Technicolor Women

Page 6 American Book Review Caustic time signatures sean singer What is jazz poetry, and what’s the best way to read it? Is it analogous to listening to jazz? Is it a representation of music using language? Is it merely descriptive ? Is it like dancing about architecture? Jayne Cortez’s The Beautiful Book is a good example of the potency and limitation of jazz-related poems. The Beautiful Book demonstrates Cortez’s manipulation of language to convey rhythm, force, and political action. The book presents a prism of concerns in six sections, ranging from jazz-related poems to political invectives to some jewel-like miniature portraits of everyday objects. It’s a powerful and energetic book, but it’s similar to her previous work, which can sometimes feel like a one-note samba. The first section is the strongest and most interesting, and the third is the weakest, least interesting “Poetic Encounters,” the first section, wonderfully articulates jazz as both a musical form and a cultural phenomenon. Cortez’s style uses open forms without punctuation that apply tension on the line. This pressure, which derives mainly from enjambment , is combined with powerful diction, and a steady rhythmic pulse. The pressure applied to the lines grants the authority to convince the reader that Cortez’s various voices are authentic. Her jazz-related work is the most authoritative . She says, for example, in “Coleman Hawkins,” that, beneath those African Creole soul messages of Sidney Bechet beneath the old time spirit & meditated voyages of John Coltrane and the cosmic rays of Charlie Parker sits the 20th century, modern art and Coleman Hawkins. Notice that Cortez’s attention to measure means a selection of the ampersand versus the word “and” depending on how long a beat she requires. She also tells us that Hawkins was a catalyst for three generations of saxophone styles: Bechet, Parker, and Coltrane. The most effective poem in this section is “Samory Toure,” a monologue in the voice of the founder of theWassoulou Empire, an Islamic military state that resisted French rule in West Africa in the nineteenth century. Like Chinua Achebe’s description in Things Fall Apart (1958) of the destruction of the Igbo via colonialism, this poem economically describes the same process: “We were napping while they were mapping / And we are still napping, rapping & capping while / they are trapping, gapping & mapping.” The second section, “Embarcadero,” further delves into African diaspora politics and language in poems about Haiti, the Darfur genocide, and post-Katrina New Orleans. The poems often create rhythmic layers that climax in their final stanzas, in a thrilling way which somehow melds her linguistic pyrotechnics with the political statements she is making: I’m speaking of New Orleans of deportation of belching bulldozers of poisonous snakes of bruised bodies of instability and madness mechanism of indifference and process of elimination I’m talking about transformation about death re-entering life with Bonne chance, bon ton roulé, bonjour & bonne vie in New Orleans, bon. Cortez creates caustic poems that have a fluid, verbal musculature. In this last stanza from “TalkingAbout New Orleans ,” she plays on the French word for “good,” and this works ironically to transform our post-Katrina understanding of New Orleans as if the words themselves were the bodies she mourns. The poems in the middle sections lack the authority and forcefulness of the rest of the book. “I Am New York City 2,” for instance, takes the 9/11 terrorist attacks as its setting, in an attempt to connect with the disaster in a Whitmanesque way: It’s 9/11/01 & I have been wounded in the lower Manhattan of my abdomen Now I am the one with the most wreckage. The speaker here lacks the authority needed to sway the reader because the details are wrong. Writing about this catastrophe is tempting because a writer feels she should have something to say about it, yet typically what’s said is less interesting than having witnessed it when it occurred. Perhaps not enough time has passed between then and now to allow the detritus of what 9/11 means to filter into the writerly consciousness. Thirty years passed, for example, between the end of...