Ron Mann’s 1982 film Poetry in Motion features 24 poets performing and discussing their work, sometimes accompanied by musicians whose compositions respond to the spoken word. One such musical- poetic performance takes center stage in the five- minute segment on Jayne Cortez’s work. Here Cortez describes the improvisatory ethic that guides both her writing and her work with the Firespitters, the band with whom she performs her pieces:
I’m playing with the visual and the verbal connections. On paper. And then when I’m reading, then it’s, you know, the verbal and the, the music coming together. It’s sound, it’s about sound. The sound of the poetry against the sound of the music. The way I work is, improvised or invented off of the word, it’s like the call and response pattern, which is an old African pattern. I am making statements, or I’m asking questions, and the music is responding to me, and I’m responding back to them, and we’re listening to each other. Making not only comments on what you’re doing, but extending that, taking it out and exploring the possibilities of the poetry and the music together. (Poetry in Motion)
Cortez provides this analysis in voiceover as the picture cuts back and forth between a scene in which she sits on a couch with Mann and one in which she and the band react to one another midperformance.
This collage precedes the group’s rendition of Cortez’s poem “I See Chano Pozo.” Here she wears a red- and- blue- striped dashiki with dark pants and a large silver necklace in the shape of a stylized African face. Her decisions to wear traditional African clothing and to perform this particular poem with the band demonstrate that naming takes a central place in her poetics. Like Sonia Sanchez, she depicts her performance’s cultural roots as African in order to invoke a specific set of historical associations. The poem affirms Pozo, a Cuban conga player who is credited alongside trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie with introducing Afro-Cuban elements to jazz. The poem’s repeated lines assert that Pozo’s music motivates “Atamo,” “Mpebi,” “Donno,” “Obonu,” “Atumpan,” “Mpintintoa,” “Ilya Ilu,” “Ntenga,” “Siky Akkua,” “Batá,” and “Fontomfrom” : “various Africa drums” (Cortez, Coagulations 111) whose timbres resonate with music’s power to articulate human emotion. By repeating her affirmations of Chano Pozo and varying through vocal tone and inflection the printed versions of the poem, Cortez oversignifies the poetic form, defying the rhetorical boundaries of both print and previous performance. Her naming of Pozo’s accomplishments functions as a political act that positions his work in opposition to Western methods of public communication. Her commitment to social protest through linguistic alteration roots her textual improvisations in a cultural ethic that resembles Sanchez’s later strategies.
Jayne Cortez’s work explodes, through hyperbolic poetic images and innovative performance strategies, the social and rhetorical structures that enable oppressive social conditions. Her poetry’s themes, many of which are articulated via scatological imagery, align her work with contemporary artistic movements such as Black Arts and the early-century surrealists. Franklin Rosemont describes surrealism as an “unparalleled freedom” of image and a commitment to revolution “in every aspect of life” (“Introduction” 65, 67), both elements that Cortez continues to explore. She has published work in the surrealist journal Arsenal and in Franklin Rosemont’s 1980 collection Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices (Woodson 73), though specifically African- American sources help to shape her brand of surrealism. Tony Bolden argues, for instance, that surrealism’s “radical politics . . . are compatible with the ideas of Black Arts theorists” ( Afro- Blue 121). Aldon Nielsen calls Cortez’s artistic approach “a black American surrealism” drawn from “the compacted imagery of the blues” (Black Chant 225). D. H. Melhem uses Cortez’s own term “supersurrealism” to denote the associations she creates in her poetry between graphic surrealist imagery and political offenses (“Supersurrealist” 206). She employs surrealism in order to critique modern social conditions, while her poetry’s performative elements signify a rebellion against conventional methods of public expression.
Cortez crafts poetry based in conceptually difficult surrealist imagery, yet she also advocates the communal, egalitarian atmosphere of spokenword performance. This juxtaposition, which might at first seem contradictory, illustrates her work’s political resolve. Her audience cannot participate in her poem’s affirmation of Chano Pozo as an innovative cultural icon without understanding the rationale behind the images—like “a very fine tube of frictional groans” (line 4)—that she uses to characterize him. The poetry occupies a narrow space on the edge of competing differences, often refusing reconciliation and synthesis even as it moves with a sense of deliberate uneasiness among oral and written traditions. The best theoretical framework for understanding these differences derives from the cultural traditions of the African- American music to which Cortez owes much of her source material. Some of her vocal performance strategies, for instance, originate in gospel music. The esoteric imagery of her surrealism also shares thematic material with the blues and artistic impulses with heavily theorized jazz traditions like the bebop and free jazz movements; several of her musician friends worked in these movements. The historically black musics of blues and jazz thus provide her with a flexible yet culturally specific language in which to voice her critiques of contemporary political situations.
~~Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History -by- Jennifer D. Ryan
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