In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Black Sounds and Phonographic Poetry
  • Jessica E. Teague (bio)
Anthony Reed, Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. xii + 268 pp. $99.95; $26.96 paper.

In 2021, Motown Records announced that it would be relaunching its short-lived Black Forum sub-label, rereleasing all of its 1970s pressings, and offering what they call “a platform to a new generation of writers, thinkers and poets.” Between 1970 and 1973, Motown’s Black Forum released overtly political spoken-word recordings by black activists and poets, but how many listeners today would remember? Although the roster of recordings included Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Elaine Brown, Langston Hughes and Margaret Danner, and Amiri Baraka, the label lasted only three years and for decades the records remained out of print. The announcement, made by Motown’s first female President, Ethiopia Habtemariam, seemed to be an attempt by Motown to reassert its relevance and rethink its past: “As we navigate our way through unprecedented times, racial and social tensions are at a high. We felt an urgent need to reactivate Black Forum in order to provide information alongside inspiration.”1 Like many cultural platforms, Motown was responding to the rising tide of public outrage and protest against police murders of black citizens. But why the return to the recorded poetry and spoken-word aesthetics of the [End Page 590] early 1970s? To date, the “platform for a new generation” has manifested only as a spoken-word competition called “Motown Mic,” which is operated by the Motown Museum—it remains to be seen whether the new Black Forum will depart in meaningful ways from its roots.

For Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production, the backward glance at the 1970s is to be expected. “Periods of political and aesthetic flux,” he writes,

tend to see an upsurge of phonographic poetry. Artists reach back to a prior generation’s aesthetic and discursive modes. In the contemporary, this means returning to a Black Arts era aesthetic and political ethos, including its implicit assumption that communities must be built, and that black sound—poetry, music, theatricality—is a means of building it.

(4–5)

Although Reed does not write about Black Forum directly, Sound-works offers new ways to hear the continued engagements between black poetry and recorded sound.

The arrival of Reed’s book has been much anticipated. His first book, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Experimental Writing (Johns Hopkins UP), was the winner of the 2016 William Sanders Scarborough Prize of the Modern Language Association. That book also dealt with experimental black poetics, but focused on the late twentieth century. His latest effort still has a solid foothold in the contemporary, but takes a step back historically to examine poetry recordings (or “phonopoems”) made during the 1950s–1970s with an emphasis on collaboration between black poets and musicians (as well as the works of musician-poets). And yet, to describe the historical frame of the book in this way perhaps does a disservice to how Reed insists on a “historical present” occasioned by recordings, which allow us to listen repeatedly and across time. The individual chapters highlight figures such as Archie Shepp and Matana Roberts, Langston Hughes and Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka and the New York Art Quartet, Cecil Taylor and Jeanne Lee, and Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters. Although Soundworks is not a sequel to Freedom Time, it extends and develops some of the most pressing theoretical gestures of Reed’s earlier work, including his radical re-theorization of textuality and his insistence on the important social [End Page 591] and political work of black experimental poetics for imagining new ways of being in the world. However, in turning attention to recordings, rather than print, Soundworks usefully reframes our mediated approach to midcentury poetics

In addressing “phonographic poetry,” Reed’s book is situated among a rich body of black sound studies scholarship. Perhaps the most important precursor is Alexander G. Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke UP, 2005), which examined how a wide range of black writers, filmmakers, musicians, and artists approached sound technology in their works. Like...

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