Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality

Author(s): Meta Du Ewa Jones

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 25, No. 1, Jazz Poetics: A Special Issue (Winter, 2002), pp. 66-91
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300385
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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-

Callaloo25.1 (2002) 66-91

 CALLALOO

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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 CALLALOO

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 JazzPoetryAnthology, 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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 CALLALOO

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 Andoumbouloupoem 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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 CALLALOO

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 Understandingthe New BlackPoetry, 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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 CALLALOO

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 SarahWebster Fabio shows similar connections through
their representationsof language. Fabio uses colloquial speech, metaphor and apostrophe
in her tribute to Louis Armstrong ("ForLouis 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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 CALLALOO

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, throughthe 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 FavoriteThings (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

72
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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 LiveAt TheVillageVanguard.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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 CALLALOO

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 terrrrrrrday." 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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 CALLALOO

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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 CALLALOO

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 Barakaparticularlychose 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: Voiceand Improvisationin Poetry, Jazz, and Song
(133), Baraka's arrangement was suggestive enough to summon the melody of Criss-
Cross into my mentalear'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 prosodicwould 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."19In 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 Bookof 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 aboutjazz.
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, "Ireach 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 FourLivesin the BebopBusiness. 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'sNew Universal
UnabridgedDictionary, 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. "BrotherJohn'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, "BrotherJohn" 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 "BrotherJohn" 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, "BrotherJohn / 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 "JohnCol" 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 blackman. 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).25Carby 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 oneblack 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 Companioncompact 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 GrownDeep LikeTheRivers:BlackPoets ReadTheirWork.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 FreedomAin'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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