Day 253: Post-Jazz Poetics

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

Day 58 : Book Excerpt : Indian Poetics

History, in the sense that we will be using the term here, is indeed an imposition of recent Western scholarship on the literature of India, ably seconded now by several generations of Indian scholars who are at least much closer to the spirit and the matter of their subject. It can run the risk of replacing that dimension of the original material most central to its formation: tradition itself, sampradaya. Indian poetics is a tradition, therefore a self-validating activity.
...
The historicity of poetics

1) In its broadest sense, poetics at its text-inception was concerned with two different subject matters— natya, the 'Sanskrit' drama, and 'kavya', Sanskrit court (esp. epic) poetry. So strongly distinctive are the subject matters, by style, by means of composition, by aesthetic effect, that it is only in a nominal sense that we speak of "a" poetics at this period; in fact, there are two poetics, each with its "proper" subject matter and methods (and this continues to be the case even later, though not in the radical sense we dimly perceive ab origine). Natya-sastra, faced with a genre whose means of expression were largely, and perhaps even primarily, non-verbal (abhinaya, characterization, setting, etc.) seems to have identified its first problem in the question, "What indeed did (or 'could') the drama express?". And to have sketched a solution in terms of a different kind of emotional response (termed 'rasa') than the emotion ('bhava') that is commonplace in every experience. Alamkara-Sastra, on the other hand, employs only one means of expression— the verbal— whose expressive capacity is not subject to any naive doubt. Other possible means of expression— even abhinaya— have to be conveyed in words. The problem of kavya-sastra, was then seen in differentiating that particular expression we call "poetic" from other verbal means, sastra and narrative. And it sought a solution to this problem not in a theory of response but in theory of language that could reconcile grammatically (for it is language) with a comprehension or an understanding that did not appear to be derived from it. It is taken for granted that in the uses of language we consider normal, the understanding derived from a sentence is founded directly upon the powers of the words or their combination (the respective views of the two Mimamsa schools most cogently at issue here), a relation that can be conveniently termed denotative, on which is based the propositional truth value of the utterance. The distinctive feature of poetry, in this basic sense, lies in its sentences or propositions that are by that standard simply not true, yet which in terms of the knowing purpose of the poet are not only true, but usually are even more striking than the truth. Bhamaha's mention vakrokti is an early witness to this mode of thought— but is not in itself an 'aesthetic'.

2) Relation of poetic texts to other known works. The issue does not concern the intellectual relationships between poetics and its allied sastras, but rather the explicit relations between early poetic texts and other works: the Buddhist logics of Dinnaga and Dharmakirti (for Bhamaha is Avidely thought to be a Buddhist on the basis of his father's name); the academic poem of Bhatti (Bhattikavya) that systematically illustrates the same set of alamkaras given in Bhamaha and Dandin; and finally whether Dandin is also the author of the Dasakuniaracarita and Avantisundarikatha. Involved in these questions is the toughest chronological problem of the alamkarasastra: the relative priority of Bhamaha and Dandin.

3) Two kinds of texts are found in both the natya and the alamkara traditions: one, by definition older, is the puranic and authorless compilation: the Natyasastra itself, but also the sections of the Agni-and the Visnudharmottara puranas that deal with poetics; the other, works that by tradition and scholarly judgment are the compositions of individual authors. It is clearly more difficult to argue chronology among texts that are ex hypothesi not the product of a fixed time; when such texts are interspersed with datable texts, relations become quite complex if not indeterminate. The oldest 'dramatic' text (NatyaSastra) is a compilation (though attributed to Bharata) the oldest two texts of the alamkara tradition (Bhamaha, Dandin) are clearly not. One of the puranas (Agni) bears evident relations to Bhamaha and Dandin; the other seems rather to look to Bharata (or Bharata to it). Given their strict separation of theoretical outlook, the problems of chronology of the dramatic and strophic poetics can to some extent be mitigated by refusing to see them in a single development.

It is conventional to begin the text history of Indian poetics with the Natyasastra, a purana of materials pertinent to the staging of the classical (Sanskrit) drama. In its various recensions (none of its editions can yet be said to be critical) three of its approximately thirty-six chapters deal with the key issues of the two poetic traditions: rasa-bhava and alamkara-guna. Other chapters touch on related topics: plot, genre, metre, the latter reserved to a separate Rostra. By and large the text pertains to dramaturgy in its practical aspect, and thus does not concern us here.

Immediately later writers, Bhamaha, etc., mention Bharata by name but appear to associate him with the "other school"; his chapter on alamkarasastra is by most arguments of internal chronology considerably older than the chapters on rasa, natyasastra per se. We have for this reason, and because the otherwise oldest datable texts (Bhamaha, Dandin) are of the alamkara tradition, chosen to begin this history with an account of the kavya-oriented poetic.

~~Indian Poetics (from the Series "A History of Indian Literature" ed. Jan Gonda) -by- Edwin Gerow