Form and Voice in Jazz and Post-War American Poetry
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Up in the Sound: Form and Voice in Jazz and Post-War American Poetry By Benjamin Richard Lempert A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Kaja Silverman, Chair Professor C. D. Blanton Professor Scott Saul Professor Ramona Naddaff Fall 2012 Abstract Up in the Sound: Form and Voice in Jazz and Post-War American Poetry by Benjamin Richard Lempert Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Kaja Silverman, Chair In this study, I build a case for redrawing the conceptual lines of American post-war poetry and music. My overall argument is that the post-war American and African American poets who engaged with jazz most profoundly were those who heard the music not simply as a set of sounds, but as an ongoing argument about the nature of aesthetic form. These poets responded to the conceptual innovations of jazz by thinking in new ways about the body, and about how a body of sound could relate to the body of the poet. In setting lyric’s material limits against its trans-medial aspirations, I show, jazz empowered poets to rethink the very nature of poetic activity, and in turn to construct a powerful new model of race-inflected aesthetics. The dissertation is divided into two sections, each of which pairs music and poetry to outline a larger historical or theoretical argument. In this it leverages the many years I have spent as a practicing jazz musician. In the first section, I use musicological analysis to develop a new account of jazz-inspired lyric based in Charlie Parker’s approach to musical narrative. What Parker’s music offers, I argue in Chapter One, is not only a set of imitable sounds, but an improvisational organization of those sounds that resists their being heard as “telling a story,” and instead turns musical form into a multi-layered, dialectical phenomenon. In Chapter Two, I use Langston Hughes’s 1951 sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred and the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson to establish the poetic resonances of this account, articulating a theory of poetic musicality in which poetry’s music becomes a matter less of how a poem sounds than how effectively it translates the structure of hermeneutic opacity that Parker’s solos put in place. In the second section, the music of Miles Davis’s mid-60’s band anchors my excavation of a powerful but overlooked model of (African) American avant-garde performance. Davis’s key aesthetic move, I argue, is to play sensuous presence against intellectual reception, so oversaturating notes and rhythms with potential meaning that pinning any of them down to a single implication becomes constitutively impossible. Chapter Four pairs Langston Hughes’s 1961 poem Ask Your Mama with the work of Robert Creeley to push this aesthetic into the realm of language, detailing a theory of poetic representation in which language’s inherent falsehoods forge identity as a permanently dispersed condition. The dissertation’s final chapter extends this model in the work of two contemporary poets, Harryette Mullen and Ed Roberson, who unsettle traditional aesthetics of “blackness” by teasing apart the multiple sensory registers upon which the concept usually rests. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii Introduction iii Chapter 1: Charlie Parker and the Forms of Opacity 1 Chapter 2: Bird is the Word: Langston Hughes, Charles Olson and a Non- 27 Representational Jazz Poetics Chapter 3: Evasive Incantations: Miles Davis and the Spell of the Plugged Nickel 56 Chapter 4: An Illusive Game to Bag: Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama and 83 Robert Creeley’s Words Chapter 5: Sounds to Break Bodies Apart: Ed Roberson, Harryette Mullen, and a 122 Post-Jazz Jazz Poetics References 154 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you Dan, Scott, Ramona, and Kaja. Thank you to my teachers, musical, academic, and otherwise. Thank you to my friends. You are indispensible. Thank you Mom, Naomi, Fern, Esther, and Carmen. Thank you Caleb. Most of all, thank you Rose. ii INTRODUCTION: Up in the Sound In this study, I build a case for redrawing the conceptual lines of American post-war poetry and music. The contours of this landscape follow a number of crucial developments in a resolutely American aesthetic: jazz. In particular, I read two musical moments – Charlie Parker’s bebop revolution of the 1940’s and the recordings of Miles Davis’s famous mid-1960’s quintet – as conceptual provocations asking us to rethink the relationships between sound, race, and aesthetic form. These analyses then underpin a series of readings of post-war poetry that show post-war poets expanding, reconfiguring, commenting on, and complicating these aesthetic models. Moving from Langston Hughes’s 1951 sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred to Harryette Mullen’s 2002 collection Sleeping with the Dictionary, and including along the way Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, Robert Creeley’s Words, Hughes’s 1961 long poem Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods For Jazz, and contemporary poet Ed Roberson’s Lucid Interval as Integral Music and City Eclogue, I argue that the significance of these poets’ work rests in their hearing jazz not simply as a set of imitable sounds, but as an ongoing argument about the nature of aesthetic form. Engaging with the ideas Parker and Davis present in notes and rhythms, I argue, empowered poets to rethink the very nature of poetic activity, newly accommodate lyric’s material limits to its trans-medial aspirations, and in turn construct a powerful new model of race-inflected aesthetics. While I generally present readings in chronological sequence, as a whole the project offers less a historical narrative than an evolutionary account of a mode of thinking that ties sound to race, and bodies to representation. For both the poets and the musicians in this study, sound functions in two ways, as material, embodied phenomenon on one hand and as signifying trope on the other. Sound is both experience and figure, the medium in which arguments are made and an identifiably racial feature of musical and textual performances. In part, this study aims to show how the coding of bodies as raced proceeds through sound; to inhabit the matrix of race is to be “up in it.” Because the materials in which it traffics are sounds and bodies, jazz offers the foundational moments of the argument whose evolution this study outlines. As I argue throughout, jazz’s aesthetic traction rests in its ability to offer not only an evolving set of sounds, but an evolving way to think about how sound comes to mean. And the way sound comes to mean is deeply intertwined with historical representations of blackness. In reconceiving not only what specific notes and rhythms come to signify (or to evade signification), but how specific notes and rhythms come to signify, then, Parker and Davis generate new models for performing race. For the poets I examine in this study, then, what matters is the turn to jazz not only as figure, or even the turn to jazz as technique (though both of those turns are certainly important), but the turn to jazz as a reservoir of conceptual approaches. Incorporating the conceptual advances proffered by the musical tradition allows these poets to recast what “musicality” comes to mean in a poetic context, and what powers that musicality might have. This process further contributes to poetry’s ability to capture or express racialized identity. Put differently, wrestling with the conceptual schemas articulated by the jazz tradition frees these poets to work as musicians do, putting sounds together in new ways and rethinking what sound means for the iii medium in which they work. As I discuss in Chapter Two, this account does run on lines askew to more standard accounts of “jazz poetry.” This is largely because of what this study takes “jazz poetry” to mean. Traditionally (as I also discuss in Chapter Two), “jazz poetry” is understood as taking one of three general forms. Most commonly, it designates poetry that is meant to sound like jazz. Rarely addressed is the fact that “sounding like jazz” more often than not indicates less a poem’s actual sound than it does a poem’s trafficking in the range of poetic codes (scat syllables, for instance), that have come to signify “jazziness.” In another vein, the term indicates poetry that takes either the music itself or a specific musician as its subject. Examples here (there are many) might include Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” for example, or Michael Harper’s “Dear John, Dear Coltrane.” Finally, the term often specifies poetry that is written according to some version of the improvisatory experience, however construed. The primary example here would be Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac’s theories of spontaneous composition. While all these are important modes of poetizing, and as such deserve attention, in this study, “jazz poetry” indicates less any of these models than poetry that thinks about itself in a jazz-inspired manner. For my purposes, that is, “jazz poetry” is poetry that employs the strategies of jazz to rethink its own condition of possibility. What matters less is whether these poems sound like jazz, or demonstrate an allegiance to jazz through choice of content, but whether they consciously extend the ways of thinking about sound and representation, particularly racial representation, inaugurated in the music whose details I limn. Put differently, what matters about this poetry is its ability to take the full measure of the jazz tradition. By “the full measure” I mean the multiple identities that “jazz” as signifier has come to connote.