Crackpots on the Roof

Abstract

America! HeviEW Jones continuedfrom previous page like the wind. The poem's self-reflexivity does not indulge solipsism . Instead, its iconographie focus on the "I" as alternately arrow, plunger, bird, and tree, and its marking the lyric "I" and reader's "eye" as "no sanctuary," signal an engagement in the poem's materiality as a shifting linguistic process. It also anticipates the language-based work of the contemporary African American poet Ruth Ellen Kocher. Kocher's recent poem "Issues Involving Interpretation " is replete with imaged text and imagined subtext that echoes Jordan's: The word has no life of its own despite what the writer tells you. Behind the sword is no quivering hand worn into life's hilt, no arm swaying the wind in dying movement. There is only the word, sword. Outside, the trees live without language And tip toward whatever sun manages. . . . But there is no tree in this poem, only The word, tree. There is no speaker who Entreats you to imagine the tree standing.... Delineating the apparent associations between Jordan 's and Kocher's verses highlights another strength of Every Goodbye Ain't Gone's diverse selections. As the editors assert, its promise rests as much in its "break from established disciplinary modes, a break from regnant pecking orders, a break through," as it lies in the connectivity it intimates between current African American artists' creative ventures and earlier modes of linguistic and poetic innovation. Such links to our contemporary literary moment help make the book fruitful for both the lay and academic reader, for the aficionado of African American literature and the specialist in the field. It enables the editors to reach their stated aim, to "shift our historical comprehension of African American poetry in recentdecades and our anticipations ofcritical comprehensions to come." For instance, Percy Johnston's "Lexington Avenue Express" recalls, through its transitory omnipotence and outreach, a Whitmanian past pushed through the urban and urbane present, as the speaker faces "The patriarch of every jukebox" and announces, "I / Become the Lexington Avenue Express; I walk through / Myself even as I stop at every local station from Woodlawn to 125th." Contemporary readers may appreciate the typographically stylized signatures by contributor Rusell Atkins's concretist "the L__ L L" with its "Un _______/ ouNOUN/ /" as a literary historical context for Harris's opening composition in "Drag": "/-?/-?/-?/- /--." No poet or critic has the last word on what constitutes a black aesthetic. Every Goodbye Ain't Gone contains nearly two hundred poems by thirty-eight contributors who published, according to the editors, "avant-garde, black poetics from the decades following the Second World War." The volume's heft seems lightened only by the comparatively slim ratio of women poets included , which the editors point out is double that of "the most broadly influential anthology representing the Black Arts Movement," LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal's Black Fire (1968). Some ofthe gender disproportion reflects, we learn, "the difficulty in securing poems from all of the potential contributors [they] approached." "Still," they hasten to emphasize, It is important to recognize that the proportions of male and female contributors in published collections during the time period we here survey was typified by the numbers we see in Black Fire. Surely this is not to say that many more women artists weren't actively pursuing the more adventurous avenues of poetic composition . . . . Rather, it is a sign of the barriers that still existed in a literary world dominated by men. One of the most important things we can do today is to recognize the importance ofthose such as Jayne Cortez, Elouise Loftin, Gloria Tropp, and June Jordan who broke a path for the many women who were to come after them, the remarkable next generation ofwomen artists whose work will reappear in the next installment of this [anthology] project. Judging by the quality of this meticulously researched anthology — in once popular books that have long been out of print, in journals and magazines that are now archival treasures, in library special collections catalogues and private authors's papers—Nielsen and Ramey's current offering will likely garner a diverse readership's anticipation of their future project. To paraphrase the avant...