indicates his frame of reference involves poems on a printed page; one can imagine that poems constructed in a hypermedia environment subvert this categorization for "written poetry."

13. "My Favorite Things" was also released as a 45-rpm single, a fact that further underscores my point.

14. See, for example, Hoyt W. Fuller's "Towards A Black Aesthetic" (1968) and Don Lee's (Haki Madhubuti) "Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties" (1971).

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15. Larry Neal, for instance, in "The Black Arts Movement" (1968) describes the "Black Arts Theatre" taking "its programs into the streets of Harlem, presenting "plays, concerts and poetry readings to the people of the community" (188-89). Also, in "Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties," Lee included "music: the unique use of vowels and consonants with the developed rap demands that the poetry be real, and read out loud" as the seventh of crucial forms for the "Black Aesthetic" (217).

16. Indeed, Gioia laments that traces of this early tendency can still be found in contemporary reviews of jazz performances. Gioia notes that "performances which fail to attain the frenetic and energetic ideal postulated by the stereotype" of the primitively inspired, intuitive jazz musician, are usually labeled as "cerebral"-one of the most damning adjectives in jazz's critical vocabulary. In contrast, the most excessive demonstrations of musical chaos are often lavishly praised so long as they are done "with feeling."

17. As Monson points out, almost all modern jazz musicians read music even though the transmission of various elements of musical style and technique occur aurally and in a performance context. See Monson's discussion of "Music, Language and Cultural Styles: Improvisation as Conversation" in Saying Something (73-96).

18. The structure of "John Col" can also be evaluated in terms of syllabic arrangement; in that case the pattern becomes 2-4-4-3; 5-4-4-4; 4-4-4-4; 4-4-4-4; 5-5-6-4; 4-3-3-4-2. Significantly the final stanza is a numerical variation of the first.

19. Alexander also picked up on the theme of repetition and slight variation in the cyclical elements of Yeats' poem. The third stanza provides the most suggestive comparison:

Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slide on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all.

Repetition with variation in the above lines has the effect of building intensity of verbal resonance while shading meaning. Alexander uses greater economy of words to similar purpose in "John Col." In addition, the opening couplet of the poem's last stanza: "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart" may also be referred to in the brass "heart" in Alexander's poem. Yeats' changes are literal and temporal, "minute by minute" while Alexander's are spatial and miniscule: mi-nute.

20. Alexander's imagery-the "bloody foot-/lights" and "red/sob" of her "trane song"-demon- strates how the poem intertextually engages with the opening scene of A.B. Spellman's "Did John's Music Kill Him?" (qtd. in Benston 177):

in the morning part of evening he would stand before his crowd. the voice would call his name & redlight fell around him. jimmy'd bow a quarter hour till McCoy fed black chords to his stroke. elvin's thunder roll & eric's scream. then john.

then john. little old lady . . .

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21. One could argue that the contraction of "I am" to "I'm" abbreviates the phrase to four words. 22. John Gilmore was Sun Ra's main saxophone soloist; the technique described here that Coltrane

employed was also one of Gilmore's trademarks. Coltrane acknowledged Gilmore's influence on his compositional style during that period.

23. Thanks to Frederick J. Berry for pointing out this allusion. 24. This reading of the conclusion in Harper's poem was inspired by Benston's claim that in

Spellman's poem "Did John's Music Kill Him?" "The stutter of repetition becomes the sly triumph of poetic grace."

25. Carby quotes Harper from his 1996 study Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity (x).

26. The fact that Harper's word play reads as an integration and revision of the white male modernist poet William Carlos Williams' proclamation, "I am a poet! I / am. I am. I am a poet," at the end of his poem, "The Desert Music," could indicate that Harper is winking at the reader (Williams, qtd. in Gelpi 366).

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