Sampling Kimberly Benston's 'Coltrane Poem'

Authors

  • Claudine Raynaud Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v3i1.87

Keywords:

John Coltrane, African American Poetry, Jazz Music, Black Arts Movement, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, Michael Harper

Abstract

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, John Coltrane became a major African American cultural icon whose magisterial 1964 A Love Supreme acted as a model for black artists infused with the spirit of the Black Arts Movement. In his study of black modernism, Performing Blackness (2000), literary critic Kimberly Benston defines the numerous poems dedicated to the musician as a distinct genre, that of the ‘Coltrane Poem.’ A close reading of three major texts by Jane Cortez, Sonia Sanchez and Michael Harper illustrates how the poetry of the black aesthetics raises jazz music to the rank of the ultimate medium of interrogation, transgression and innovation that poetry itself in turn incarnates. After Coltrane’s disappearance in 1967, black poets construct an elegiac mode by revisiting the myth of Black Orpheus from dismemberment to resurrection. Poetry is performance, immediacy, and presence, to the point of letting the voice alone bear the burden of a vanishing text. The violent political context of the sixties, the avant-garde desire to disrupt barriers between music and words and the impact of Coltrane’s conversion in 1957, account for the revolutionary character of these texts. ‘Coltrane’ is not the ‘subject’ of a meditation. His radically new approach to jazz and his genius for improvisation–he also wrote poems that he incorporated into his music–inhabit a questioning of the form itself and of the nature of art as a medium, often at the peril of the word and at the risk of meaning. Elegy and eulogy are as many fighting modes on the battlefield of sound and voice, faced with death, chaos and silence, but full with the promise of transcendence.

Author Biography

  • Claudine Raynaud, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier

    Professor of English and American Studies Dpt of English Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier

References

Benston, Kimberly (1985) ‘I yam what I am: Naming and Unnaming in Afro-American Literature’. Black America Literature Forum 16.1: 3–11. Expanded version reprinted in Black Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 121–47. New York: Methuen.

——(2000) Performing Blackness: Enactments of African American Modernism. London and New York: Routledge.

Collins, Lisa G., and Margo Natalie Crawford (2006) New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, with an afterword by Houston A. Baker, Jr. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.

Cortez, Jayne (1969) Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man Wares. New York: Phrase Text.

Delorme, Michel, and Claude Lénissois (1965) ‘Coltrane, vedette d’Antibes’. Jazz Hot 212 (September): 5–6.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1997 [1940]) Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward the Autobiography of a Race Concept. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.

Ellison, Ralph (1995 [1947]) Invisible Man. New York: Random House.

——(2003) ‘On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz’. In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, 256–66. New York: The Modern Library.

Feinstein, Sascha (1997) Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (1985) ‘Writing “Race” and the Difference it Makes’. Critical Inquiry 1 (Autumn): 1–21.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and Nelly McKay, eds. (1997) Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co.

Harper, Michael S. (1985) Dear John, Dear Coltrane: Poems by Michael S. Harper. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Henderson, Stephen (1973) Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow.

Melhem. D. H. (1990) Heroism in the New Black African Poetry: Introductions and Interviews. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Morrison, Toni (1992) Jazz. New York: Albert Knopf.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn (1997) Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Porter, Lewis (1988) John Coltrane: His Life, His Music. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Randall, Dudley, and Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, eds. (1969) For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X. Detroit: Broadside Press.

Ron Karenga, Maulana. ‘On Black Art’. http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/on_ black_art.htm (accessed 16 February 2009).

Sanders, Marilyn Mobley (1993) ‘Narrative Dilemma: Jadine as Cultural Orphan in Tar Baby’. In Toni Morrison, Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah, 284–92. New York: Amistad.

Published

2010-04-12

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Raynaud, C. (2010). Sampling Kimberly Benston’s ’Coltrane Poem’. Jazz Research Journal, 3(1), 87-103. https://doi.org/10.1558/jazz.v3i1.87