Student Blog Post: Reading Practices with/and Corregidora by Gabrielle Rajerison

In order to conserve space and preserve the element of suspense (if not so much surprise) for my presentation Tuesday, here are three provocations:

(1) In a Split Second of Hate and Love: The (Il)legible, the Liminal, and the Black Body

Despite the twenty-two year gap between when the lovers had last been together, the end of Corregidora finds Ursa and Mutt’s reunion plagued less by the memories of their prior relationship than by their mutual inability to risk moving toward uncharted territories. Even their physical surroundings confirm this groove: “It wasn’t the same room,” Ursa tells us of where Mutt is staying, “but the same place.” Similarly, when Ursa performs oral sex on Mutt for the first time in their entire relationship, his sole response is to repeatedly state that he never thought she would. 

Yet there is something to be said about Ursa’s gesture toward a “first” it’s unsurprising that it’s in this moment that she is finally able to reconcile herself with something that has haunted her throughout the book: 

It had to be sexual, I was thinking, it had to be something sexual that Great Gram did to Corregidora. I knew it had to be sexual: “What is it a woman can do to a man that make him hate her so bad he wont to kill her one minute and keep thinking about her and can’t get her out of his mind the next?” In a split second I knew what it was, in a split second of hate and love I knew what it was, and I think he might have known too. A moment of pleasure and excruciating pain at the same time, a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops just before sexlessness, a moment that stops before it breaks the skin: “I could kill you.”

Such insight is crystalizing for Ursa, and yet she reflects on her own illegibility immediately after: “It was like I didn’t know how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora…”

This realization also provides the catalyst for the novel’s final stretch of dialogue, a call-and-response that begins with Ursa insisting upon her ability to inflict pain on Mutt and ends with him holding her after she admits she does not want to be hurt either. As Emily Lordi has argued, such an ending does not achieve the level of closure or—more importantly—“progress” readers and critics might desire or expect. Instead, it pinches at the possibilities of interpretation, daring critics to squeeze from its taut prose whatever they need in order to defend the readings they’ve already decided are true. 

However, my return to this moment is not to labor over the ending. Instead, I’d like to linger over that “split second” (which, considering the novel’s succinct style, is actually given a wide berth to linger on its own). Within this space of “hate and love,” Ursa informs us, is both the ability to achieve power against another, however slim and ephemeral, and the risk of losing one’s own legibility within others. I wonder, within the scope of our class, what other (actual, theoretical) black things might exist or be made possible within this “split second”; this black hole?

(2) The New World Artist at Work: Yona, Billie, Gayl, Ursa

Ursa spends the latter part of her life attempting to create a “New World song” and we have spent the latter part of this class attempting to delineate what, besides the obvious, differentiates the spoken/sung from the written word. Though a sharpening of vocabulary (“vernacular” vs. “dialect”) has done little to settle the debate, artists like Yona Harvey and critics like Emily Lordi allow for the nurturance of a third option, one in which the relationship between the written and the sonic is not only mutually generative but deliberately unstable.

Corregidora adds to this semester-long layering in its portrayal of a black female musician. While Harvey’s lyric reflections on being a literary artist brought us closer to a discussion of artists portraying artists—“Who’s Frieda,” she wrote, and we recognized in this cross-medium kinship a genealogy—Jones’s portrayal of a blues singer within what many critics have characterized as a “blues novel” throws us right in. Lordi’s own analysis of Corregidora provides some avenues through which to answer this call, but as her reading is craft-based (and thus focused on Jones) rather than representation-based (which would focus more on Ursa), I feel there’s still a lot of room—even within the confines of her own reading—to explore.

Obviously, any discussion of Ursa’s character revolves back to Jones but I’m curious as to how those who had not previously read the book responded to the relationship between form, content, and character prior to reading Lordi’s chapter. Are the anxieties or pressures about the written word vs. the spoken word alleviated or heightened when the written speaker is a singer? Did what Lordi called Ursa’s inaccessible interfere with your ability to “hear” her singing? What do you think a “New World song” sounds like? Do you think it’s even possible?

(3) Toward a More Curious Criticism: Corregidora, Reading, and Form/alism

Though Le’Mil will discuss Lordi’s Black Resonance in more detail in his own post and presentation, I’d like to use her chapter on Gayl Jones’s Corregidora as a starting point for this final baiting.

Central to Lordi’s reading of Corregidora is her teasing out of the novel’s “mixture of the recognizable and unpredictable”—a practice which not only aligns Jones, in Lordi’s eyes, with Billie Holiday but also sets the novel against the more common readings of its structure. These interpretations tend to fall into one of two sets: they either read Corregidora’s form as confirming its status as a “blues novel” or as confirming its psychoanalytic investment in trauma.

While neither reading is wrong (and both, in fact, can be helpful in illuminating the narrative at large), each approaches the novel as if it might be made more legible through sheer categorization; whether intentionally or not, they each seek to erase what is deliberately and profoundly “unaccountable” in Jones’s work. Just as dangerously, these approaches are typically couched in “predetermined and abstracted ideas” which, if not challenged, will not only confirm their own findings but also only ever find the same thing each time. In other words, by assuming the stability between varying categories (literature and music most prominently), many of these critics forsake the ability to be “curious” about those relationships, a trait Lordi explicitly associates with the vitality of community and implicitly associates with the vitality of criticism itself.

Much of the discomfort around Corregidora’s legibility, Lordi argues, has to do with the almost universal response it evokes in its readers as a novel which is both haunted and “haunting.” The tension between the desire to remain vulnerable to intense, even uncomfortable, responses to artworks and the desire to default to an uncritical intellectual autopilot is not itself new. Contemporary critical works like Jennifer Doyle’s Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art and Eugenie Brinkema’s The Forms of the Affects revolve around this very problematic. Like Doyle and Brinkema, Lordi asserts that “one always risks misreading, misrecognizing, getting it wrong when responding to haunting expression.” It is in “admitting” this risk that critics are able to move toward readings that not only analyze but also enhance understanding.

I rehearse this intellectual journey in order to ask how y’all perceived Lordi’s challenge. What might it mean, amid weekly theoretical readings we may or may not be desperate to apply, to remain “curious” about the texts we share (without deflecting into indecision)? Practically speaking, what differentiates a desire to understand that’s fueled by curiosity from one that’s fueled by the need to dominate a text? To speak even more practically, how might we become better at, first, reading for where texts resist rather than just where they comply and, second, preserving what is (for lack of a better term) “unreadable”?

Student Blog Post on Emily J Lordi's Black Resonance: Le'Mil Eiland

Literary historian and critic, Emily Lordi, begins Black Resonance with a theoretical reevaluation. Lordi writes, “I propose a theoretical revaluation of the relationship between music and writing in black expressive culture by staging singers and writers as collaborators in the creation of twentieth-century black aesthetics” (8). This intentional revaluation prompts a historiographical intervention on the privileging of black musical traditions over literary practices. Simply put, Lordi advocates for a musical-literary reciprocity. This dialectical relationship centers Black women’s “intellectual labor.” Focusing on black women’s performance practices, across two generations, allows Lordi to intervene on music’s masculinist musical biases. Through Lordi’s case studies, Black women are not celebrated as muses for literary work-in a contemporary hood vernacular, “they puttin’ in that work.” Writing in the tradition of Daphne Brooks’ Bodies in Dissent and Jayna Brown’s Babylon Girls, Lordi exalts Black women’s artistic/technical aesthetic choices to “value of black women’s creativity…” (4). In addition to repositioning black women, Lordi makes a novel theoretical and methodological provocation: “…writings about music occupy the middle space [between literary and vocal practice]” (5). This provocation allows Lordi to argue that music writings provide a lexicon to illuminate vocal and literary practices. For the purposes of this blog, I will only work through two case studies, in efforts to pose some provocations (of my own that are implicit in Lordi’s project) and consider the interdisciplinary implications on theatre and performance studies (i.e. my scholarly research).

Whereas I think vivid lyricism provides an important lens to reengage Smith’s work, I struggle with (what I perceived as) the generous reconsideration of Wright’s film Native Son. For Lordi, vivid lyricism is “the practice of exploiting the sound of language to enhance visual description” (31). Wright’s proclaimed vivid lyricism in Smith’s vocality illuminates how “social exclusion might yield uniquely intense, musical visions of the world” (31).

BESSIE SMITH’S BACKWATER BLUES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gXShOJVwaM

And for the most part I was on board with Lordi’s analysis of vivid lyricism in Wright’s work. In general, I was unclear about two of Lordi’s claims: “Wright’s embodiment of his protagonist align these female characters more closely with the author” (44) and “By drawing Wright into alignment with Native Son’s singers, the film revises Wright’s own performance of black masculinity” (45). By positioning these women to Bigger/Wright, Lordi posits the film unsettles his carefully constructed persona of the stoic black male exile. Yet, I was unclear about that claim based on the notion that “Bessie and Hannah are no longer tethered to Bigger’s consciousness…” (45). Is this a reflection of Wright’s artistic intentionality or genre conventions? The development of female characters that are separate from Bigger’s conscious seems like a genre convention (or maybe I’m misreading this). Lordi makes this intentional shift in decoupling Wright’s mis/readings and troubling gender politics in Native Son (fiction).

In Chapter Two, Lordi couples Mahalia Jackson and Ralph Ellison through the concept of sincere ambivalence. For Lordi, ambivalence is the integrative practice which conveys conflicting ideas or emotions (68). These multiple ideas and emotions reflect a timbre of sincerity that do not alternate but instead coexist. This double-ness in performance permits the telling of multiple truths.

Mahalia Jackson’s SUMMERTIME/MOTHERLESS CHILD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc2vVPV_ZTQ

Through the “timbre of sincerity,” Jackson is able to sustain “affirmative and subversive attitudes towards ‘Summertime’” (79).  In particular, I am interested in how space informs notions of sincerity. Ellison argued that the church was the location where Jackson should be heard. By focusing on Jackson’s vocal performance how can we reconsider how blackness and black aesthetics traverse black spaces and black sites? Even though Ellison advocated for a reverse crossover effect, by affirm the black church, he misses an opportunity to complicate the relationship with black space and black expression. How can the practice of “timbre of sincerity” respond/expand/or complicate DuBois’ concept of “double consciousness?”

In Chapter Three, we examine understatement with James Baldwin, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. Understatement, as a practices, allows for artists to privilege black listeners. Understatement seems to traffic in phenomenology, because more than “commonly held assumptions,” understatement is build upon listening and experience. I push further beyond assumptions because understatement seems inclusive of experienced abjection and suffering. Can we listen for understatement in Billie Holiday’s Billie’s Blues?

Billie Holiday’s Billie’s Blues

Larger Thoughts:

In your responses, you can address any of the chapters, I will incorporate your thoughts into my Tuesday presentation. I am also curious about the ways in which instrumentality, space, and technologies (inclusive of literary writing practice) form and impact sonic practices. What are your thoughts on this? Also, how does Lordi use of musical writing alter how we listen? Is something lost when vocal performance is structured through literary analysis? Furthermore, in thinking about Nikki Giovanni and Aretha Franklin, in relation to the Black Arts Movement and Etta James relationship with Jean Grae, how can these sonic reconsiderations benefit contemporary artists like Lil’ Kim? Lil’ Kim’s artistic skill has always been challenged due to the acknowledgment that Biggie wrote her earlier lyrics. However, focusing on her sonic performance could potentially reframe discussions typically shaped by visual performances (ex. clothing and sexuality)..

Lil’ Kim Video

Larger Implications of Lordi’s work in my field

In the field of theatre and performance studies, I am currently interested in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ (BJJ) An Octoroon (2014). BJJ’s contemporary play is a revisionist adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) about racial anxieties regarding miscegenation. It is important to mention that BJJ maintains Boucicault’s plot, characters, and dramaturgical structure (form). Textually, it is clear that BJJ is challenging the racist and sexist underpinnings that traffic Boucicault’s Victorian melodrama. But what is interesting is the way the sonic articulates itself in BJJ’s contemporary adaptation. During the prologue of this contemporary reenactment, A$AP Rocky’s “Fu*kin’ Problems” plays. In thinking through this play, Lordi’s Resonance presents a divergent opportunity to ponder about the relationship with sonic performances with dramatized literary works. Although there will not be enough time to discuss this. I think this pushes the parameters of musical-literary reciprocity.

“A$AP Rocky’s “Fu*kin’ Problems”

George E. Lewis: Artist in Residence at Pitt! (write your post-panel comments under this post!)

This week Pitt welcomes distinguished composer, musician, scholar, and MacArthur genius George E. Lewis,  Professor of Music at Columbia University.  I've posted some videos below to familiarize you with his dynamic work, which centers around questions of improvisation, collaboration, and technology. Our class will attend the "Sounding New Socialities" panel on Tues, Feb 23. See his full itinerary below!

The University of Pittsburgh Jazz Program in the Department of Music and Music on the Edge are pleased to welcome George Lewis as our Artist in Residence for a week of events as part of the university's Year of the Humanities, with support from the Humanities Center, College of Arts and Sciences, A&S Faculty Research and Scholarship Program, and Yamaha Pianos. George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, where he is head of the Music Composition Area and a member of the faculty in Historical Musicology. A recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, Lewis is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2015 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lewis is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and he has been widely recognized for his work in electronic music and computer-based multimedia installations.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Panel Discussion: Sounding New Socialities
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, 6 p.m., Free
Find out more…

Thursday, February 25, 2016
Lecture: “A Power Stronger Than Itself”
with book signing to follow
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, 7:30 p.m., Free
Find out more…

Friday, February 26, 2016
“Spooky Interaction”
Bellefield Hall Auditorium, 8 p.m., Free
Spooky Interaction is a live, transcontinental performance over Internet2 utilizing Lewis’ Voyager interactive improvisation software.
Find out more…

Saturday, February 27, 2016
Music on the Edge: The Chamber Music of George Lewis
The Andy Warhol Museum, 8 p.m.

Lecture: "Improvisation as a Way of Life"

George E. Lewis and the brilliant pianist Vijay Ayer in Concert

George E. Lewis ant Marina Rosenfeld play "Sour Mash" on computer and turntables

Post-Class Open Thread

Post any lingering questions you have after Tuesday's discussion. What issues would you like us to take up during our next discussion?

Week Six Student Blog Post: "Grey Areas: Storying Blackness Through Creativity" (Kevin Young's The Grey Album and Yona Harvey's Hemming the Water) by Caitlyn Hunter

  Below is a music video from DJ Dangermouse’s The Grey Album. It’s blending of the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album was controversial in the sense that it pirated music from both artists. But what it succeeds in doing is translating black music through white authenticity. If we think about music’s evolution being a blend of various influences rooted deeply in historical importance, what are we to take away from new genres as they emerge? 

(DJ Dangermouse, The Grey Album-Encore)

    This begs the question: in what ways is blackness communicated? Kevin Young introduces the idea of storying in which black artists use form and content in a “counterfeit tradition” which embellishes on the plight of black life through dichromatic themes.  “Black writers,” as Young claims “create their own authority in order to craft their own alternative system of literary currency and value….functioning both within and without the dominant, supposed gold-standard system of American culture.” (24) He presents this idea of the “trickster” in tandem with this narrative tradition, where the act of storying “provides an easing of passage” (30) between white and black audiences. 

            Storying as means of communication in its most primitive form, is both an aural and oral tradition. Storying, in both music and literature is fragmented experience which has evolved and changed in tandem to societal and political movements, however, it is important to stress that these works are rooted in the spiritual gospels of the antebellum South. 

            Young observes Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes’ choice of using dialect in their poetry. Of course the common misconception in such experimental writing is that the Negro dialect is a lesser form connotative with unintelligence and was met with negative response. But what’s interesting is that Young notes that writing in Black vernacular was a linguistic display to communicate racial difference where “classicism is a form of defense.” (122) As Blues becomes engrained with American pop culture, the marriage of the negro spiritual and blackness becomes redefined. Hughes seizes this opportunity to return to his roots thus using vernacular to translate the commonality of the black struggle—through controversial characters such as the prostitute, the abusive drunkard, the gambler, etc—in relation to the great migration of Black Americans to the North. 

    With the emergence of jazz in America, we see the birth of Afro-modernity. Black artists use creativity to answer the call of what it means to be black.  Art becomes more abstract in performance, but nonetheless effective in communicating political discourse (whether intentionally or not). In her song “Strange Fruit” Billie Holliday uses her song as political platform against the injustice of Black Americans in the South. Her song is revolutionary in the sense that it empowered a black woman’s voice through technology. Young points out that “Holiday’s song and storying provide a new kind of grammar…not just reworking or ‘recomposing’ a tune, but also rewriting the notion of how we sing.” (225)

(Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit)

    Similarly, writer and composer (and musical prodigy) Mary Lou Williams is another example of an artist who uses her music as a way to correspond social and political response. Though her music was largely abstract, Williams made a conscious point to support the black community through performing for local politicians.  Farah Jasmine Griffin observes that “Williams passion for racial and economic justice was as spiritually driven as it was politically motivated.” (140) It’s important to note that many of Williams’ actions were motivated by a desire of spiritual enlightenment—something Griffin infers that Williams never found. In 1943 Williams starts to compose her masterpiece Zodiac Suite where it is later referred to as “a series of vividly evocative tone poems in the jazz idiom.” (165) Again we see Williams attempt at finding spirituality through music and literal astrology. 

Mary Lou Williams, Zodiac Suite--Aries

 

     Yona Harvey’s interpretation to Zodiac Suite is interesting in it’s composition in response to Williams’ music. For sake of time and space on this post I will look at the first stanza “Aries” in comparison to William’s song. The music begins first with a playful melody (much like ragtime) for seven seconds then blending into gospel like chords, the performance seems hymnal but the melody is no longer recognizable. “Elusive little g-o-d-/shoot above frost” (17) Then, the chords blend back into upbeat tempo much like Ellington’s train songs, but then, a minute in, the audience is given dissonant keys, and the tone and structure begin to waver to a fractured and trailing sadness. “Air in crocus throat/&therein my mother” (17) Finally, in this trailing dissonance where there seems to be no resolve, the piano booms and crashes like thunder in an arraying of keys and octaves that call and respond to another and we wait in this fragmented sound waiting for resolution to come. “[My first, my prayer, my hurdle]” (17)

           

    Yona Harvey is definitely not the first to write poetry in response to music. We’ve looked at Amiri Baraka write about Coltrane. We’ve seen Hughes’  blues poems. But I still have not come away with a clear idea of how music is translated into poetry and how, as Young constantly refers to as storying is communicated within a contemporary lens. Does something inherently get lost in the message? Are we to read these interpretations differently? As society changes how does the story change both sonically and visually?

Post-class Open Thread on The Muse is Music, Brooks, Griffin, Beyoncé and more

Use this thread for your post-class thoughts.

"I Got Hot Sauce in My Bag:" Beyoncé's "Formation" Wins The Super Bowl (and apparently a football game took place, as well.)

On Saturday Beyoncé released the video for her new single "Formation," in which she boldly informs us, in an ultimate declaration of countrified blackness, "I got hot sauce in my bag." (A phrase worth unpacking from our own critical bags, as it were. For me the "hot sauce" suggests the resourcefulness and improvisatory brilliance that are hallmarks of black performance--the ability to transform the bland into something delicious.

The video is also a visual love letter to New Orleans. Importantly, it does not highlight tourist culture, nor does it celebrate the city in its recently-gentrified hipster glory, but rather pays homage its unapologetic, sonically resonant, shimmering and gritty blackness. New Orleans's historic importance to American music and culture cannot be overstated. What is the relevance of staging this performance here, in this hallowed space, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

The single also features the voice of Big Freedia, New Orleans bounce icon and Queen Diva. About a a minute in, Big Freedia can be heard saying: "I did not come to play with you hoes. I came to slay, bitch." There is so much to say here about the politics of slaying, especially when channeled through lens of a queered performance of blackness. Big Freedia (Freddie Jones) a rapper who uses feminine pronouns, announces her intention to "slay" not only the performance, but also the normative values of hip hop and pop culture itself.

Read this NYT article "New Orleans Gender-bending Rap" and watch Big Freedia's video for "Y'all Get Back Now." Much to be said here about the subversive reclaiming of space in Freedia's video.

And, we shouldn't forget to discuss how the Super Bowl performance extends this narrative even further. Things to discuss: 1. Beyoncé's afro-coiffed dancers clad in all black (Gucci) leather channeling Black Panther sartorial brilliance 2. Beyoncé's costume channeling Michael Jackson's 1993 Super Bowl garb. 3. The blatantly militaristic connotations of "formation," rendered visually and sonically 4. The dance sequences 5. The rainbow-coalition finale with Bruno Mars and Coldplay.

Michael Jackson at 1993 Super Bowl 

Week 5 Student Blog Post: “Textual Performance: the Translation of Jazz onto the Poetic Page” by Malcolm Friend

In Meta DuEwa Jones’s The Muse Is Music, the act of representation in its various modes and how this representation challenges reading and writing practices and counters sexist and heteronormative notions of jazz are central themes in the analysis of jazz(-influenced) poetry. I’m interested in how Jones highlights both writing and performance as mediums through which to translate jazz onto the poetic page, bringing a focus to the body of the text as well as the body of the poet. Since it’s familiar to the class already, I thought I’d start with Langston Hughes. Last week, looking at Fine Clothes to the Jew, we noted the poem “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” particularly the moment in which the speaker slips into multilingualism:

              “May I?

                Mais oui?

                Mien gott!

                Parece una rumba.

            Play it, jazz band!

            You’ve got seven languages to speak in

            And then some,

            Even if you do come from Georgia.” (Hughes, Fine Clothes 74)

This moment sticks out as pointing to an international appeal of jazz. A similar impulse can be found in Ask Your Mama, particularly in the section “Ride, Red, Ride.” Within the body of the poem we see the incorporation of French and Spanish, as well as references to Mont Pelée in Martinique (invoking the French Caribbean), Patrice Lumumba (first Congolese Prime Minister), and Granada (last Muslim stronghold in Moorish Spain) (Hughes, The Collected Poems 482-483). Ask Your Mama also asks us to consider how we read with the incorporation of marginalia (Jones 62-64). Do we read it against the text as musical direction for the poem or as part of the poem when read horizontally across blank space? In “Ride, Red, Ride,” this “marginalia” works in concert with the text of the poem, once again pointing to an international prominence of jazz, invoking Latin American and Caribbean music while also returning to the American South. Yet Hughes, in his recording of Ask Your Mama, omits these cues from his reading (Jones 63). While this could point to them solely being musical cues, Jones also points out that these musical cues are highly poetic in their construction and contribute to the political implications of the text (62-63), begging the question of whether these political implications are fully realized without the recognition of the text. Take for example a performance of “Ride, Red, Ride” by The Langston Hughes Project. Does the music do the same work in conjunction with the poem as the musical cue? What do the differences between the text as we read it and the text as it is performed indicate about a poetry steeped in jazz (or any other music for that matter)?

Langston Hughes Project: “Red, Ride, Red”

This question of how text and performance also comes into focus with the Coltrane poems, in particular Cornelius Eady’s “Alabama, c. 1963: A Ballad by John Coltrane” and Sonia Sanchez’s “a/coltrane/poem.” In discussing “Alabama, c. 1963,” Jones points to the interplay between the performance of the text and the performance of the poet in incorporating Coltrane’s “Alabama.” The opening gesture of the poem, the reference to long and lost breaths could point to Coltrane’s breaths, the breaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the performance styles of both Coltrane instrumentally in “Alabama” and Eady vocally in his “Alabama, c. 1963” (Jones 109). This multiple meaning is significant as it points to Eady emulating Coltrane not just in terms of writing but in his bodily performance. Eady’s text as well as controlled reading style act as a mute, altering the resonance of the poem without taking away its intensity (Jones 111).

John Coltrane: “Alabama”

Cornelius Eady: “Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket”

When looking at Sonia Sanchez’s “a/coltrane/poem,” the text likewise becomes a manner in which to emulate Coltrane, although in this case orthographically. Jones details Sanchez’s use of repetitive arrangement of letters and altering capital and lower-case letters as a textual representation of Coltrane’s use of multiphonics, making multiple tones sound simultaneously (102). This textual representation of Coltrane can also be viewed as challenging the gendered representations that accompany jazz. The textual representation of Coltrane’s sound grounds Sanchez as instrumentalist, combating the masculinist discourse around jazz which conflates instrumental virtuosity with masculine virility (Jones 135). Further, in asserting “yo / fight is my fight,” Sanchez decenters masculinity while asserting the political nature of Coltrane’s music.

As mentioned earlier, similar questions I have regarding Hughes’s Ask Your Mama and the performance of it emerge when examining Eady and Sanchez’s Coltrane poems. Relating the structure of the poems (and even the performance of them) back to Coltrane almost necessitates a knowledge of Coltrane. Sanchez admits this herself when talking about “a/coltrane/poem.”

Sonia Sanchez on “a/coltrane/poem”

Sanchez’s laments regarding “a/coltrane/poem” mirror Jones’s relaying that many critics saw the typography as, “at best, evidence of a lack of aesthetic appeal and, at worst, evidence of poor craftsmanship” (103). This raises questions regarding Eady and Sanchez’s work, but also questions regarding jazz poetry (and any music-based poetry in general) that I’ll leave the class with: do we need a working knowledge of Coltrane’s work for these poems to resonate with us? Given the intertextuality of music-based poems, how should we judge them? By how they incorporate/represent the music, how they interact with criticism, or simply on “the value of the poem”? Do we hold a different standard for the bodily performance than the written text? I’m excited to hear your thoughts.