Conductivities of Composition

AMQgI1 Review Levy continuedfrom previous page - - --------------separation of aesthetics and social ethics. Both men want to possess fully the poetry they read, to examine the relationships between black and white, ink and paper, territorial establishment and maintenance. Such relationships determine how people use their environments. Reading, seen in this light, is like lovemaking—a sensuous connection with matter is necessary to all literary understanding, regardless of how dematerialized, ruptured, or abstracted— and Atkins's verse is rife with each of these latter qualities . Nielsen observes that: forAtkins meaning serves technique, and meaning is one technique. Perhaps not since Edgar Allan Poe has American poetry seen a writer so strongly committed to the production of effect.... [This] has also served to place him well outside the dominant modes even ofthe outsiders and innovators of American postmodernity. As a black man working independently. . . [contesting] the directions of William Carlos Williams, the Objectivists, and much of the Black Mountain School, Atkins has been multiply obscured by the workings of recent literary history. Identifying the importance of Atkins's work in this way focuses upon the break in African American literary and musical culture as the bridgework of African American innovation. Nielsen defines this innovation as improvisational— a plurality of"reals" in a world moving into a polyphrenic cultural space of continuous transformation. As they say in the DJ world, it's all in the mix. Further, the idea of improvisation that Nielsen develops in his readings ofhis five subjects is incompatible with the idea of relating literary production, or that of any other art medium, to "spontaneity," a concept most readily linked to the lyric and its valuation ofself-expression predicated on the notion ofthe unitary, intending subject. Rather, the emphasis is on doing research—of"digging," as DJs put it, both on the possibilities ofan art form and on the possibilities of subjectivity. In such an evolving model, one discovers the desire for that which has not yet, and may indeed never, arrive— and which itself can be read as the basis for an idea of postmodernity: a figurative participation between writer and reader, a recollection forwards. The improvisational poetics Nielsen maps in his examination ofeach writer, from Atkins to Cortez, is constructivist, not at all spontaneist—a "fact" that all great improvisers, pre-Charlie Parker to post-Anthony Braxton, have understood. Nielsen argues brilliantly that we havepaid (and continue topay) too much in every conceivable way for having not attended to thesefive authors, and their improvisations. In his preface to Integral Music, Nielsen indicates that the order of the chapters was determined chronologically based upon theircomposition. There is another integral idea that links these chapters and each of these five authors to one another: Nielsen has theorized at least five radically innovative epistemologies, yet each of these writers uses improvisational techniques and modes of reasoning that, taken together, might well transform how we read and teach, and, in particular, how we read what we've taught our students to write. Further, Nielsen convincingly argues that the quintessential American art form is improvisational —to take a fifteen-second break and extend it into a fifteen-to-twenty minute jam. For Nielsen, improvisation is the integral modernist and postmodernist American contribution to international trends in music, poetry, and philosophy, and the works of the five authors under consideration are exemplary models of the corresponding African American legacy, the core repository of improvisational technique. Underwriting Nielsen's scholarship, as I understand him, is a modulated sense of anger at the institutional erasure of this legacy— anger at the fact that it has been inadequately appreciated, that it has gone largely unrecognized. Instead, as Julie Patton—another Clevelander postmodernist African American poet—has described the situation with regard to Atkins's oeuvre, it's much as if this work has been written in "disappearing ink," and "[blookended by volumes of a more official silence." Nielsen has, in this book, effectively given notice to that official silence. Nielsen's emphasis, brilliantly argued throughout , is that we have paid (and continue to pay) too much in every conceivable way for having not attended to these five authors, and their improvisations , with compassion, creativity, empathy, and intelligence. Integral...