Content area
Full Text
1
As what always seems to happen these days when someone important to me dies, in my grief, I attempt to find profundity in the life of the departed.
Sometimes, I have to reach. This time, it wasn't hard. The poetry of the late Jayne Cortez was undeniably important to me.
Some call her a "political" poet. I would argue that the term "political poetry" has been conflated with "African American poetry" in order to marginalize the anguish or outrage of black bodies/psyches, and those black poets who want to talk in transparent ways about how their black bodies/ psyches have been assaulted. To me, African Americans most decidedly are not "political" in its original sense, meaning "the form, organization, or administration of a state." African Americans never have had any power when it comes to "the state."
Instead, I like to think of Cortez as a writer of "revolutionary" poems, and one that, according to the scholar Jerry Ward, Jr., "exploited the compelling dimensions of sound" from the beginning of her career. With her first book of poetry, Pisstained Stairs and the Monkey Mans Wares (Phrase Text, 1969), and her first poetry recording, Celebrations and Solitudes: The Poetry of Jayne Cortez & Richard Davis, Bassist (Strata-East, 1974), she declared herself as a poet interested in the nexus of powerful language and the human. Those qualities distinguish her work as extraordinary, but even more so in a current Contemporary American Poetry atmosphere that many times, sacrifices reader accessibility and "political" urgency for internal, lyric knowledge. Later generations of poets should understand that it is possible to write a good, "political" poem that non-poets can understand, because a poet like Cortez proved it first.
As with many black woman poets, I write the poems made directly possible by poets like Cortez. This is not my speaking through the hyperbole of grief. This is the truth: I'm someone who speaks openly in my work about being a rape and child molestation survivor; I couldn't do that if Cortez hadn't written her poem "Rape," published in Firespitter (Bola Press, 1982). And I'm a blues poet who started out as a performance poet; Jayne Cortez used blues utterance combined with jazz improvisation on stage, accompanied by live musicians with...