Hughes/Olson: Whose Music? Whose Era?

American Literature Benjamin R. Lempert Hughes/Olson: Whose Music? Whose Era? If Charlie Parker could read the thousands of poems written in his honor, would he be delighted enough by the sheer volume to overlook the weakness of the verse itself?—Sascha Feinstein, “Yusef Komunyakaa’s ‘Testimony’ and the Humanity of Charlie Parker” (2005) T aking up the question of poetry’s musicality is always a tenuous proposition. We all know that poetry is musical. But how so? To the question “In what does poetry’s musicality lie?” (sound? structure? igure? visuality?) there are nearly as many answers as there are poems. Compounding the dificulty is the fact that poetry’s music is also poetry’s music, and as such evinces parts that are always clearly more than musical, or even not musical. Of what this “more” or “not” consists, we remain similarly unsettled. Finally, there remains the issue that “music” in this conversation is a resolutely historical phenomenon, that to speak of poetry’s music is inevitably to acknowledge “music” as a speciic deinition of music, or a speciic sense of what counts as music. And even when that music is named directly—in this essay, it is jazz, particularly the “bebop” jazz developed in the 1940s by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, and their collaborators—how that music functions poetically, what “musicality” means relative to “music,” can remain frustratingly equivocal. To accept Mallarme’s famous quip, “poems are not made out of ideas; they’re made out of words,” is to concede that the music of words is not homologous with the music of musical sound, and that this nonidentity often embraces multiple stations of mediation and/or American Literature, Volume 87, Number 2, June 2015 DOI 10.1215/00029831-2886139 © 2015 by Duke University Press Published by Duke University Press American Literature 304 American Literature translation, be they material, cultural, or conceptual (quoted in Mason and Nims 2006, 121). While this essay cannot hope to resolve the question of musicality in toto, it does aim to clarify some recent instantiations of the problem. In particular, it isolates two poles through which to read a particularly musical moment of US aesthetics. This moment is that of postwar US poetry, and these poles are the 1950s work of Langston Hughes— his long sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred—and the poetry and poetics of Black Mountain pioneer Charles Olson. Speciically, I read Hughes and Olson as inaugurating two foundational responses to a pivotal artistic achievement of the twentieth century: the “bebop” jazz of Parker, Gillespie, and their contemporaries, a revolutionary music whose impact has been as lasting as it has been pervasive.1 How pervasive? Well, the Beats, Black Arts, the New York School, Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Umbra group, LANGUAGE poetry: all legitimately claim bebop as artistic or cultural template. So why Hughes and Olson? Because, this essay will argue, it is Hughes and Olson—individually and together—who give us the most powerful conceptual model(s) for thinking about bebop as a properly poetic phenomenon. Put together, the two help articulate a loose theory of what one could call “nonmimetic musical representation”: a jazz-based poetics that dispenses with (or at least complicates) the widespread assumption that poetry’s musicality lies in the fact that it, like music, develops sounds over time. A quick survey: by now a familiar designation, “jazz poetry” as a category tends to aggregate into a number of standard types. There are, for example, poems that adopt what one might call an “imitative” model, ostensibly replicating in print the experience of listening to actual music. Of these, scat poems are the most recognizable, but not the only, example (“a hubbalubba drum, hellofa biff-bam hallabaloo” reads a symptomatic line from Ray Bremser [1965]). There are poems that take the music as subject matter; the list here includes widely anthologized poems like Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” (1964) to the hundreds of “Charlie Parker poems” that Sascha Feinstein, editor of The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991), describes as employing “embarrassingly hagiographic . . . clichés . . . as well as a host of dreadful ornithological metaphors” (Feinstein 2005, 757). Finally, there are poems composed according to some version of “improvisation,” however considered. Distressingly, the bulk of these tend to endorse Allen Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 305 Ginsberg’s description of jazz as being “like a fountain of instantaneous inspiration that’s available to everybody. All you have to do is turn on the radio or put on a record or pick up an axe yourself and blow” (quoted in Yaffe 2006, 46). That Ginsberg’s account radically misinterprets the actual process of jazz improvisation, and in so doing sustains a wellentrenched version of racial primitivism, has not been lost on Ginsberg’s critics.2 Pace these models, Olson and Hughes distinguish themselves by taking “jazz” less as a speciic body of sounds than as a conceptual impetus, a provocation to rethink the very idea (and ideal) of poetry as a musical phenomenon. In so doing, their work allows bebop to provide poetry not only with new ways to sound, but new ways to mean, especially as that mode of meaning ties music to racial representation. Together, both poets help us make new sense of three phenomena: the way poetry relates to musical sounds external to it, the way poetry understands itself as a form of music, and the prospects for racial representation this reevaluation makes possible. Before digging in, a note on choices. Clearly, the list of poets with thoughtful and nuanced responses to bebop includes more than Hughes and Olson. Olson’s friend Robert Creeley, for example, remained a lifelong jazz fan, recording with musicians well into his seventies (in the 2000s). Creeley’s work, too—slow, pensive, often self-eliminating— offers an intriguing version of jazz poetics, granting the music a depth precluded by the hyperactive excesses more typical of “bebop poetry.”3 Or Clark Coolidge, a jazz drummer in addition to being a poet, whose work too spans multiple eras, providing, as Aldon Nielsen (1993, 94) describes, “a veritable taxonomy of improvisatory possibilities.” Bob Kaufman, the “black Rimbaud,” remains a crucially understudied igure of postwar poetry. David Meltzer, one of the irst white poets to read with jazz musicians, still creates work that expands bebop’s reservoir of prosodic possibility. A. B. Spellman’s poems usher bebop into later jazz-inspired moments. And so on. Given this, my focus on Hughes and Olson aims less to restrict poetic analysis than to provide some new tools. And while there are, arguably, reasons for not focusing on the poets just mentioned (briely: Creeley’s work to my mind better relects later developments in jazz, particularly Miles Davis’s music of the mid-1960s and early 1970s; Coolidge’s work is almost too varied to produce a consistent conceptual model; Kaufman and Metzger it a little too easily into the Beat idiom I Published by Duke University Press American Literature 306 American Literature am in part critiquing), I focus on Hughes and Olson because in large part I see these other poets as readable within—or, at least, fruitfully against—the conceptual models Hughes and Olson help articulate. Finally, astute readers will hear the echo in my title of Marjorie Perloff’s famous 1982 essay, “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” I quote Perloff not to arrogate to this paper either the scope or the depth of her analysis—her essay remains an enduring touchstone of twentiethcentury literary studies—but simply to pay homage to a reading that too operates by distinguishing two conceptual magnets around which a given aesthetic problem might be productively organized. I begin with Hughes. A Song Deferred: Langston Hughes and the Stakes of Poetic Imitation By 1951, Langston Hughes’s status as chief poetic chronicler of African American music had been long secured. Given Hughes’s ties to jazz, it seems inevitable in retrospect that when the turbulent sounds that came to be called “bebop” started radiating from uptown New York, its irst major poetic response would bear Hughes’s name. And in 1951, it did. This was Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, a sequence of ninety-one individual poems demonstrating stark differences in voice, sound, tone, and structure, but thematically linked to “form a diverse unity,” in Arnold Rampersad’s words (1989, 151). Given Hughes’s history, however, what was also perhaps inevitable was that critical attention to Montage would tend to repeat the patterns gleaned from Hughes’s earlier poems. For years the model has remained strikingly consistent: beginning with a brief discussion of the music Hughes’s poetry invokes, the criticism shows irst how his poems incorporate these musical features, then points out what this poetic replication communicates about African American culture, for which Harlem generally stands as representative location.4 Helpful, certainly, though one might also notice how this approach makes ultimately supericial the difference between poetry inspired by bebop and that inspired by earlier forms of jazz: though the new poetry may sound and look different from its predecessors, the manner of this poetry’s presentation, the way it igures itself as conveying something Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 307 essential about African American life, replicates earlier models. While the sounds may change, the song remains the same, so to speak. There are, certainly, understandable justiications for this approach. There is, for example, the long-standing tradition of reading Hughes’s work as a statement about race, rather than one about poetics.5 There is the dificulty of bebop itself, a thorny music notoriously resistant to linguistic paraphrase. Most directly, there is the fact that Montage’s poems do seem to pose themselves as musical windows into 1950s Harlem. As Hughes’s introduction to the sequence famously describes: In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it has progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogiewoogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like bebop, is marked by conlicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and distortions of the music of a community in transition. ([1951] 1994, 387) Like be-bop, indeed: as a whole, this capacious sentence nicely corroborates Scott DeVeaux’s characterization of Charlie Parker’s solos as “[delighting] in sudden and disorienting shifts of rhetoric” (1997, 380), and narratively performs bebop’s ability to incorporate multiple styles without being reduced to any of them. Yet underneath this performance, this passage does its more important work, subtly putting into place a chain of substitutions that become crucial to Montage as a project. As I read it, there are two. First, African American music is posed as being so constitutive of the culture from which it comes that it can synecdochally stand for that culture. Second, poetry’s ability to articulate the psychic and social experiences of this community thereby becomes a matter of a poem’s making itself phenomenologically reminiscent of the hearable sounds of bebop, making the experience of reading equivalent to the experience of listening. That these substitutions seem natural, if not inevitable, testiies to the ease with which we have come to accept certain assumptions about poetry, music, and race. Yet a closer look at the sequence itself suggests that the story may not be so simple. The difference, I believe, lies in bebop itself: while Montage clearly takes the music as its model, it also, I believe, sees bebop as working differently than the music that Published by Duke University Press American Literature 308 American Literature had come before it. From this perspective, Montage takes up bebop not only to chart what bebop’s sounds tell us about life in 1950s Harlem, but to describe how those sounds communicate (or refuse to communicate) this information, how they igure themselves as being able to tell us something about life in 1950s Harlem. At end, that is, Montage registers most prominently not only as a meditation on black life circa 1950, or even a meditation on the role of bebop in articulating that life, but as a meditation on jazz-inspired musicality as such. To explore this idea, let us examine the sequence’s opening poem, the iconic “Dream Boogie.” Its broken rhythms and scat syllables conspicuously displayed, “Dream Boogie” has clearly taken stock of the previous decade’s musical revolution, a revolution conveyed most explicitly through the contrast between the poem’s opening lines: Good morning, daddy! Ain’t you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? and it’s closing ones: Hey, pop! Re-bop! Mop! Y-e-a-h! (Hughes [1951] 1994, 388) Yet while most readings describe the poem as straightforwardly channeling the music of Parker and Gillespie, what I ind more provocative is the shift “Dream Boogie” traces to bebop music from the earlier modes of musicality seen in this opening.6 This is a transformation, for example, that turns the “Good morning, daddy!” that opens the poem turns into the equally slangy, but less respectful, “Hey, pop!” Much separates these two addresses: typeface, spacing, generational argot, but above all, a larger shift in musicality, since unlike “Good morning, daddy!,” “Hey, pop! ”—a single metric foot—functions equally well as address or nonsensical scat syllables, sounds absent semantic value. This transition in musicality is too captured by the rhythmic differences separating the poem’s standard lines from its italicized ones: while the opening stanzas proceed in a bouncy 4/4 rhythm, the inal Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 309 italicized lines, with their repeated exclamation marks, eschew rhythmic regularity for unpredictable sonic volley.7 What is most signiicant about the opening stanzas is not just that they proceed in 4/4 time, but that this 4/4 time rhythmically mirrors the “boogie-woogie rumble” its lines mention. Indeed, given that one of the most identiiable characteristics of boogie-woogie is the steady, repeated rhythm of its pianist’s left hand, that is, these nonitalicized stanzas directly align content with form: by both naming and sounding the “rumble” and “something underneath” (from the poem’s third stanza: “Listen to it closely: / ain’t you heard / something underneath”) of boogie-woogie, these stanzas pose the music’s churning, rhythmic foundation as hearable in both the igurative and literal sense. With this, we are thus dispatched into the substitutional movement of Montage’s introduction. First, the implication is that “boogie-woogie” sound is somehow revelatory enough of the black experience (the “dream deferred”) to stand for it. Twice asking the audience to “listen closely,” the poem here thus igures the music it describes (its “boogie-woogie”) as an essentially transparent text, one whose material identity is important only insofar as it can narrate a larger history of social frustration. Second, this conceit—that the rhythm the poem creates transparently performs the extrapoetic music its lines describe—imbues the poem with the same transparency it grants to boogie-woogie music. Simple repetition seems enough to enforce this gesture, which is interestingly communicated not by singing, but by the movement of what this poem describes as “feet / Beating out and beating out” the boogiewoogie rhythm the lines perform. Feet is of course an overloaded term here, pointing not only to the body, but also to the poetic rhythms (the “feet”) of the lines themselves. Change in tense makes this clear: while “Ain’t you heard” suggests that boogie-woogie music (whose existence as nonlinguistic sound both precedes and exceeds the poem) has always been hearable as an expression of the dream deferred, the “Listen closely” that opens the poem’s third stanza proposes that this content is equally borne by the music the reader can actually hear: the boogie-woogie sounds the poem’s own rhythms perform. Conceptually, then, the conceit is that this “imitative” mode, in which a poem attempts to sonically replicate an extant piece or style of music, makes the experience of reading identical to that of hearing. And the effect is to effectively do away with poetry’s materiality qua poetry: since the rhythms and sounds of pre-bop music suficiently articulate Published by Duke University Press American Literature 310 American Literature the experience of contemporary African American life, poetry becomes useful only as a bearer of pre-bop music, its success lying in its ability to neutralize whatever resistance its properly poetic components might offer to the poem’s purely musical force. Its aspiration, that is, is to a form of material self-effacement. And one might, in fact, read the “dream” of the poem (or the “Dream” of Montage of a Dream Deferred ) as this “dream” of unmediated communicative presence, one in which word, sound, and meaning fall into perfect alignment. It is important, of course, to recognize the igurative nature of this goal, since of course the very presence of the poem as words on a page belies this aspiration to material transparency. The point is obvious, but crucial: without the words giving semantic direction to the sounds and rhythms they produce, these sounds and rhythms would not register the speciic meaning with which the poem invests them. For these nonitalicized lines to even tell us that the hearable content of boogiewoogie music is that of having one’s dream deferred, that is, they must already be experientially different from it. This is why the “dream” of a written poem’s literally being a mode of music remains forever “deferred,” and why the idealized overcoming of the divide separating poetry from music remains unrealizable in the poem: positing this goal as goal necessitates the very presence of words on a page that it purports to overcome. The more straightforward deferral in the poem, of course, is that of the italicized stanzas’ repeatedly frustrating the closure of the stanzas they interrupt. The irst intrusion, “You think / It’s a happy beat?” suggests already a detachment between the rhythms beaten out by feet and what the (likely white) audience to which the lines are addressed actually hears in the music: yet another iteration of the happy minstrelsy it has been conditioned to hear. And as the poem continues, the transformation of voice from enthusiasm to resignation, into a situation where “Sure / I’m happy!” (from the inal nonitalicized stanza) means its exact opposite, comes to introduce a new relation of sound to meaning, of surface to depth. Read this way, the movement into supericially ebullient syllables at end effectively narrates a disillusionment with music’s communicative potentials and an attendant acquiescence to an ironic (and by now standard) mask of minstrel performance. For against earlier attempts to blend music and word, sound and communicative experience, the syllables at the poem’s end (“Hey, pop! / Re-bop! / Mop!”), exuberant as they seem, harbor no illusion about the Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 311 ability to relate depth of experience, or to overcome the cultural stereotypes they aim to combat. In so doing, these syllables permanently rend open the dream of word and sound being able to substitute for each other. If the poem’s nonitalicized syllables pose themselves as materially unnecessary, these italicized bebop stanzas work in the opposite mode: it is precisely their inability to communicate the dream deferred that necessitates their graphic presence on the page. Instead, they communicate only their inability to communicate; that they are unable to communicate a depth of historical experience is, precisely, the experience they communicate. There is a seeming paradox here: the success of these syllables at imitating bebop requires the concomitant acknowledgment of their failure to actually be bebop. It is not that they become meaningless—symbolically, syllables like these remain clearly readable as signs of blackness. Yet their material presence admits no representative capacity; the content of this version of blackness is vacated by these syllables’ lack of semantic reference, the fact that they employ the codes that invoke the category of imitation without presenting those codes as signs of a pre-performative essence. Now, before continuing, it is worth pursuing a potential objection to this reading. This is the objection by way of scat, the performative practice deined by the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz as a “technique of jazz singing in which onomatopoeic or nonsense syllables are sung to improvised melodies” (Robinson 2012). As a musical practice, scat singing has been around at least since 1926, but it gained particular prominence in the bebop era, when vocalists came to use scat as a way to improvise new melodies alongside their instrumentalist colleagues, and thus become actual improvisers, instead of merely the singers of song lyrics.8 And by the late 1940s, the syllables scat singers used had already migrated into jazz poems, many of which read as neartranscriptions of vocalized performances. Given this, the objection would be that a poem like “Dream Boogie” is not actually rending word from sound, or poetry from music, for the simple reason that its closing syllables (“Re-bop! Mop!”) are exactly the syllables a jazz vocalist might sing. As such, they gain musical power not from trying to sound like instrumental music, but from bearing the same linguistic—even musical—content as vocalized improvisation. That scat is an actual musical practice, that is, makes these syllables homologous with musical production, rather than (as I am Published by Duke University Press American Literature 312 American Literature arguing) a purported echo of it, especially an echo that disavows its actually being the sound it ostensibly echoes. To address this, let us examine scat’s identity as simultaneous vocal and written practice. Considered musically, what is germane is that scat (interestingly) employs the sounds of vocal articulation—the same sounds available in language—to establish a new matrix of musical signiication. In lending singers multiple options for rendering a given musical note, that is, scat displaces the enunciative options available to instrumentalists (the uses of embouchure, breath, or inger force) onto the linguistic realm, making language’s sonic capacities the site of musical/performative articulation. Scat thus approaches poetry from the obverse side: if written poetry assumes language’s denotative side to mobilize its sonic one, scat employs language’s sonic capabilities to asymptotically approach the world of semantic meaning, stretching toward the semantic, if not quite touching it. Scat, one might say, is music made poetic. In this, scat singing shares afinities with twentieth-century sound poetry, given that whatever semantic or denotative sense it makes comes irst from its syllables being employed as sound-invoking entities. Yet what we have in Hughes’s poem is not scat singing, it is scat writing. And there is a fundamental difference between the two. This difference is that scat writing, to be recognizable as such, inevitably overlays whatever scat singing’s musical achievements with a layer of referentiality. The point of written scat, that is, is not simply to emphasize language’s sonic components—all poetry might be said to do this—but to show how its particular use of musical language is borrowed from a speciic, nonpoetic phenomenon: vocalized jazz. Its aurality is thus a second-level aurality: scat poetry employs a set of linguistic symbols borrowed from vocal practice irst to advertise that it has borrowed those particular symbols from that particular practice, and only after this to employ those symbols as means of producing sound. And it is precisely by way of this referentiality, I am arguing, that Hughes’s written scat marks the limits between poetry’s “music” and the music of jazz vocalization. If scat might be described, as Nathaniel Mackey (1986, 182) does, as a form of “ ‘telling inarticulacy’—an inarticulacy that nonetheless (or thereby) speaks, carries content,” Hughes’s poem transposes this idea of “telling inarticulacy” to the written realm. By employing recognizable scat syllables, “Dream Boogie” (among many other poems in Montage) is clearly meant to ref- Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 313 erence the developing vocal practice of bebop. As such, these syllables look like they sound like something a singer would sing. But precisely because they work in this manner—by looking like they sound a certain way—they foreground the visual materiality that forecloses the possibility of their actually being sounded music. Two quick poems explore this difference. One is “Flatted Fifths.” Like “Dream Boogie,” this poem (whose title evokes Dixieland musician Eddie Condon’s famous condemnation of the beboppers, “They lat their ifths; we drink ours” [quoted in Crow 2005, 264]) too narrates a transformation. Initially skeptical, its opening lines “little cullud boys with beards / re-bop be-bop mop and stop” emphasize the immaturity of the beboppers; that four of the irst ive lines rhyme suggests that it sees the beboppers’ “frantic” bluster as enacting little real change. Most powerful is what happens syntactically: transforming “re-bop be-bop mop and stop” into active, narrativizing verbs, these lines effectively neuter the disruptive power of these bebop syllables. Yet this mocking tone soon gives way to grudging acceptance, even endorsement. The pivot is the word “change,” in the sixth line. The word carries musical overtones, since to jazz musicians, “changes” is the preferred synonym for “chords.” As the only internal word in the poem that explicitly rhymes with an end word (“strange”), “change” injects a sense of newness into the otherwise repetitive rhyme scheme, which immediately becomes far less predictable. More important is what happens to the poem’s rhythm: while the poem’s opening seven lines maintain the same bouncy 4/4 rhythm we saw in “Dream Boogie,” the poem interrupts this rhythm with the words “rich and strange,” a phrase owning its own line, line 8. Two stressed syllables appear out of nowhere: the line is strange itself. Yet notice how these words compare to the “stop” ending line 2. The difference is this: while “stop” narrates a rhythmic break, because it remains within the 4/4 rhythm of its line, it cannot actually perform one. “Rich and strange,” in contrast, performs this break simply and without explanation. This shift, from a word (“stop”) that describes what the beboppers do without actually participating in that activity, and a phrase (“rich and strange”) that enacts bebop’s broken rhythms without needing to describe them, nicely captures the poem’s larger transformation in tone. One can further see this in the way the “little cullud boys with beards” with which the poem opens changes into “little cullud boys in berets” in the inal stanza. The change—from “with beards” to “with Published by Duke University Press American Literature 314 American Literature berets”—not only resigniies the players as mature, but also adds a trochee to the line’s last beat. The effect is to either modify or refuse—depending on how one reads it—the strict 4/4 rhythm into which the opening stanza so observantly its. And once modiied, these lines come to admit new possibilities, as we see in the return of the poem’s bebop syllables to a position of nonsemantic signiication, italicized and separated from the narrative. At end, it seems, musical “changes” do enable new ways of being. “Jam Session,” inally, pinpoints a conceptual limit of sorts. A set of simultaneous narratives, one in standard lettering, the other italicized, indented, and spelled out in scat syllables, the poem as a whole evokes the experience of having a conversation repeatedly interrupted by music. More important, however, is the contrast between the two simultaneous narratives. While one appears in couplets that are nothing if not consistent—two stresses per line, three progressive verbs (“letting,” “having,” “sprinkling”), three easy rhymes (“bail,” “jail,” “tail”)— its bebop lines (“pop-a-da,” “oop-pop-a-da,” “pop-a-da”) appear without narrative preparation, swell and contract on their own, and rhyme only with themselves (other than, perhaps, with “salt”), all without ever suggesting a reason for doing so. Whether they are meant to interrupt the poem’s straightforward lines, to reject, comment on, or undo something about them, is never made clear. While their expansion and contraction clearly conforms to a logic, what exactly this logic might be, the poem gives no hint. Posed alongside, intertwined with, but clearly not absorbed by the narrative voice of the poem, these syllables certainly reference the African American culture from which bebop sounds come. Yet what they can say about that culture is made opaque by the absence of hermeneutic assistance. To be clear, this logic does not animate every poem in Montage. Yet overall, its sounds and structures do provide something new: a poetics clearly identiiable as African American, and that takes music as the most important and revealing African American cultural production, but that challenges the ideas, irst, that communicating the African American experience through poetry can happen in a semantically and musically transparent way, and second, that the musicality of a poem can be phenomenologically or materially equivalent to that of extrapoetic music. What is left is a new sense of hermeneutic opacity— a sense that bebop-inspired musicality might be best read as a poem’s ensuring that it can’t be read properly, that its “musical” components are precisely those that evade hermeneutic capture. In this sense Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 315 Montage is, as its introduction suggests, a poem about transition, one that points toward the future without knowing what the future will look or sound like, or what structures of representation will be available to access it. And it is precisely by registering this question that Montage opens space for this future to emerge. Charles Olson and the Musicality of Form If Hughes seems a logical igure for this study, seeing him paired with Charles Olson may puzzle. Although hugely inluential in US poetry, Olson was not African American, nor was his work particularly concerned with race, other than perhaps his own Swedish heritage. 9 Almost a full generation older than the other artists associated with Black Mountain College, Olson was not likely to have taken bebop as the definitive generational statement his younger colleagues did. Whether or not Olson was even much of a music fan is itself debatable. One biography has a composer friend saying that “music was mysterious to [Olson]” (Clark 1991, 134), and other accounts suggest that Olson spent little time either listening to or thinking about music. Even if these descriptions are overstated, it is far easier to imagine Olson’s tastes running toward cerebral art music (John Cage and pianist David Tudor were both presences at Black Mountain) than toward a genre always rooted in the popular.10 A number of factors do, however, endorse reading Olson as a seminal igure of jazz-inspired poetics. First, whether or not Olson spent much time actually listening to jazz, much of his thought clearly emerged from his friendship with Robert Creeley and the other Black Mountain artists (Jonathan Williams and Ed Dorn, among others) for whom Charlie Parker’s music was hugely important. It is arguably the inluence of Creeley and these other artists that best explains Olson’s 1968 statement that “the whole ‘Black Mountain Poet’ thing is a lot of bullshit . . . Ha ha. Boy, there was no poetic. It was Charlie Parker. Literally, it was Charlie Parker” (Olson 1979, 71). Second, there is the widespread inluence Olson’s work had on the many African American poets traditionally read as “jazz poets.” Amiri Baraka is most prominent of these, but not at all unique; other Olson-inluenced igures include A. B. Spellman, Lorenzo Thomas, and Jayne Cortez.11 That these poets (and others like them) found Olson’s work so fertile does suggest that something in it deeply accords with jazz as an aesthetic. Published by Duke University Press American Literature 316 American Literature This “something,” of course, remains quite different from the bebopinspired musicality seen in Hughes. If Hughes igures poetry nach bebop as the explicit separation of word and sound, Olson takes the opposite approach: putting the human body in a fundamentally musical relationship with the world, Olson igures the poem as the site, not merely the record, of improvised musicality. To Olson, a poem becomes properly musical not when it phenomenologically resembles music, but when its creation properly engages the music-making faculties of the human body. Poetry thus moves from being a reading of the extant sounds of bebop to an experience of participation in the physical, even ontological processes by which jazz-inspired sound is created in the irst place. Jazz, as a consequence, signiies less a set of identiiable sounds or codes than a particularly musical mode of corporeal inhabitation. The most direct formulation of this argument appears in Olson’s essays “Projective Verse” ([1950] 1966a) and “Human Universe” ([1951] 1966b), both of which became manifestos of sorts for the Black Mountain project. As such, both essays work by posing Olson’s “projective” or “open” verse as an antidote to the stagnant “closed form” with which Olson characterizes the English poetry of the past few centuries (“In English the poetics became meubles—furniture” proclaim the Maximus Poems [Olson 1983, 249]). By “closed form,” Olson means poetry written by contemporary poets but in traditional structures, the “inherited line, stanza, over-all form” (1966a, 16). Olson’s problems with closed form are multiple. By providing pre-given structures into which poets can simply slot words, closed forms promote a sort of compositional laziness, allowing poets to compose by habit rather than attention. In so doing they delect attention away from poetry’s more fundamental elements: “syllable” and “line,” the constitutive components that “together . . . make a poem” (18–19). Syllable, the smallest, most selfcontained element of form, links “particles of sound” with the “words they compose” (17–18). Line, in contrast, secures the basic arena of the syllable’s deployment, forming “the threshing loor for the dance” (19). This description helps explain Olson’s more ontological problem with closed form. One of the key beliefs animating Olson’s “system” is that objects and other phenomena in the world possess what one could call an immanent meaning, a nonrelational meaning generated outside of epistemological, economic or ontological kinship with other phenomena in the world: “not a thing’s class . . . but the thing itself” (1966b, Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 317 56). This is why closed form is such a problem for Olson: subsuming poetic elements to a comprehensive framework that takes primacy over them, “closed form” creates meaning through comparison and relationality, rather than employing the particularities of each poetic element to generate an organic form that respects these particularities. Musicality is a prime example, given that traditional sites of poetic music—“rime and meter,” assonance, alliteration—are qualities of pure comparison and relationality, and to Olson therefore suppress musicality rather than cultivate it, imposing meaning rather than assisting it. In this view, Olson clearly its within the twentieth-century attempt to rethink musicality in poetic terms (see Pound’s call to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome” [1918, 3]). What is distinct about Olson’s model, however, is his invocation of the body. By this I mean that syllable and line—the building blocks of poetry—are ultimately important to Olson not on their own, but because they represent material instantiations of bodily activity. As he explains: “Let me put it baldly. The two halves are: / the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE” (1966a, 19). Let us start with the middle terms here, “breath” and “ear.” First, breath. Olson understands this term quite literally, and his phrase “the beginning and the end is breath” (1966a, 24) is meant to resonate in two senses. Compositionally, the length of each line in a poem should come directly from the breath, corresponding with “the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment he writes” (19). Lines should likewise end, regardless of sentence length, at the exact point “where [the poet’s] breathing, shall come to termination” (19). Ontologically, this prescription is meant to relect breath’s status as both the activity that gives and sustains life and the mechanism that produces a distinctly human sound. By tying line length to breath length, projective verse aims to imbue the poem with the sustaining activities of human existence, memorializing those activities and passing them on to the reader. (One might also note that this account literalizes one of the oldest poetic topoi in existence, poetic inspiration, literally “in”— “spirare,” to breathe in, and thus aims to reconnect language with its essential biologism.) The other term here, “ear,” similarly links the compositional and the ontological. On the one hand the ear is the site of sonic acquisition Published by Duke University Press American Literature 318 American Literature and, since it is linked to the “head,” the organ that irst registers the syllable’s semantic implications. On the other, “ear” metonymically identifies a receptive “stance toward the reality of a poem itself” (1966a, 24). This stance is one of attentiveness, of listening to the world as it comes to fruition through the self; “we are only / as we ind out we are” (19), Maximus famously notes. “Ear” thus designates a process of simultaneous reception and production, and “hearing” a mechanism by which the world becomes itself: “If [a poet] stay inside himself,” Olson writes, “he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way” (1966a, 25). With this logic in mind, Olson uses the word “objectism” to describe his poetics, arguing that they inally dispense with “the lyrical interference of the ego . . . [that] Western man has interposed” (1966a, 24) between himself as subject and himself as object. Deconstruction of Western metaphysics aside, it is in this larger account of “objectism” that we see the deep afinities between Olson’s project and the aesthetics of jazz improvisation. First, the temporality of poetic creation Olson describes—the self as a mode of sonic response to a luctuating world—turns poetizing into an improvisatory act rooted in focused attention to the self. Not the mindless id of Ginsberg’s “pick up an axe and blow,” but a thoughtful process whose temporal openness both participates in and relects that of the world’s. Second, and more important, there is Olson’s account of breath and ear. For if I conjure the image of a jazz saxophonist, we might notice from the beginning that tying the poetic line to the duration of the breath replicates the exact process by which a saxophone player determines the length of an improvised phrase. Indeed, for a saxophone player (or other wind player, or arguably any melodic instrumentalist), breath is too “the beginning and the end”: as the fundamental process by which musical sound is made, breath supports musical phrasing and dynamics and imposes a physiological limit on what can be played (and in this latter case comes to structure musical content).12 Indeed, the case in jazz is arguably more extreme even than that in Olson’s poetics, since while a poet can take time to study the changing contours of her breath, a saxophone player phrasing in the moment must rely on the shape of the breath exactly as that breath occurs; for this reason (among others), the content of her improvisations will literally always relect the lineaments of her physiology. Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 319 The situation with “ear” is uncannily similar. This is because, as most improvisers know, an improviser’s identity as a sound maker also rests on him or her inhabiting the role of listener. This happens in multiple ways: as a member of a collective ensemble, every note or silence an improviser plays is ideally made in communication with the other musicians on the bandstand, and as such contributes to a group’s collective sound. It is in this sense that having “big ears” is a high compliment in the jazz world.13 Yet improvisation also involves the more personal, individual mode of listening that Olson describes. For, as any improviser will tell you, a great majority of the improvisatory process takes place not on one’s instrument, but in one’s head, in what Paul Berliner (1994, 180–91) calls “the singing mind.” That is, while jazz improvisation reaches materiality as instrumentally produced sound, in actuality it involves two primary skills: being able to hear interesting ideas in one’s head, and then being able to play those ideas on one’s instrument. In jazz, in fact, instrumental technique is often prized not just for its own sake, but because it allows a player to more easily play those sounds heard in his or her head. (The reciprocal is often also true: increased instrumental luency often expands the range of sounds an improviser can imagine in his or her head.) When listeners praise a jazz player’s playing, what they are often in fact praising is not that player’s technical skill, but the player’s ability to hear creative and unique musical ideas, and only then to execute them. That Olson igures poetry as this form of embodied activity is, then, what makes his version of musicality so provocative. For the claim against which he pushes is that in which poetry is understood to be musical because it betrays a phenomenological similarity to music— that poetry is musical because it, like music, develops sounds and rhythms over time. Olson’s model, in contrast, suggests that the majority of formal features generally understood to be musical—a poem’s setting up and modifying a regular pulse, for example, or the recognizable sonic patterns of rhyme, assonance, and alliteration—are deeply nonmusical. For Olson, musicality is not about the regularity of a poem’s sounds; it is about the mode of their creation, the degree to which their presence emerges from the sound-producing capacities of the human body itself. His poetics therefore limn the difference between poetry that is experienced in a musical way and poetry whose mode of creation is essentially musical. Form here becomes properly musical not when it sounds like music, but when it is the product of a Published by Duke University Press American Literature 320 American Literature poet’s having adopted a fundamentally musical approach to the world, poetically manifesting the dynamics of heart and head, breath and ear. To see how this works, observe the following lines, from the Maximus Poems: I measure my song, measure the sources of my song, measure me, measure my forces (Olson 1983, 48) An ars poetica of sorts, this short stanza gathers multiple references, including both Whitman (“I sing myself”) and Protagoras (“man is the measure of all things”). It is also careful to bend its anaphoric pattern to its own ends. The key word, of course, is “measure,” whose irst two letters—“me”—subtly extend the reference to the self opened by the poem’s initial “I,” ensuring that each line begins with some version of this self. As beits the syllable’s being the site where the sonic and semantic meet, we might also observe how the syllable “me” reverberates throughout these lines, nearly half of whose words play variations on “me”: “mea” / “my” / “mea” / “my” / “mea” / “me” / “mea” / “my.” “Measure”’s second half, “sure,” works similarly, spreading its own sonic ripples: “sure” / “song” / “sure” / “sour” / “song” / “sure” / “sure” / “ces.” Through this proliferation, the syllabic crashes into the semantic: While “measure” most explicitly glosses as “appraise” or “codify,” the fact that “measure” is a musical term—a “measure” is a length of musical time—layers musical meaning here, so that the evaluation of the self here (the “measuring”) is always also a musical gesture, a “putting-the-self-into-measures.” “Song” in these lines thereby becomes the product of one’s locating (discovering, placing) oneself as this node of dynamic movement; song results from the fact that attending to (“measuring”) the self is always, inevitably, a making-musical. Or these, also from Maximus: light signals & mass points normal mappings of inertia & every possible action of aether and of change (Olson 1983, 516) Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 321 These lines, too, nicely foreground the open qualities of projective verse. “Light signals” and “mass points” generate spaces of ambiguous syntax, potentially readable as either adjective-noun or noun-verb phrases. The irst word, “light,” connotes both visuality and tactility, both imposing and bridging the gap between modes of sensory reception. “Mass,” following it, inscribes even more insistently the palimpsestic etymology so important to Olson: while semantically, the word balances the “light” preceding it by suggesting heft and stability, “mass” at the same time points to the state, Massachusetts, to which the bulk of the Maximus sequence is devoted. This alignment of geography and semantics thus becomes a key to these lines as a whole: as a “mapping” of space, indeed of mass, the buried name “Massachusetts” provides us a temporary way to make sense of the lux of the world. Yet mappings of this sort will always be limited, since the mass now called “Massachusetts” wasn’t always called this, nor will it always be. While “signals” and “points” are the way we’re given to mapping the aether, then, any such map can only enact temporally local effects. This condition extends to the words on the page as well: as “signals” literally communicated through the passage of “light,” words too are “normal mappings” of “every possible action.” Spacing and timing buttress this claim: following “every possible action” with a two-line pause bookends the phrase with the word “inertia” on one side and an actual rhythmic inertia on the other. But neither inertia is ever really inert, since both gain their force only through the forward movement of the poem, the progressive temporality that tells us to read the line breaks as pauses. The contrast between stability and change (and the necessity each has for its other) is pushed to a limit of sorts in the poem’s penultimate line, “of aether and of.” On one hand the large space following the line makes ambiguous whether the inal “of” links to the “change” further down the page, if it links to the blankness preceding that “change” (a blankness that marks the “aether”), or if this “of” inally even functions as a preposition at all, if the “and” in the line balances not “aether” and “change” but “aether” and “of.” By being bookended by “of”s, the line itself, “of aether and of,” too ensures that “aether” hearkens both backward and forward in time, space, and meaning. Yet at the end the pun on “aether” (“either”) imposes a breakdown in implied difference between all these carefully balanced terms, immediately rendering all states analogous, or at least indifferent to our particular choices.14 While the poem at the end names “change” as it constitutive condition, then, the results of any such change become less important than Published by Duke University Press American Literature 322 American Literature change itself, since whichever “end” of change we inhabit, the dynamic remains the same. Yet the very act of poetic naming, of placing marks on a page, suggests that change itself is only accessible through the stability of graphic presence. Indicating its own impermanence, graphic presence becomes as critical an experience as change; the point is not to abandon form so much as employ its relative stability as a means to register the dynamic state of lux from which it comes and to which it always refers. Again, from a purely sonic perspective, these lines are distinguished most by an almost extreme abundance of accent, one almost assaultive in its avoidance of traditional song. Yet in some ways this is exactly the point: that Olson’s is a poetry inluenced by jazz (or is even a poetry explicitly musical) is, very consciously, not veriiable by the referential workings of its sounds. For Olson, such poetry might be interesting from a sociological or cultural perspective, but it would not be authentically musical. For to reproduce an extant music in a literal (or quasiliteral) manner is to produce a nonmusical comment on that music, rather than a poetry that makes (or is) its own music. And this poem does produce music of an important sort: just as the asymmetric phrasing and unexpected accents of bebop keep the listener (and the musician trying to play them) from falling into prescribed patterns of sound making, this poem literally forces the reader’s body into unfamiliar comportments of breath and movement. “Every possible action,” it seems, is not merely an abstract concept. Only by breaking the body out of its habitual modes of hearing and breathing, this poem suggests, can the poem make that body aware of the fact of its breathing, or lead it into physical and musical comportments about which it would otherwise been unaware. Rejecting its assumed status as static artifact of a physical process, form becomes the site of exchange between poet, reader, and world, one node in an ongoing musical way of being. “Listen Closely, Can’t You Hear?” On Nonrepresentative Representation If I have taken some pains with Olson, it is not only because he reads jazz so provocatively, but because of the potential he has for complimenting Hughes. For in many ways, Olson’s poetics provide a provisional route out of the scenario that leads Hughes to insert a near-permanent Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 323 wedge between the jazzy sounds a poem could produce and a poem’s desire to actually be a type of music. For Hughes, we’ll remember, poetry’s engagement with bebop requires poems to register their musicality precisely by foregrounding the material differences between themselves and the sounds they ostensibly replicate. In this manner, Hughes’s poems successfully invoke bebop only to the degree they acknowledge their inability to be bebop. Word and sound—or at least word and extrapoetic sound—remain separate categories, analogous iguratively, never literally. If one consigns poetic musicality to meaning “poetry that sounds like music,” then Hughes arguably pushes the idea to a conceptual limit. In redeining the category, however, Olson potentially unlocks this material straightjacket, restoring a form of music—literal, not igurative music—to poetry’s essential constitution. As with Hughes, there is a paradox here: to Olson, poetry succeeds at being a type of jazz only to the degree it eschews resemblance to anything one would likely identify as “jazz poetry.” “Musicality,” consequently, acquires a new, unconventional meaning, one more akin to “uniqueness,” or “inimitability.” Yet the conceptual payoff is sizeable. Rather than positing “jazz” as an external category that poetry can at best hope to approach asymptotically, by iguring poetry as a mode of music making whose genesis lies in the body’s adopting the precise physical and intellectual comportments operative in jazz improvisation, Olson turns poetry into a kind of jazz itself. Rather than foregrounding its generic difference from music proper, poetry becomes transmedial by nature. There is, of course, a potential problem with this model. This is Olson’s handling of race. The argument works as follows: in posing the poetizing body as a set of energies located between perception and production, listening and sound making, Olson’s poetics conveniently ignore the fact that bodies always possess socially resonant exteriors, and that it is by these exteriors that they are often most forcefully recognized, if not formed as such. Further problematic is the requirement that a poem eschew the representative codes that make it legible as anything other than wholly individualized. One wonders how far this prescription might go: to the degree that an “open ield” poem forswears inherited forms and the occupations of habit, it would seem to be expressly limited from invoking the codes that designate its being situated in, say, the tradition of African American literature, or the codes that designate “African American music.” Published by Duke University Press American Literature 324 American Literature More directly, Olson’s system seems geared around denying race’s existence as a meaningful concept. This, too, is a consequence of his insistence on particularity. Just as Olson denounces rhyme and meter because they impose a system of comparison, so too does “race” submit human identity to classiicatory schemes that direct attention away from “the thing itself” and toward “the thing’s ‘class’” or “hierarchy” (1966b, 56). Instead of group identiication, which preempts our selfidentiication as individuals, it is particularity itself that grants a wider commonality. Olson’s example is the Maya (with whom he lived for a time in Mexico), whom he venerates for allegedly living out the sort of ontology Olson admires. When encountering a Maya, Olson claims, “the individual who peers out from that lesh” is not a Maya irst, but “is precisely himself, is a curious wandering animal like me”; “Human Universe” is near-euphoric in describing the Mayan ability to “wear their lesh with that difference which the understanding that it is common leads to” (57). These views are not just abstract. They imply a politics, and as such have incurred serious criticism. As Amiri Baraka later described, “the overwhelming line” of “the Creeley-Olson thing” “was always antipolitical” (Benston and Baraka 1978, 306). Meaning: “the CreeleyOlson thing” devalued the speciically racial experiences of its practitioners. Olson (2000, 306) himself makes his position clear in a 1963 letter to Baraka, writing that “your position that the Negro solely ought to act as an end and change of what is manifestly no good is in fact any man’s who wishes to have had a life in society . . . . Has the Negro any particular thing to give any more than any one else who likewise has lived in this society?” Meaning: the black experience merits no special treatment or aesthetic, since it should rightly be absorbed into a more general set of problems. This is no small issue, especially if “jazz” is to be a critical reference against which Olson is measured. Indeed, in jettisoning the dynamic of representation from his system, Olson might be fairly accused of, at best, making it nearly impossible for a poem to register its being located in an African American tradition, and at worst denying the very possibility of blackness being a legitimate category. Olson’s jazz-inspired aesthetic would thus be content to appropriate the elements of jazz it inds interesting (like “improvisation,” or “listening”) while ignoring the very real social and historical contexts those elements occupy. How to navigate these complications? To start, one might productively turn to the many African American poets who found Olson’s Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 325 work so helpful. For many of them, “race,” or even “blackness,” represents a poetic construct emerging slightly differently than Baraka would have it. For Baraka’s criticism to hold, blackness must to some degree persist as a pre-performative category, one then relectable in aesthetic works.15 For Olson, however, race could not exist as an external referent to which a poem could then adhere more or less accurately. The sheer present-ness of Olson’s poetry makes this notion impossible; posing race as such a condition would be no different from a poem’s adhering to a pre-given structure, or directly imitating a piece of music. This is, it must be noted, to a degree the position to which Hughes comes in Montage, whereby blackness comes to occupy the space between the symbolic references of its bebop syllables and those syllables’ semantic meaning. While the former allows those lines to partake in the association of blackness with music, the latter ensures that the version of blackness given is one without essence attached to it. In so doing, Montage carves out space for a new aesthetics of blackness, one in which what that term expresses is not a pre-given meaning, but emerges from the interaction between aesthetic form and the structures of reception—aesthetic, historical, perceptual—in which that form operates. Opposed to this might seem to be Olson’s position. Yet there are perhaps other possibilities. For if Olson’s poetics poses as essential the relationship between a poet and her own mode of physicality, it also seems to acknowledge, if implicitly, that this very mode of physical inthe-world-ness is itself shaped, arguably to the core, by the racially marked exterior Olson might otherwise be accused of whitewashing. To pose the poetic as a relection of the way the world’s shapes become themselves through the uniquenesses of a poet’s apprehension, is, in fact, necessarily to acknowledge history—interpersonal history—as a crucial category of this process. And while Olson may not read his own personal history as having been impacted by the experience of inhabiting a racially marked exterior, for other poets, it would be almost impossible to have an experience of one’s body that was not somehow indicative of reception that body had received in the social world. If Olson’s history is that of Gloucester, Massachusetts, why would the world of another poet—a world in which racial identity plays a more explicitly constitutive role—not be an equally apposite source of sounds, igures, and references? If Olson’s spatial relationship to the world leads him to quote the journals of Gloucester’s founders, it is easy to imagine the Published by Duke University Press American Literature 326 American Literature sounds of jazz (for example) that a different poet may have been hearing for most of his or her life surfacing in his or her poems. This seems to be the reading implicit in the work of the many African American poets inspired by Olson. It is not that all representative language need be barred from a projective poem; it is that the point of such language should be individual and idiosyncratic—such words or rhythms should manifest only as pieces of the fabric that constitutes the individual making the poem. Indeed, musicality for Olson, as we have seen, depends not quite on the resolute avoidance of all representative language—such a goal would be impossible—but on those moments of alleged representative language being situated within larger, idiosyncratic open structures, as moments of the self rather than direct references to the external world. In this Olson would allow for race to be only a part of whatever identity the poem presented. But it would also allow, if indirectly, for a poem to incorporate language carrying the same symbolic function as that occasionally employed by Hughes. That race as a category is disavowed, that is, need not keep language, references, and rhythms coded as “raced” from the poem. And in this sense Olson’s system might, depending on who reads the poem, imply the presence of that category, even if in a way that the system itself remains unable to gauge. There is one more issue with reading Olson within the jazz tradition. Above I argued that Olson’s poetics demonstrates a number of fundamental afinities with jazz, particularly bebop. Yet the charge that the resulting poetry read in a traditionally unmusical way also prevents that poetry from participating in another crucial element of jazz improvisation: swing, the relaxed, polyrhythmic feel that has been constitutive of jazz from its beginning. This is especially true in bebop: while the improvisations of Parker, Gillespie, and Monk (among others) inarguably raised the harmonic, melodic, and narrative stakes of the idiom, their music never wavers from its commitment to swing, and thus to the musical tradition from which bebop comes. If one is to take “Projective Verse” as a reading of jazz, then Olson’s likely claim that to consciously swing in a poem’s rhythm would be to still write in a referential manner, instead of a spontaneous one, would also be a problem, as it would suggest that jazz actually can produce a truly free form rather than acknowledging that a jazz improvisation always takes place as a reading of a pre-given form. Put differently, the proper criticism of Olson might be that in abandoning this rhythmic Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 327 foundation, the work does not think as dialectically as it could. That numerous of Olson’s successors were able to write projective verseinspired poems that nonetheless do demonstrate commitments to swing (however construed), does, however, suggest that perhaps the issue is—if one is to take embodied poetry as a guide—that Olson is simply less comfortable in his body than Charlie Parker is in his. My aim in reading Olson and Hughes together here is not, it should be noted, to construct an airtight system. For to do so would be to pose a deinitive answer to a set of questions whose open-endedness has provided an enduring source of aesthetic creativity. It is rather to identify two reservoirs of potential that, when taken up in various combinations, help sharpen these questions in provocative new ways. As with Perloff’s essay, at end the question “Whose Era?” comes down to value and interpretation; it is a puzzle whose pieces we still inhabit. Stanford University Notes Enormous thanks go to C. D. Blanton, Scott Saul, Ramona Naddaff, and Tyrone Williams for their advice and assistance on this piece. 1 Ralph Ellison (1972, 201) describes bebop as “a momentous modulation into a new key of musical sensibility; in brief, a revolution in culture.” For a book-length account of the music’s genesis and signiicance, see DeVeaux (1997); for shorter analyses, see Lott (1988) and Saul (2003). 2 David Yaffe (2006, 46), in fact, follows this quote by noting just how comical the image of Ginsberg actually “picking up an ‘axe’ and blowing the choruses of ‘Ko Ko’” would be. For an extended, if polemical, critique of many Beat-era appropriations of jazz, see Panish (1997). 3 For a jazz-inluenced reading of Creeley, see Hartman (1991). 4 A representative sample might include Farrell and Johnson (1981), Lowney (2000), Hokanson (1998), Smethurst (2002), Tracy (1989), or Rampersad (1989). For readings that move in directions more akin to the one I pursue here, see Patterson (2000) or Jones (2002). 5 As Meta Jones (2002, 1146) notes, the “critical penchant for reviewing Hughes’s writing through a primarily racial lens has the unwarranted consequence of obscuring his signiicance as an experimental writer.” 6 Barry Wallenstein (1991, 603), for example, calls the poem “reminiscent of Dizzy Gillespie’s raps”; Michael Borshuk (2006, 75) describes the poem as “[capturing] bebop’s ability to balance revolution and historical comprehensiveness”; and Erskine Peters (1993, 34–35) discusses the poem’s “metri-phonic effects,” “complex rhythmic pace,” and “combination of exclamatory and haltingly suspenseful interrogatory intonations.” Published by Duke University Press American Literature 328 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 American Literature For a reading that, like mine, sees the poem posing a dialogue between two separate musics, see Brunner (2001). “4/4 time” indicates four beats in a musical measure, or in this case, four beats per line. Stephen Tracy (1988, 230) hears this poem as a twelve-bar blues. I agree, though I admittedly have dificulty hearing “Dream Boogie” as Tracy notates it. To my ear, the irst stanza should be notated as follows: I say 1926 because the apocryphal story (dispelled by Brent Edwards [2002] and others) has Louis Armstrong inventing the technique when his lyric sheet falls to the loor during a recording session. For a mild counterargument, see Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism’s Other Work, which argues for Olson’s poetics being “dedicated to recognizing and managing minority perspectives” (2012, 143). I am less convinced, for reasons articulated later. George Butterick (1978, xv) notes that it was from composer Pierre Boulez, in fact, that Olson borrowed the notion of “series” that organizes the Maximus Poems. Despite Olson’s clear inluence on a generation of African American poets, the formal lineages have so far been only minimally explored. To my knowledge, only three books even devote space to the subject: Harris (1985), Siraganian (2012), and Nielsen (1997). This is the case even for instrumentalists whose playing does not appear to depend on breath (piano, guitar, vibraphone, among others). On one hand, because the jazz vocabulary largely comes from saxophone players and trumpeters—Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, among others—the guidelines for “what it makes sense to say” in the idiom largely derive from the physiological comportments afforded by breath-based instruments. Second, regardless of instrument, “musical sense” in jazz is often rooted in the voice, with all instrumentalists encouraged to phrase according to what they can sing. This reliance on singing tends to privilege breath above other corporeal activities. There is much more to say about this (jazz’s being rooted in oral culture, for example), and there are certainly many exceptions (especially in avant-garde contexts), but I would uphold this as a general description. From Duke Ellington: “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen” (quoted in Monroe 2005, 18). Indeed, when read in a Gloucester-inspired accent, the pun extends further, turning “aether and of” into “either end of.” Thanks to C. D. Blanton for this observation. For a useful reading of Baraka here, see Benston (2000). Published by Duke University Press American Literature Hughes/Olson 329 References Benston, Kimberley W. 2000. Performing Blackness: Enactments of AfricanAmerican Modernism. New York: Routledge. Benston, Kimberly W., and Amiri Baraka. 1978. “Amiri Baraka: An Interview.” boundary 2 6, no. 2: 303–18. Berliner, Paul F. 1994. Thinking in Jazz: The Ininite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 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