Instrumental Voices: Experimental Poetry and the Jazz Tradition

Open Access
- Author:
- New, Michael John
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 01, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Linda Furgerson Selzer, Committee Member
Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, Committee Member
Jonathan Paul Eburne, Special Member - Keywords:
- American literature
African American literature
American poetry
contemporary poetry
jazz poetry
hip hop
multimedia poetry - Abstract:
- This dissertation investigates strategies innovated by Black Arts poets to reach beyond the constraints of the Western high-art tradition in order to develop new literary forms and methods that reflect black vernacular music. Spurning what had until then been called Negro Literature, writers of the Black Arts movement asserted the primacy of oral traditions and derided written forms as derivative and inauthentic for their reliance upon Eurocentric models. But rather than abandon literary pursuits, they instead dramatically re-imagined the scope of literature so as to accommodate the aesthetic values and ritual forms of everyday black speech and to aspire in writing to the expressive heights of black music. Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane set for them a precedent of uncompromising artists whose seemingly effortless blend of vanguard style and popular appeal was highly influential upon Black Arts writers’ pursuit of a politics and aesthetics at once capable of envisioning radical change and galvanizing broad-based support. By the end of the 1960s, poets were dedicating work to, writing praise-songs for, and composing in the spirit of jazz musicians on an unprecedented scale. Although theorists of the movement advocated a new literary ethos based on avant-garde jazz performance, the work that most closely adheres to this vision is often overlooked by critics. Either because recordings frustrate the methodologies of literary studies or because the cultural nationalism that motivated these experiments has been seen to abandon art for sloganeering, collaborations between writers and musicians are underrepresented in the historical record. Amiri Baraka’s early work with the New York Art Quartet, Sonny Murray, and Sun Ra have received some attention, but his transition from sideman to session leader on albums like Black & Beautiful / Soul & Madness (1968) and It’s Nation Time (1972) falls outside extant considerations of jazz-text. Similarly, Gil Scott-Heron may have been the ideal revolutionary artist according to poet and critic Larry Neal’s criteria, but his work has received precious little attention; mine is among the first extensive considerations of his contributions to the formal experimentation and populist appeal of the Black Arts movement. These works, I argue, leverage orality’s social efficacy but do so without compromising their claims to textual authority. In effect, the interplay between jazz and poetry demonstrates that Black Arts innovations were just then cresting in the mid-1970s, even if the movement’s nationalist momentum had largely collapsed. It wasn’t until 1974 that Jayne Cortez, the poet who has perhaps done the most with jazz arrangements of her work, released her first album, Celebrations and Solitudes; by 1977, Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem, for colored girls… had hit the Broadway stage. Not only did Baraka, Scott-Heron, Cortez, and Shange continue prolific careers throughout the 1980s and 90s, but their pioneering work with hybrid forms also enlisted new writers in the struggle to reconcile oral and literary traditions. In particular, Nathaniel Mackey’s genre-defiant serial writing demonstrates that the fulfillment of jazz’s experimental imperative is yet to come. The supposed decline in the mid-70s of the Black Arts movement and its musical analogue, free jazz, coincides with the emergence of hip-hop, on one hand, and a critical shift toward the African American novel on the other. Black Arts writers were an undeniable influence upon subsequent artists, nonetheless these poets did not cede their vanguard position so easily. I argue, rather, that Black Arts writers and avant-garde improvisers’ shared skepticism toward genre-labels like poetry or jazz remains a relevant critique of the commercial appropriation of the black experimental tradition. My project contributes an alternative narrative that resituates black poetry’s kinship with jazz as an on-going site of contemporary innovation.