Woodslane | Book - 9780252036217

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The Muse is Music

Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word

ISBN-13: 9780252036217
Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
By Meta DuEwa Jones
Price: AUD $271.00
Stock: 0 in stock
Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 14/08/2011
Format: Hardback 304 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: Poetry [DC]

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Table of Contents
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Google Preview: This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz's influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary spoken word poetry. Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights how the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality shape the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. She applies prosodic analysis to emphasize the musicality of African American poetic performance and examines the gendered meanings evident in such performances and in the criticism, images, and sounds circulating within jazz cultures. Jones also considers poets who have participated in contemporary venues for black writing, including Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, and Carl Phillips. Incorporating a finely honed discussion of the Black Arts Movement, the poetry-jazz fusion of the late 1950s, and slam and spoken word performance milieus, she also focuses on jazz and hip hop-influenced performance artists such as Tracie Morris, Saul Williams, and Carl Hancock Rux. Illuminating how innovations in American poetry have been linked to jazz as musical performance and as literary representation, The Muse Is Music deftly applies the methodology of textual close reading to a critical ''close listening'' of American poetry's resonant soundscape.; Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 R iff, Remembrance, and Revision 1. Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes on the (Jazz) Record 33 2. Jazz Prosody: The Gendered Contours of the Post-Soul Coltrane Poem 85 New Traditions, New Translations 3. Opening the Canary's Cage: Sex, Gender, and the Jazz Body 129 4. A Cave Canem Continuum or a Dark Room Renaissance? From Jazz Improvisation to Hip-Hop Stylization in Contemporary Black Poetry 167 Epilogue. ''When the Muse Is Music'': Collaboration and Improvisation in Jazz Poetics 209 Notes 231 Works Cited 249 Index 273; ''Like Melba Liston stepping to the microphone, trombone in hand, to punctuate one of her own arrangements with a newly improvised statement, Meta DuEwa Jones takes up the changes in the interrelationship between jazz and poetry and turns them out. Even those few readers who have read everything in print on the subject of jazz and verse will find that Jones has both new chapters and new verses, well worth multiple hearings.'' Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovation; Google Preview content

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The Muse is Music

Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word