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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. In his essay on jazz and gender, David Chinitz cites an unpublished poem by T. S. Eliot, “The Smoke That Gathers Blue and Sinks,” from 1911 (322); however, I find Lindsay’s poem more useful as a historical marker because it anticipates the cultural racism that Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts writers would challenge in the coming decades. Lindsay also published several poems in the 1920s that either used jazz as a descriptor or criticized the music (Feinstein, Bibliographic Guide 58). 2. Kenneth Rexroth has written insightfully about the origins of jazz poetry as a performance art. He defines it as “the reciting of suitable poetry with the music of a jazz band” in which “[t]he voice is integrally wedded to the music and, although it does not sing notes, is treated as another instrument” (69). Like many theorists of jazz- influenced literature, he argues that jazz poetry deserves serious attention from knowledgeable audiences and artists (71). Though Rexroth describes an important stage in the emergence of jazz- poetic work, my analysis in this book will not extend to the kinds of performance on which he focuses. 3. Feinstein cites Etheridge Knight, Vachel Lindsay, Arthur Guiterman, E. E. Cummings, Carl Sandburg, DuBose Heyward, Mina Loy, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Melvin Tolson, William Carlos Williams, the Beat poets, Amiri Baraka, William Matthews, Yusef Komunyakaa, Hayden Carruth, Michael Harper, and Al Young as the genre’s major innovators and participants in many of its ideological debates. 4. Henderson discusses these elements again in a lecture published in Callaloo in 1982, “The Blues as Black Poetry.” 5. Henderson elaborates upon this last concept in a later article, “Worrying the Line: Notes on Black American Poetry.” Here he explains “worrying the line” as “essentially a kind of analytical play on words, on parts of words, on qualities of words” (69). This broader conception alludes to both the social practices this technique embodies and the vocal melismas used to “worry” a pitch in gospel or blues music. Henderson also labels the call- and- response patterns of gospel music a kind of “worrying the line” that strengthens the sense of communal interaction essential to spiritually inspired performance (“Worrying” 72). 182 Notes 6. Like Feinstein, Nielsen claims that innovations in black experimental poetics have often paralleled new developments in black music; today, such innovations underline the historical importance of revision and improvisation in African- American art. Nielsen also cautions that divisions between the categories of song, chant, and poetry should be avoided in favor of Amiri Baraka’s notion of the “changing same”: the repetition with a difference that occurs in both black experimen- tal poetics and black musical innovation (Black Chant 30). Nielsen proposes Amiri Baraka, Harold Carrington, A. B. Spellman, Oliver Pitcher, Cecil Taylor, and Joseph Jarman as representative examples of the tradition of “black chant,” a concept that addresses the network of connections between oral and written traditions in African- American poetry. 7. Although Mackey’s list of experimental poets differs from Nielsen’s and includes writers of the African diaspora—Clarence Major, Kamau Brathwaite, and Wilson Harris—he employs similar methods by which to link these poets under the rubric of “discrepant engagement.” 8. Feinstein’s, Mackey’s, and Nielsen’s works are preceded by Charles O. Hartman’s more New Critical theorization in Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song (1991) that narrative voice func- tions as a key formal link between jazz music and jazz- inflected texts. Although Hartman considers how both jazz performance and poetic composition enable artists to claim social authority, his ideas focus on a somewhat narrowly defined conception of voice (4). Many critics, including both Nielsen and Mackey, have cautioned against the essen- tialist trap of associating African- American literature exclusively with oral traditions, rather than understanding black writing as both orally and textually influenced. 9. Both Matthew B. White and Elisabeth D. Kuhn have analyzed the gender politics of blues lyrics. White argues that “[t]hrough their music, bluesmen were able to exert power and control. They could exercise the prerogatives and privileges of a man in a patriarchal society through song” (22–23), while Kuhn suggests that the largely male authors of blues lyrics could “recreate, even within the formulaic constraints of the blues form, the same strategies that are found in real- life requests” (529). This sense of unequal gender relations within traditional blues lyrics may also provide another motivation for women jazz poets’ politicized messages. 10. Namely, Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa’s The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) and The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology Volume 2 (1996), and Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey’s Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (1993). Jim Stephens also edited Bright Moments: A Collection of Jazz Poetry (1980), while Kevin Young more recently col- lected the work of several emerging poets and fiction writers who draw on jazz materials in Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000). Notes 183 Chapter 1 1. Angela Davis also notes that, while “at times Bessie Smith was a victim of male violence,” on the other hand “she would not hesitate to hurl violent threats—which she sometimes carried out—at the men who betrayed her” (37). 2. Writing about the poetry of Lucille Clifton, Ajuan Maria Mance argues that “African American women poets have used their representations of black women’s lives as a tool for renegotiating popular assumptions about identity and race that have limited the category of woman to female subjects who are white” (123). She calls Clifton’s depictions of black women in her poems moments of “excessive display” in which “she and other women poets writing against the hegemony of the main- stream highlight the role of process—of making—in those institutions and identity categories most commonly understood as absolute” (135). Williams creates similar moments in her Bessie Smith pieces; she attaches her work’s social messages to a time period, the 1920s, that anticipated future feminist movements in activism and the arts. 3. See my discussion of Maulana Karenga’s attitude toward the blues in Chapter 2. 4. The strength of the relationship between Williams and Brown is under- scored by the warm personal tone of an article that Williams published in Black American Literature Forum on the occasion of Brown’s death, “Remembering Prof. Sterling A. Brown, 1901–1989.” 5. The fact that the Bessie Smith poems form the largest subsection of her poetic oeuvre suggests that Williams uses her voice to speak for disadvantaged women. Although Smith is less well-known for the eco- nomic peaks and declines of her personal and professional lives, these experiences shaped her life as substantially as did her musical abilities (Albertson 24). 6. This title comes from the lyrics to a traditional African- American spiri- tual, “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” the first verse of which runs as follows: “O Mary don’t you weep / Tell Martha not to moan / Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea / O Mary don’t you weep / Tell Martha not to moan.” 7. Howard Zinn cites the growing development of “black capitalism,” in which formerly radical black leaders were given business loans and advantageous political positions by white corporate giants, as a factor in black women’s increasingly vocal objections to patriarchy in the early 1970s. Women laboring under the triple stigma of racial, gender, and economic minority more pointedly articulated the false consciousness of black capitalism (Zinn 456–57). Williams’s characterization of black female authorship suggests her ideological roots in these currents of 1970s social discourse. 8. In their introduction to Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (1997), Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer posit that 184 Notes the primary value of such writing lies in its “decentered perspective of the dominant culture’s values,” a perspective that “highlights cultural and geographical differences and makes its readers consider how these differences have shaped their lives and the lives of others” (2). The defi- nition of regionalism that Inness and Royer propose emphasizes both an “investment in community” and an examination of identity in terms of “sectors based on class, gender, race, politics, religion, and a myriad of other constructs” (7). I find this combination of perspectives originat- ing in marginalized social discourses, community, and the complicated intersections of identity politics particularly well- suited to the themes and agenda of Williams’s work. 9. The truck driver drove away without bothering to investigate what had happened. A doctor on his way to go fishing happened to be the next person who appeared on the scene; he examined Smith, but before she could be moved to a hospital, another car crashed into the back of the doctor’s vehicle. Two ambulances were summoned; one left bearing Smith and the other the young white couple who had been the third car’s passengers. Commentators disagree about whether Smith was denied admittance at a white hospital in Clarksdale before entering the town’s “colored” institution (Albertson 219–23). 10. Edward Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith (1959), a play that takes as truth the story that Smith was denied treatment and died before reach- ing a hospital that would admit her, secured her place as a personality of legendary importance in white representations of race. Angela Y. Davis chose Smith as one of the three central figures in her study of classic blues singers and their later impact on black feminists, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. She has also been the subject of or mentioned in more than 50 jazz poems (Feinstein, Bibliographic Guide 184–85).
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