Harryette Mullen and the Contemporary Jazz Voice

Abstract

That much African American poetry, if not American poetry in general, from the mid- twentieth century onwards bears a deep debt to jazz need almost go without saying. Vari- ously incarnated as a set of recognizable names, a vocabulary of sonic, orthographical, or compositional effects, even as an implicit influence appearing in many poets' descriptions of their work, jazz has provided many African American poems the means for exploring and/or foregrounding their African American-ness. 1 It is often in this poetry that jazz's historical status as African American cultural production dovetails with the music's formal and technical features—its improvisatory aesthetic, for example, or the fact that jazz's history comprises both a body of specific sounds and the ways those sounds have come to bespeak (or not) African American culture as a whole—in ways that open up sizable questions about textuality and its relation to a host of larger phenomenological and/or social experiences. While the development of "jazz poetry" proper perhaps reached its prominence in the period spanning roughly the 1950s to the 1970s (a period loosely mirroring post-bebop jazz's heyday), we still witness today a wealth of creative poets producing jazz-inspired projects. The difference between the last generation of jazz-influenced poets and the more contemporary one, however, is significant: while today's poets still often gain poetic inspi- ration from music created forty (or more) years ago, in the intervening years other strands of experimentalism have slowly but deeply begun to inflect American poetic practices, arguably leading those poets still interested in writing jazz-inspired poetry to reassess some relatively well-entrenched conceptual assumptions. The issue, as I read it, is one of voice: while a jazz performance privileges the revelation of individual voice, "voice" here understood as the physically resonant sonic productions of a (generally black) body pres- ent in time and space, numerous strands of experimental poetics—L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Oulipo-group poetry, most prominently—have worked to deeply trouble both the assumed coherence of their poems' material sources and the intentional relationship between corporeal author and produced artwork. Indeed, this latter understanding of voice (which might be read as extending an essentially modernist project 2 ) has proven so influential that many contemporary literary critics are likely to gaze with suspicion on any poem that textually asserts itself as the literal voice of its flesh-and-blood author, viewing such a claim as naive at best, reactionary at worst. For those of us interested in poetry's formal properties, this conundrum offers an interesting point of observation. For to take stock of this second idea of voice is to ask some difficult questions of the first: is something like an authentic "jazz poetry" even