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  • Swing and Swagger
  • Nikki Paley Cox (bio)
Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems
James Baldwin
Beacon Press
www.beacon.org/Default.aspx
120 Pages; Print, $16.00

When I was a junior in college in New York City, my English professor and the 60-year old woman who embodied The City to me, looked me dead in the eye and said, “What do you mean you haven’t read James Baldwin? Here, take this. Read it this instant.” She handed me a copy of Another Country (1962), and she wasn’t kidding. “Go,” she instructed, pointing me out of her office. Embarrassed, the way most undergraduates are when they have to admit they haven’t read everything their professors have, I thanked her and left awkwardly. I retreated to my dorm room, opened the novel, and didn’t leave until I finished it. New York and I were never the same.

This year marks what would be James Baldwin’s ninetieth birthday, and Beacon Press has published a beautiful and necessary collection of Baldwin’s poetry, Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems. It includes all nineteen poems from his original 1983 collection, Jimmy’s Blues, and six poems from his limited-edition 1989 volume, Gypsy, of which only 325 copies were ever printed.

Everyone should read and own this book, not just because he is, as Nikky Finney writes in her introduction to the collection, “the most salient, sublime, and consequential American writer of the twentieth century,” which is difficult to disagree with, but simply because these poems do what poems are supposed to do: they tell the truth. They shout and blaze and glint and sing the truth of us. They tell it straight. They are sexy and dangerous and difficult to keep up with. In the best ways possible, Baldwin’s poems wear. you. out.

Jimmy’s Blues begins with “Staggerlee wonders,” a four-part, 16-page poem that sets the tone, scope, and perspective for the collection. Some background: Stagger Lee was a real man, Lee Shelton, of ill-repute, who murdered Billy Lyons, a possible political and business rival, in 1895, in a St. Louis saloon. Reportedly, he killed Lyons because Lyons took his Stetson hat. Shelton’s crime became part of American folklore, and everyone from Ma Rainey to the Grateful Dead to Amy Winehouse has recorded some version of the now-famous murder ballad, “Stagger Lee.”

Depending on how much context one chooses to include in telling Stagger Lee’s story – he was a pimp, a loner, a businessman, a murderer, a victim – his character becomes more or less complex and sympathetic, like any American anti-hero, which makes his a captivating voice to explain, “the pink and alabaster pragmatists”:

the gentle, wide-eyed, cheerful ladies, and their men, nostalgic for the noble cause of Vietnam, nostalgic for noble causes, aching, nobly, to wade through the blood of savages–

Staggerlee’s voice is bold, even brazen, and unflinching. He leaves nothing unsaid, guiding us through global politics, humanitarian crimes, theological arguments, and literary allusions. The poem begins by harshly criticizing white America’s motives for foreign policy, moves on to comparing the African-American experience to Plato’s cave and its required self-reflection, continues to an understanding of the reality of African-American separateness, and finishes by abstracting Staggerlee’s vision into biblical and metaphorical language. The poem ends thunderously:

and we tried to make you hear life in our song but now it matters not at all to me whether you know what I am talking about–or not: I know why we are not blinded by your brightness, are able to see you, who cannot see us. I know why we are still here.

Godspeed. The niggers are calculating, from day to day, life everlasting, and wish you well: but decline to imitate the Son of Morning, and rule in Hell.

Baldwin weaves together politics, stories, abstractions, philosophers, and canonized poets in musical, even rhetorical verse. He is our national witness, and the poem, in Staggerlee’s voice, is his testimony. Both compressed and epic, it would not be an overstatement to call the poem an American masterpiece.

And that’s...

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