I See Jayne Cortez: On Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez

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Jayne Cortez will not meet you where you are. 

You must share some of her knowledge to enter into a world in which “Phillis Wheatley / was the great great missing aunt / and ancestor / of Leopold Senghor” (“Phyllis Wheatley”), the blue-filtered coffin where “Duke / who like Satchmo like Nat (King) Cole / will never die because love they say / never dies” (“Rose Solitude”), a world where Cuba, South Africa, the Congo, Paris, and the Antilles aren’t just places on a map or footnotes of history, but necessary and living sites of counteractivity. This is to say, it takes time to learn the names. Hers is a history concordant with that of jazz, of islands off the coasts-of, of négritude and struggle. We have these poems whose revolutionary force moves across and beyond the page, serpentine-like, a trackable history of the poet herself. Though her career spans the gulf of post-war American poetry, we’ve been waiting too long for these poems to be collected in total, we who have been living in one of the two, or three, or five-hundred different Americas to which her labors were addressed. Thanks to Nightboat Books and editor Margaret Busby, since August, we have had Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez. To read it is to share her history, and be bared before a history that has always been shared. 

At once bitter and uplifting, a consummate uncoverer, her rhythms fell wherever the bombs didn’t, recording a sort of anti-map of resistance, an un-controlled burning, as if sending out flares for extraterrestrial consciousness. And yet, she’s terrestrial to her core: Whitmanian in form, utterance, and forebearing; Ginsbergian in guttural profusion of light. Like both, she harbored a penchant for the anaphoric. Repeated phrases build in these poems to consistently surprising effect. Unlike Ginsberg, however, the incantatory power of that anaphora came from an intimate, rather than borrowed, milieu of jazz practitioners, as in one of Jayne Cortez’s poems dedicated to Charles Mingus, a friend, titled “Into This Time:” 

Into this time
of steel feathers blowing from hearts
into this turquoise flame time in the mouth
into this sonic boom time in the conch
into this musty stone-fly time sinking into
the melancholy buttocks of dawn

She leaned, she rocked: that was the Whitman but also the blues about her. Her poetry not only spoke like jazz, it spoke with it, used similar tempos, snatched phrasings. This is Jayne Cortez, holy, made up of parts none of which could add up to her but somehow made her whole: that was the occasional New York about her, sometimes sounding like the Harlem of the past, and other times the Harlem of the future. Either way, she was everything she said she was: woman, mother, revolutionary, Cuban, African, fire. As she wrote in 1973, she makes no “buts” about it, “I Am New York City:”  

i am new york city

here is my brain of hot sauce

my tobacco teeth my

mattress of bedbug tongue

She was a performance poet, a poet who performed. Not unlike Cecil Taylor or Sun Ra, who also wrote poems. Cortez would never put mouth to horn, however. She was born with an instrument—a radical tongue—honed on shaping and reshaping both speech and the written word. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that most, if not almost all, of what we know as poetry-in-performance descended from Cortez’s dedication to poetry off the page, to poetry in music and as music. This is Jayne Cortez, the firespitter. 

Born in Fort Huachuca, Arizona in 1934, and then raised in the Watts district of Los Angeles, Cortez’s parents’ extensive jazz and Latin record collection afforded her the most impactful educational tool she would ever receive, an ear for music. From her first book, Pissstained stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares, throughout the many books of poems she published until her death in 2012, Cortez dedicated many poems to jazz heavyweights like Billie Holiday (“If You Were Mine”), some of them friends like John Coltrane (most famously, “How Long Has Trane Been Gone”) and Pharoah Sanders (“[Harsh Cries From]”), but none with such directive as “ORNETTE,” included in her first volume. “Go listen to Ornette,” she commands, a typical mode of Cortez’s, gleaned more from the Negritude poets of France, like Aimé Césaire, Éduoard Glissant, and Léopold Senghor, than from Whitman. Black musical experimentation for Cortez, whether out of the end of a bell of a brass instrument or out of the tip of a pen, is warfare: 

Go listen to Ornette  

Rambling Blessings 

with Cherry Higgins Haden

O.D.C.B.  holding church 

at the five spot in

N.Y.C.

Listen to the shrill voice 

Vibrating with 

Love & Agony

Jazz, and particularly good jazz, as Amiri Baraka wrote again and again, is an intimately Black radical phenomenon, and thus, social to its core: “It can be expressive of the entire force, or make it the occasion of some special pleading…we simply identify the part of the world in which we are most responsive” (“The Changing Same”). That is, jazz is a way of calling folks together. Cortez’s poetry, too, is a kind of call and response, not just to some ancestral force of troubled identity, but to the future in which Black liberation—the undeniable subject of her entire oeuvre—isn’t a dream, but a way of being. The invocation of “Love & Agony” is not the revanchism of some Romantic shorthand, but the acknowledgement of a shared ideal of Blackness, “a special site and resources for the task of articulation,” which, as Fred Moten put once in In the Break, “can occasion something very much like sadness and something very much like devilish enjoyment.” This bears out in the wide breadth of Cortez’s poetic career where joy is a weapon as much as pain is. Freedom is not the elimination of either joy or pain, but the freedom to feel both at their weight. 

Cortez is, perhaps, most associated with the Black Arts movement and its attendant permutations throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Where, as their careers went on, her compatriots like Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, and Sonia Sanchez would both soften their address and de-emphasize some of the bombastic rhetoric of Black Power in exchange for a more readably feminist ethics of representation, Cortez remained steadfast to the interlinkage of all forms of struggle. A life-long political organizer, Cortez’s most common form was the ensemble. As Cortez’s first husband, arch-scientist of the Church of Jazz, Ornette Coleman, titled his most groundbreaking album “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” Cortez’s rhapsodic, rhythmic intricacies shaped the work of many boundary-pushing poets alive today, such as Douglas Kearney, Tyehimba Jess, and those who have avowed personal tutelage at Cortez’s sweat-brimmed altar, like the no-less inimitable Evie Shockley and Dawn Lundy Martin. This innovative spirit arose out of her milieu—as did the ethos of artistic creation as a shared phenomenon. 

At the end of the 1950s, the Ornette Coleman Quartet burst—discordantly, sharp-suited, and slant—onto the national jazz scene. Schooled and in the process of re-schooling a traditional musical heritage, the ensemble of Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, Charlie Haden, and Coleman himself, developed a way of playing jazz that would forever trouble Western standards of art as monument. Improvised music could not be placed in a museum, of course. Very often, it wasn’t even written down. Coleman’s group had technique, but the result of that technique circulated from horn to ear, then ear to word of mouth. With a flourish of the lips, free jazz announced itself in its own language, a free-rhythmic syntax and voiced timbre that would come to be what we, the uninitiated or nearly, would hear bouncing around between our ears when we hear that word, jazz. As with any mid-century art, social context is key. This was Civil Rights (not yet hitting its pitch, but heating up), the heat in Harlem and the Upper East Side, and Watts and Newark still building, bristling with hunger. Most importantly, there was love, though, spuriously in spite of the vigilance it takes to keep watch, taken seriously and taken as unseriously as would allow new connections to flourish, to build a movement. 

Love presides over Coleman’s 1957 song “Jayne,” the third song featured on Something Else!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman. Cortez and Coleman got married in 1954, two pulsars meeting at their edges. As the Cumbia groove that begins “Jayne” dissolves, the music becomes less a portrait of its eponymous soon-to-be poet-performer, than an invitation to dance. As Coleman knew, and as we, her future readers, listeners, and co-members of her rhythmic ensemble know as soon as we tune in, dance is both for what and by the beat of which Jayne Cortez writes. “Is there anyone finer today   olé    okay,” she writes in one of her most well known poems, “I See Chano Pozo,” published in Firespitter (1982) and set to music on her album There It Is in 1982. The poem figures moment of passionate identification the poet herself had upon seeing the Cuban jazz percussionist perform live—an identification of musical-aesthetic comradery, as well as an identification of a shared cultural tradition:

Oye

I’m in the presence of ancestor 

                                         Chano Pozo

Chano connector of two worlds

You go and celebrate again with 

                                          the companeros in Santiago

and tell us about it

…

You go to Angola

and tell us about it

You go to Calabar 

and tell us about it

Critic Aldon Lynn Nielsen, in his essay “Capillary Currents: Jayne Cortez,” described the poem as taking place “at the nexus of prefigured and postproduced poetic history, and displaces it.” And it’s visible here on the page, though divorced from its incantatory effect on the recording, Cortez’s syllables step, backstep, and hop over traditional lyric boundedness with projective force. New revolutionary utterances of Black Power required new revolutionary form, and not just form, but, as Charles Olson wrote, a new “stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance towards the reality of a poem itself.” It is not only her stance toward, but her dogged, avowed belief in reality, that makes her poems political. Once the poet herself establishes a firm position in the world, the composition of poetry takes on a documentary function, as in “In A Stream of Ink:”

  So many events
so many blunted instruments scraping
into the rhythm of the moment
  of so much diversity
in a stream of ink

It is known, but too infrequently acknowledged, how dedicated Black poets of that era were to the innovative (and, it should be said, jazz inspired) poetics of Charles Olson, whose essay “Projective Verse,” had been republished by Baraka’s own Totem Press in 1959. Olson’s words granted permission to practice a poetry outside of traditional institutions, and to practice poetry with one’s body. Olson can be credited with igniting the mature work of Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Robert Creeley, among others, and though those three are considered inheritors of Olson’s charge toward the incorporation of the breath-rhythm into the composition process, addressing the whole page as compositional-field, suped-up syllabic attention, and capturing affect in the instant, the radical Black poets of that same era inherited it just as intensely, and in many cases, took it beyond. For one, the poem should not only be a record of the poet’s “breath,” as Olson pleaded—not simply the end point of a recorded utterance, but the beginning of a larger sonic relationship, between speaker, listener, and performer. In Cortez’s own theoretical writing, that is, breath is not enough; there is music in the sounds of words. “The sounds of words and languages are / an important part of my poetic expression,” she writes in “Find Your Own Voice and Use It / Use Your Own Voice and Find It,” a keynote talking-poem she gave in 2011:

Out of sound comes the image or
set of images, and that is the poem which
becomes the center post for encounters
the creative point for departures & the melodic
impulse for players of musical instruments.

Thus, the caesura present in poems like the late career  “Dialogue on Violence:” 

It’s that direct   indirect

Productive   reproductive

Amateur   anonymous

Insidious   political

Or in the more familiar ‘composition-by-field’ techniques present in poems like “What Do They Care:” 

They are not concerned about the future
because killers have no future
It’s about the oil,
the pipeline,
& the road to the docks

The white spaces are not simply the negative space of inscription, pregnant with an illegible meaning all its own, but, like an accompaniment’s half of a musical score, a space pregnant with a legibility in waiting, a sonic phrase—whether breath, chord, or horned howl—which the poem invites rather than resists. Speaking of “I See Chano Pozo,” she writes, “The poem represents moments of transitions… / the sound of everything coming together & turned into / a poetry & music collaboration” (“Find Your Voice”). Claiming artistic heritage from Langston Hughes through Gwendolyn Brooks, too, the poems can undoubtedly be said to swing, a word rarely used anymore to describe poetry. But in the language of early African American aesthetic innovation, it signified a breaking of the sonic rules, thrumming to the beat of a distinct subcultural drum. For Cortez, that poetry involved reading constituted only the first part of the process—again, like Coleman’s song, it’s an invitation to dance, and the reader must dance. 

Cortez would outlive and outplay Coleman, inflecting jazz yet anew as a pioneer of poetic performance, backed by her band, The Firespitters, for which their son, Denardo Coleman, played drums. Their marriage would end in 1964, and, in her own words, “Poetry came back to me.” She would subsequently found the Watts Repertory Theater, in sequence with Black Arts movement centers around the country, even founding her own poetry press, Bola Press, publishing her own work as well as the work of radical Black poets in the US and abroad. The political consciousness among Black artists of that time spread wide, throughout all disciplines and genres. Though alliances would shift, like many of her nationalist compatriots, Cortez believed in a single unifying “us” worthy of Chano Pozo’s mystical, globe-trotting telling, the existence—or rather the persistence—of a global Black power of resistance. Pan-African at the outset, Pozo’s playing not only unifies, but accelerates the diasporic wielding of knowledge: 

You’re the one who made Mpebi into
an activated slasher of lies

You’re the one who made Donno into
an armpit of flammable explosives

You’re the one who made Obonu into
a circle of signifying snakes

It would be years after Coleman’s release of “Jayne” that Cortez would link up (both local and at a distance) with the community of diasporic motivation, a set of bombasts in Harlem—that spectral, timeless plain of moody adventure—poets who would come to be called poets of the Black Arts Movement, such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Ishmael Reed, Nikki Giovanni, and Audre Lorde. There, they would do to the literary language what, already by then, jazz legends had been doing to the language of America’s first homegrown folk tradition, the blues. It’s difficult to imagine now the degree to which the conceptual drive of innovation-as-revolt, in that era so tirelessly held up as a national cultural revolution, had been shared between its visual artists (Benny Andrews, Faith Ringgold), musicians and composers (Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra), and writers (see the non-exhaustive list above), all African American innovators who contributed to the definitional parameters of the “New Black Aesthetic,” as it was coined by the movement’s homegrown literary critic, Addison Gayle Jr. 

If it feels like I’ve been throwing a lot of names at you, you’re right. The penchant to name-drop when speaking about the early Black Arts Movement—the same impulse behind every buzz-killing white jazz superfan to make even the slightest mention of the musical art into a trivia session—is inescapable, but what else is one to do when confronted with an army of the high-ranking aesthetic pioneers? It’s also a way of signifying, as Cortez often did, the strength of a greater movement, for which her poems act as social documents. It’s not just the present which poems can document, however, but the past. Adhering to Muriel Rukeyser’s famous dictum of poetry which “can extend the document,” Cortez’s work takes the historical record to task and, in poetry, reassesses the meaning of historical pain. 

In Fragments, from 1994, Cortez achieves unmatched lyrical and historical concision. Here, fragments are figured as a distinctly textual phenomenon, whereas fragmentation is dependent upon the material result of material having been worked upon or disfigured, whether by time or other more human violences. These poems originally accompanied photographs of drawings and sculptures from artist Melvin Edwards’s “Lynch Fragment” series. Edward’s sculptures were themselves fragmentary conglomerates of various steel components—chain-link, shackles, binders, sharp objects—recalling the implements of African slave heritage as well as expressive of that heritage’s implosive relation to national identity. Cortez locates a depth in these pieces which bears upon the meaning of such implements of torture as objects—like those who were enslaved—whose essential qualities bent and broke not simply under the weight of conscience, but the language that was used in order to justify that conscience’s wane. The book begins as if amid conversation, or perhaps more pertinently, the point at which a conversation is taken up again, past its brink:

also the ironess of iron
the metaphorical behavior of tools
horseshoehammerheadaxes
plus the language of pumps & vises
& the high carbon ghost from Tijuca 

(“Also”)

The book constitutes Cortez’s most sustained ekphrasis of visual art, which propels to further innovate her poetics. Dropping the “n” in “ironess,” for example, seems to combine essential quality (“ironness”) with royalty (as in “duchess” or “baroness”), and thus by proximity, comments upon the pernicious constructedness—most often at the expense of those who are said to lack essential qualities—of material value. In the stretched legibility of the fragment’s third line, value equated with the meaning of words is complicated by the morphematic possibilities of parsing it as a reader. Looking at it for more than a few seconds, brings associations to mind of horses, sharks, headaches, and misplaced shoes. Ruminating on those choices, as an active participant in the meaning-making of the line, we get the sense that there are ethical implications here, as well, which, from whatever vantage of historical identity we may be said to occupy, determine the immediate threat of these illusory objects to our bodily constitution. 

History is decided by the vigilant acknowledgment of our present entanglement with it. This might be the most salient lesson Cortez’s poems teach us, whether she articulates it through the re-cyclical logic of jazz or the liberating critical potential of the poetic treatment of words. “We are two bones / in the same clamp,” the fragment “We Are” reads, “two cults hanging from / the same tree.” In order to create anew, one must harbor a transhistorical attention, and as much as we are tempted to pare away, we must “cult”-ivate what has been planted before us in order ascribe newer meaning to it in the context of freedom. Cult of national history (and its decisive forgetting), cult of Black consciousness (always in need of renewal), cult of the Black body enslaved: in our own cultivation of knowledge regarding history, such work must be done to untangle our entanglements. 

What does it take to write political poetry? Rarely can one stomach the fact that to write political entails that you live political, as Cortez certainly did. To riff the words of her fellow performance poet Gil Scott-Heron, the revolution will not be digestible. That is why her poetry spits. The revolutionary spirit must have recourse to some form of reification, so why not the total sinus-strippage of the bardic voice cleansed with the pain that comes from disavowing power? Jayne Cortez will not meet you where you are. Most likely, you’ve been asleep at the wheel: 

We were napping while they were mapping
And we are still napping, rapping & capping while
they are trapping, gapping & mapping

(“Samory Toure”)

By her example, one is able to renewably articulate where the hell we need to go when we wake up.