Harryette Mullen and the Contemporary Jazz Voice

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. Variously 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 inspiration 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 present 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 project²) 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 naïve 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 possible, for example, within the experimental mode that privileges the playful detachment of poem-as-object from author-as-corporeal-entity? If contemporary experimental poetry has absorbed the post-structuralist lessons by which racial categories reflect not a pre-given materiality but an ongoing reinscription of human corporeality,³ can its African American branch still do justice to the concrete, lived experiences of its producers? If foregrounding a relation to jazz has been the means by which many African American poems have asserted their identities precisely as African American, can jazz itself—"the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz," according to Sonny Rollins (qtd. in "All About Jazz")—assimilate these experimentalisms without something essential being renounced?

It is with these questions in mind that I turn to the work of Harryette Mullen, a poet whose intelligence and originality well justify her growing prestige in the American poetry world. In particular, this paper will attempt to read a number of poems from Mullen's 2002 collection Sleeping with the Dictionary as intimations of what a contemporary jazz voice—one mobilizing the experimental playfulness of these recent poetic innovations while nonetheless unquestionably understanding itself as upholding the jazz tradition—might look (or sound) like. In so doing it examines the way Mullen understands her poetry as a form of...