Description
Book SynopsisAn elaborate articulation of the connections between jazz, poetry and gender
Trade ReviewReceived an Honorable Mention in the competition for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA), 2012.
"An important addition to the growing literature about jazz poetry. Recommended."--
Choice "An extraordinarily original and important book about the musicality of African American poetic performance. Meta DuEwa Jones offers insightful and sophisticated readings and analyses of the relationship between black poetry and jazz. This wide-ranging and ambitious book will make an immediate impact on African American literary and cultural studies as well as performance studies."--Farah Jasmine Griffin, coauthor of
Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever"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"Highly original… Jones's authoritative knowledge and passion for jazz and for poetry infuse this book, and allow her to move with sweeping range through nearly a century of African American poetic production."--
Wasafiri“Meta DeEwa Jones's recent tour de force of contemporary criticism,
The Muse is Music, most certainly must take its place among classic and recent critical studies of African-American poetry and, as Jones describes her topic, ‘jazz resonant’ writing.”—
The Black ScholarTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Riff, 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
