Yusef Komunyakaa: Special Issue || Yusef Komunyakaa's Blues: The Postmodern Music of Neon Vernacular

Yusef Komunyakaa's Blues: The Postmodern Music of Neon VernacularAuthor(s): Keith LeonardSource: Callaloo, Vol. 28, No. 3, Yusef Komunyakaa: Special Issue (Summer, 2005), pp. 824-849Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805787 .

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YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA'S BLUES

The Postmodern Music of Neon Vernacular

by Keith Leonard

If the ultimate sources for poetry and jazz are the life of the emotions, the extreme difficulty of describing that life, and the

great spiritual cost of not trying to describe it, then poetry and

jazz are rooted at the very center of what it's like to be human.

?William Mathews1

A loneliness

lingers like a silver needle under my black skin, as I try to feel how it is to scream for help through a horn.

?Yusef Komunyakaa, from "February in Sydney"2

In his 1993 volume Neon Vernacular, Yusef Komunyakaa, whose poetry is often associated with jazz, includes poems that suggest that the most important and most fundamental component of jazz music and of his own poetics is the individual artist's

improvisational expression of a fundamental human loneliness lingering beneath black skin. More important than the form of the music and the heritage from which it comes is the mind that makes it, a mind isolated in more fundamental ways than can be accounted for by analyzing the operations of racism. With this definition, which is

ultimately of the nature of consciousness rather than of the nature of music, Komun?

yakaa's verse refutes longstanding ideas about absolute racial difference at the heart of both Anglo-American and African-American literary study and posits introspection as an alternative to the social logic of identity politics that guides both bodies of criticism. On the one hand, instead of seeking only to characterize an exclusive racial

community in terms of its social circumstances, Komunyakaa asserts that the African-

American experience of social exclusion and consequent "loneliness" exemplifies a

universal human condition of existential isolation and a necessity for self-expression. On the other hand, rather than claiming to transcend difference, Komunyakaa implies that this expressive necessity is necessarily manifest in distinctive cultural forms. Not

just the "'always already' of Afro-American culture," as Houston Baker called them, the improvisational forms of African-American music are the public enactment of the

African-American individual's common human agency to define and to validate him

Callaloo 28.3 (2005) 825-849



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CALLALOO

or herself through personalized, idiosyncratic versions of the received cultural forms and discourses that might otherwise isolate the person in a world without absolute

meaning (Baker 3). Improvisation also allows such persons to expect to garner the

sympathy of others who share this isolation. Neither exclusively ethnic cultural self- definition nor an erasure of difference, improvisation in Komunyakaa's verse is a

postmodern introspective practice that rewrites the social discourses that create and

justify exclusion, including but not limited to racism, making it the defining activity of the mind. Improvisation therefore becomes the defining process of all human

identity. This approach to African-American identity and jazz poetics constitutes a distinc-

tive and fairly new strategy for using African-American music in poetic artistry. Komunyakaa's practice turns attention away from the idea in African-American

literary and cultural studies that ethnic affirmation needs to be predicated entirely upon principles of difference, without falling into the opposite trap of suggesting that the primary ideal of the artist is to articulate some putative "universal" that transcends the limits of race into models of cultural homogeneity. In fact, his notion of jazz improvisation is so unconventional that his use of the music in his poetry is largely neglected in most studies of his work, much of which favors the more explicitly political analysis of his Vietnam poems?as in Kevin Stein's discussion of the African- American soldier's internal life as a private mode of public history, or Stein's direct concern with race politics, and in Alvin Aubert's discussion of Komunyakaa's poetry as a critique of canon politics. After all, most jazz-poetry scholars define the subgenre in terms of how closely the written text of a poem mirrors musical sound, providing only limited terms for characterizing Komunyakaa's practice, which is based on his belief that jazz poems "need not have an overt jazz theme as such" but need only "embrace the whole improvisational spirit of jazz" (Gotera 222). Whether it is Stephen Henderson's insightful claim that black music as poetic reference contains a "massive concentration of black experiential energy" (Henderson 47) or Kimberly Benston's

provocative assertion that "black music is thus made to take up what we might call the ordeal of authority and meaning at the heart of modern black performance" in order to "renovate" blackness (Benston 117,145), the most persuasive conceptualizations of African-American music in literary art treat the music as a set of forms and practices for the almost exclusive use of African-American self-definition and political subver- sion based on an "authentic" set of cultural forms.3 The music certainly is a locus of distinctive ethnic-cultural expression, cultural authority, and the disruption of racist discourse through improvisational discursive revision, but for Komunyakaa, whose

emphasis is on the individual psyche rather than cultural performance or communal

heritage, such authority serves to define the most fundamental components of a shared human consciousness. In construing jazz in these terms, Komunyakaa pursues a discursive disruption of notions of difference that complicate both African-Amer? ican ethnic-cultural assumptions and racism.

Like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray before him, Komunyakaa illuminates how the music's improvisational spirit rejects the limited political mandates by which the music has been consigned to exclusive ethnic-cultural difference by using it to revise

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that old literary bugbear, the universal: "Music was the main thread that linked us to the future, was a process of reclaiming ourselves. Being in motion?improvisation, becoming?this was the root of our creativity" (Kelly 646). The music revolves around a shared "creativity" rather than a shared social condition of victimization, a distinction that "reclaims" African-American music as a process of self-definition rather than an exclusively black discursive practice available only to the black artist who is dedicated to defining blackness against racism. In fact, in a 1992 interview, Komun?

yakaa declared that African-American poets of his generation were no longer providing what he called "service literature"?no longer seeking "the wand of approval and

recognition as a mere human being" (Kelly 653)?but were instead producing a more

"introspective poetry" that contradicts racism with the complexity of the poet's internal life rather than with protests of social inequalities (Gotera 222). This claim is

particularly important, given the fact that at the time he made this statement in a 1990 interview the dominant conceptions of African-American poetry were Henderson's Under standing the New Black Poetry, in which musical reference was explained as

exclusively about black experience, and Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices: The Mission

of African American Poetry, where music was likewise seen as a central means to achieve the "mission" of an ethnic literary history. Komunyakaa also made the claim at a time when theories of African-American literary culture in general, made by scholars like Houston Baker, Henry Louis Gates, and Paul Gilroy, were ignoring poetry, neglecting its capacity to enact the discursive challenges, and signifying practices by which these scholars were redefining the "service" that literature provid- ed as the construction of a complex and evolving ethnic self.

This scholarly emphasis on the discursive implicitly dismissed the lyric as too local in its vision and described its introspection as a naive universalism. As Baker put it, the "sound lessons" of poststructuralism had "reoriented" the thinking of African- American literary scholars away from the notion of a distinctive subjectivity and, by extension, the idea that cultural distinctiveness could be understood without recourse to notions of an exclusive discursive environment. That reoriented thinking has made it difficult for scholars to conceive of the individual consciousness as a constructed

component of ethnic cultural heritage and to recognize it as a defining and affirming component of black subjectivity. Understanding Komunyakaa's claim will lead to an

understanding of how his verse transforms an ethnically distinctive practice into a mode of poetry capable of affirming the most fundamental human creativity?both conscious and subconscious?as the source of that concrete difference, making the "universal" and the ethnic in literature into the same thing?improvisational self- constitution.

This idea of the isolated consciousness in Komunyakaa's work represents that

entity as both a socially constructed ideal of selfhood and as a fundamental compo? nent of the human animal, an overlap of conception that removes consciousness from

the realm of psychology and locates it in the "natural" world, a practice that clarifies

Komunyakaa's remarkably consistent use of nature imagery in discussing modes of mind. It also distinguishes it from naive and often politically retrograde conceptions of the "universal" Enlightenment individual. In effect, Komunyakaa's definition of

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improvisation makes racial difference, individuality, and shared human values and ideals into mutually informing aspects of one another in a practice of individual and collective self-definition rather than mutually exclusive components of the Man- ichean racial universe, an innovation that extends to its fullest reach the complex insights of scholars like Baker and Benston. This mode or conception of consciousness is a version of what Baker called a discursive "blues matrix" of cultural understanding in which the blues singer "lustily transform[s] experiences of a durative (unceasingly oppressive) landscape into the energies of rhythmic song." In this formulation, the artist's mind and song constitute a "juncture" that is "polymorphous and multidirec-

tional, [a] scene of arrivals and departures, [a] place betwixt and between" (Baker 7). As Baker makes clear, that shared and isolated mind is not "transcendent" of race, as

Angela Salas suggests of Komunyakaa's ideal (Salas). It is, instead, historically embedded in a particular welter of cultural forces and forms. But unlike Baker's

implication that this matrix is exclusively ethnic, Komunyakaa's broader version of

jazz poetics suggests that this matrix is also emotional, gendered, and informed by class, and is motivated by a common need for expression, a "matrix" of social

components that interact and refute the major limiting notions of identity?from biological difference and inferiority to transcendent universal commonality to authentic ethnic difference. With this principle, Komunyakaa's verse offers a more

powerful affirmation of cultural difference by emphasizing the common emotions and imagination and the shared "durative landscape" from which that difference

emerges, the experiential manifestations that diversify it and give it fuller, more accurate meaning. This postmodern middle ground is based in the idea that racial difference is multiple not binary, as even Baker's brilliant conception ultimately suggests, and that individual "consciousness" has the capacity to synthesize binaries

provisionally, momentarily, in expression, much like Baker's blues singer. Introspec- tion for Komunyakaa is therefore not constituted by the singular Enlightenment self but rather by an African-American selfhood determined as much by its shifting internal dynamics as by its social relationships, a distinction that substitutes inter-

locking modes of commonality and difference for the strategic essentialism of identity politics and the white supremacist essentialism of racism. In this practice, the African- American mind is its own best defense against an existential isolation through improvisation because that which constitutes it defies the fixing effects of racist discourse and Western binary logic. And, again, this activity is necessary for all minds and is exemplified not by Shakespeare but by jazz.

I call Komunyakaa's approach to jazz improvisation in verse a postmodern music because I want to locate his unique strategy of resistance outside the standard logic of ethnic cultural affirmation?usually blackness against whiteness?by clarifying its resemblance to the conclusions derived from contemporary theories' postmodern poetics, theories that are much more comfortable with multiplicity than are most models of African-American literary study. I am suggesting, first of all, that Komun?

yakaa's aesthetic affirms Werner Sollors's simple and accurate insight that ethnicity "is not a thing but a process," an unexplored implication of Baker's idea of a blues matrix (Sollors xv).4 In effect, Komunyakaa's verse identifies how the communal

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identity prized by jazz-poetry scholars is constituted within what Sollors called the "codes of socialization" within and against which individual identity constructs

itself, a culturally constructed and historically shifting framework (a polymorphous, multidirectional matrix) that provides the raw material for the "improvisational" mind (Sollors x). Cultural specificity thus becomes the framework within which

individuality makes sense at the same time that individuality gives central components of meaning to that framework as it is actually lived, solidifying its "energies" of meaning in song. Komunyakaa's conception of jazz improvisation is therefore

persuasively understood as his version of what Aldon Lynn Nielsen called the

"languages of African-American postmodernism," the avant-garde practices through which African-American poets highlight the artificiality of the languages and categories of race (including ethnic authenticity) using nonrepresentational experiments in

poetic structure and sound (Nielsen). Regarding little-studied African-American

experimental poets, Nielsen suggests, and Komunyakaa acknowledges, how the

endlessly deferred and improvisationally constructed nature of identity both motivates and defies attempts at linguistic meaning, making expression a transforming process of meaning-making that is dependent upon its own inadequacy. Rather than

affirming a history of difference alone, then, the jazz-blues consciousness, as Komu?

nyakaa represents it, refutes what Charles Altieri called the dominant culture's

"commodified cultural order," foregrounding the materiality of language?its embodiment of empowered discursive meaning and its use as commodity?in order to undermine the capacity of that language to impose its norms on the human emotional life (Altieri 205).5 Those norms include the idea of a stable self in liberal humanism and the associated white bourgeois individualism in US public discourse, norms that make the "universal" into extensions of this racist cultural order. The poet's attempt to resist such discursive power locates the dynamics of the individual mind in its

capacity to resist what Altieri calls the society's idealization "[aligned] with version of truth or myth or even of sensibility that can easily be identified with failed

ideologies and class interests" (Altieri 204). Komunyakaa's poetry is distinctive in

envisioning how the interaction of consciousness, jazz poetics, and the blues form undermines attempts to idealize and fix them, attempts of which even black scholars are guilty. Komunyakaa thus rewrites the "universal" lyric "I," loosening it from its associations with a Eurocentric normative perspective by locating it in improvisation.

Any full appreciation of Komunyakaa's jazz poetics must begin with his accurate claim that both communal cultural selfhood and shared humanity gain their mean-

ings from the individual emotional complexity manifest in improvisational expressive forms as that combination constructs and gives substance to so-called transcendent ideals and/or communal values. Those transcendent ideals remain constructs to

Komunyakaa but are based on a genuinely universal dynamic of consciousness that is translated into need and desire in his verse, needs and desires that lead the individual mind always to resist the constructs alleged to fulfill those needs. To make this case, I argue that Neon Vernacular (1993), Komunyakaa's most important volume, is dominated by a jazz-blues aesthetic that represents ethnicity not as a political

loyalty or an entirely distinctive cultural heritage but as a particular individual's

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psychological, emotional, and cultural experience realized in expressive form. Start-

ing with poems explicitly inspired by jazz, I clarify how Komunyakaa identities the most fundamental meaning of the music as its enactment of the process of mind that I will call consciousness. I then demonstrate how this consciousness is the foundation for Komunyakaa's explorations of all his major themes, even in poems without an

explicit connection to jazz. I also illuminate how this approach redefines the political meaning and agency of ethnic affirmation by locating it in the validation of the individual consciousness as it defies social categorization. As a result, aesthetic identification depends on a reader's sympathetic recognition of this process of self-

expression based on a shared isolation. Finally, I identify how these interlocking ideals of expression, self-definition, and community through individual identifica? tion?as enhanced by formal innovations?encourage readers to the imaginative self- consciousness necessary to refute false notions of difference. I conclude that, with these innovations, Komunyakaa's verse makes improvisation the defining human universal.

Rather than starting with the politics of race, then, I start my analysis of Komun?

yakaa's innovative rewriting of jazz poetics, African-American ethnicity, and the ideal of human commonality with these powerful postmodern existential effects of

lingering loneliness that constitute this jazz-blues consciousness. To put it in Komu?

nyakaa's words, jazz is a means to get at "the emotional mystery behind things," and the blues is an "existential melancholy based on an acute awareness" linked to "a kind of psychological survival." Both characterizations imply what Ralph Ellison famous-

ly asserts, that the blues is "the impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-

tragic, near-comic lyricism" (Ellison 78-79; italics added). Not primarily an attempt to "solidify communal values and heighten communal morale," as Shirley Ann Williams put it, jazz or blues artistry for Komunyakaa and Ellison is predicated on the

impulse to expression, the desire or need for self-articulation (not even necessarily the articulation itself) from which the individual derives ongoing and evolving practices to console and to provide the primary defense against the loss of meaning and

certainty. This impulse is, in Komunyakaa's verse, what makes consciousness possible. This "impulsive" mind is the foundation of Komunyakaa's jazz poetics, even in

explicit jazz poems like "February in Sydney." The poem is set in Sydney, Australia, where the poet lived for a time, and it uses that locale to provide a physical embodiment of the personal, emotional isolation of the African-American speaker. In

effect, Australia functions in this poem as a less racist version of Africa in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: it is physical locale as analogy for consciousness. In this

environment, after recalling a Dexter Gordon performance of "April in Paris" and the film 'Round Midnight in an attempt to feel at home, the speaker of the poem relives a

recurring, even archetypal racial experience: "another scene keeps repeating itself: / I emerge from a dark theater, / passing a woman who grabs her red purse / & hugs it to her like a heart attack" (178). This actual racist event?an emblem of the

universality of oppressive and alienating discourses?momentarily pushes the mem-

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ories of the music out of the speaker's head. But to compensate for the rage and alienation that this typical gesture of prejudice provokes, the speaker aligns himself with a community of people, some of them jazz musicians like "Bud, Prez, Webster & The Hawk" whose "names run together / like mellifluous riffs," and who have

experienced similar slights. They even become the music, either as these "mellifluous riffs" or as "painful gods" who "jive talk through / bloodstained reeds & shiny brass,"

functioning in their individual instances as the "anesthetic" the music is as a whole

(178). In dealing with his anger, then, the speaker finds in his musical pantheon and in the technique or "form" of the saxophonist Dexter Gordon's horn solo ("Tremolo: Dexter comes back to rest / behind my eyelids.") what the scholar Houston Baker describes as a cultural space in which "familiar antinomies [of racial stereotypes and other oppressive discourses] are resolved (dissolved) in the office of adequate cultur? al understanding" (Baker 7). In effect, musical texture becomes communal connec-

tion, creating a harmonious and momentary consolation for the race hatred and alienation clutched in that red purse. In these terms, the poem reiterates the oft-

acknowledged capacity of African-American music to "solidify communal values and heighten communal morale."

But the key distinction is that the poem emphasizes the speaker's isolation rather than his relationship to community, implying in addition that the poem is an act of existential self-creation equivalent to (not lesser than) the jazz music to which it refers. In other words, the poem does not merely recite jazz or blues conventions, nor does it attempt to sound like jazz music. Rather, it tries to use the music as a metaphor and model of a mode of mind by which the isolated individual can reject the inimical discourses evoked in his mind by the woman's racist act. As in much of Komunya? kaa's verse, then, such an all-too-familiar racist act functions as a challenge to

personal as well as cultural meaning, creating an existential as well as a social angst. Thus, as the "unreadable faces from the human void / float like torn pages across the bus / windows," they enhance the anxiety caused by the woman's act in the unfamil- iar context of Australia because those faces are like the scripts of human communion shredded by each individual racist act. This ripping of the discourse of human unity necessitates the counterbalance of the more familiar spirit of jazz?and its alternative

script of unity?in the speaker's mind: "Dexter Gordon's tenor sax / plays 'April in Paris' / inside my head all the way back / on the bus from Double Bay" (178). The

speaker finds little in the outside world to depend on, including the ideals of

community associated with African-American music. Instead, "loneliness lingers" even after Dexter Gordon's solo returns in his mind, because the meaning of that solo refers not to any external cultural order or to communal values but to Dexter Gordon's own emotional order. In other words, the script of unity in jazz music is no more

externally validated than Enlightenment rationalism or the American mythos of democratic unity. The speaker "tries" to feel how it is to scream for help through a horn and, though he arguably succeeds, the silent, imagined scream is primarily for himself and is not a communal morale boost. As such, the poem should be read as an internal monologue that "improvises" a sense of self in order to defend the psyche against inimical cultural meanings, an act of expression analogous to Gordon's solo,

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which is also internally directed before or while being directed outward. And the

poem does so without resembling or referring to jazz sound or form. It is a postmod? ern momentary stay against confusion. This model of existential jazz poetry is

replicated throughout the "Copacetic" section oiNeon Vernacular, including in poems like "Villon / Leadbelly," "Copacetic Mingus," and "Elegy for Thelonious." In each of these poems, the speaker finds in the music an internal order for his emotional

experience, finding momentary order for the chaos of experience that validates the chaos as much as the order.

In other words, the effects of the poem?like the effects of the speaker's imagined scream?are analogous to the effect of jazz music but are ultimately independent of the music. It is, instead, a new "form" of expression of consciousness that is more

important than the heritage of musical forms that inspire it. Thus, "February in

Sydney" does not privilege the oral vernacular forms of jazz as a more valid expres? sion of African-American identity than formal poetics, an implication in most jazz- poetry scholarship (Jones 68).6 As Nielsen points out, such assumptions reinforce a

faulty opposition between the oral and the written that underestimates the complex written strategies through which African-American poets capture African-American oral culture (Nielsen 15).7 Moreover, as I am suggesting here, such a faulty opposition also reinf orces the erasure of the possibility of theorizing an individual consciousness in modes of literary thought too committed to understanding African-American culture in its totality. Thus, as Meta DuEwa Jones perceptively observes, jazz-poetry scholars should analyze "the graphic aspect of each author's poetics" in order "to

prevent 'the great wailing of jazz' from drowning out the presence of other artistic influences that structure their work" (Jones 77). In Komunyakaa's case, the "wailing of jazz" is important not for its sound or greater authenticity but for its model of

improvisational self-constitution, what Komunyakaa called "a tonal thread holding the poem together, whereby we are able to make leaps not necessarily through logic, but through feeling" (Gotera 219). What matters is the moment of emotional unity that

improvisation as personal script allows and that constitutes the logic of a given moment of expression and of the consciousness that makes and is made by it. And in

"February in Sydney," that tonal logic is determined not by sound but by the accentual verse form in which the consistent use of three or four accents per line allows the line to extend or shorten in length to mirror the process of consciousness rather than the sound of music. The impression is of a lack of structure, "improvisa? tion," a shifting music, though the rhythm is actually quite regular, a free verse that

is, of course, not at all free. Almost all of Komunyakaa's poems are structured with such accentual verse or "variable feet," thus inviting analogous modes of analysis of the "graphic" as a component of sonic texture. This "hidden" structure is consistent and balanced in much the same way that the repetition of Dexter's horn solo and of the racist act in the poem imply the eternal coexistence of these two poles in the

speaker's mind. This emphasis on the individual consciousness (rather than subjectivity) does not

need to undermine the ideals of community central to the music. In fact, Komunyakaa uses his verse to imagine more persuasively how the musical or poetic representation of introspection maintains the capacity to unify. But for Komunyakaa that unity is not

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a given. It is constructed in each moment of expression along with the construction of

subjectivity, an ideal that prevents conceptions of aesthetic effect and communal

unity from being rendered static parts of the commodified cultural order that delimits the black self and that maintains the various modes of cultural hierarchy that subordinates and alienates black people. This agency of communal unity, which starts with how self-constitution defies the discourses that alienate, is best exemplified in "Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance Poets of the Harold Park Hotel," which I quote it in its entirety:

the need gotta be so deep words can't answer simple questions all night long notes stumble off the tongue & color the air indigo so deep fragments of gut & flesh cling to the song you gotta get into it so deep salt crystallizes on eyelashes the need gotta be so deep you can vomit up ghosts & not feel broken till you are no more than a half ounce of gold in painful brightness you gotta get into it blow that saxophone so deep all the sex & dope in this world can't erase your need to howl against the sky the need gotta be so deep you can't

just wiggle your hips & rise up out of it chaos in the cosmos modern man in the pepperpot you gotta get hooked into every hungry groove so deep the bomb locked in rust opens like a fist into it into it so deep rhythm is pre-memory the need gotta be basic animal need to see & know the terror

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we are made of honey cause if you wanna dance this boogie be ready to let the devil use your head for a drum (176-77)

On the one hand, the poem simply characterizes the individual jazz-blues conscious? ness as Ellison's "impulse" for expression, the motivation for the scream of a horn

solo, or the silent scream of an introspective poem. It is an act of bravado in which the

speaker implicitly claims to be more capable of poetic expression than performance poets, whose acts seem to have disappointed. This sutra?or knowledge?that the

poet offers is rooted in a greater attention to the dynamics of consciousness than the conventions that adhere even to the performance poetry which bills itself as anti- conventional. The impulse that the speaker validates as the proper alternative emerges from and is constituted by a need "so deep" and urgent it bears repeating in a two-

part refrain that provides an organizing frame for the structured improvisation of African-American self-creation: "the need gotta be / so deep," and "you gotta get into it / so deep." The poem alternates between going to the "depths" of the individual

psyche and rising up to expression in each of three loosely defined and "improvised" sections, as in: "so deep all the sex and dope in this world / can't erase your need / to howl against the sky." Even as the poem's speaker addresses the external "you," then, the instructions it gives pertain as much to the poet-speaker as to the implied audience, tying the explicit "you" to the implicit "me," making the "you" and "me" a melange of the speaker's self. The performance poets at the Harold Park Hotel may be listening, and they certainly need to, but what matters is that the speaker hears himself. Arguably, such conventions as capitalization evoke public address, and by eschewing them the poet hints at introspection rather than externalization. Also, that

rejection of convention speaks to the speaker's advice to the inept performance poets. On the other hand, in defining this model for the source of performance poetry, this

poem goes beyond this power of introspection and "howling against the sky" to

represent how consciousness defies the logic of the very language?and the associated cultural conventions and social roles?by which it dialogues with itself and with the world. Though clearly not the primary aim of the poem, this defiance derives from the sense that the source of inspiration?consciousness itself?cannot be fixed. It therefore defies the conventions of performance poetry. Even if the need for self-

exploration is an "animal need"?a "natural" component of human being, and even if rhythm is "pre-memory"?an instinctual commitment to moving on beat, neither the self nor its rhythm is entirely inherent or biological. The preexisting "rhythm" is

actually, paradoxically, conditional upon our being "into it into it," that is, upon our

consciously pursuing it. Getting to the heart of the psyche for inspiration is never an

entirely complete process because that process of removing overlays of poetic con? ventions and associated social and cultural discourses is paradoxically achieved

through the layering of language. Whatever there may be of "pre-memory" cannot be accessed entirely and, when accessed at all, gains its meaning through the language it allegedly precedes and certainly resists. Take, for example, "you gotta get hooked /

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into every hungry groove / so deep the bomb locked / in rust opens like a fist." The

implication of a preexisting "it" of the self is complicated by the paradox of the

simultaneously opened and closed fist of a bomb, as if the openness of an explosion could be simply compared to a closed fist. This image suggests that whatever mystery is at the heart of the imaginative consciousness remains locked, even though the identification of the openly locked self still has the impact of a punch or a Black-Power salute (or an explosion, of course). Although rejecting the worst simplicities of Black Power nationalism, then, Komunyakaa asserts an antiracist power of individual self-

knowledge for African-American people, located in the validation generated by the

complexity of deferral, a kind of fission reaction, if you will, in which the dispersal of

meaning (not its ethnically affirming consolidation) is a source of the "energy" or

power of self-knowledge. This pursuit of the self breaks apart fixed notions of identity by revealing how the apparent clarity of the terms used to describe that allegedly fixed self belies their inadequacy. It also implies that creativity is a process parallel to the

process of the mind or self and only bounded by these inimical discourses predicated on the assertion of the self into various social hierarchies. By being aware of this play of consciousness, the speaker advises, performance poets could find true sources for their expression and could therefore reach their audience. If the "natural" dynamics of mind necessitate innovation, then holding on to static categories of race and

imagination militates against the possibility of achievement poetry. Thus, in reading "Blue Light Lounge Sutra," what the reader?like the speaker?

finds is a simultaneously happy and melancholic inadequacy of language, a joyous "riffing" on these received, inadequate notions of selfhood, or, as Albert Murray put it in his definition of the blues, "a strategy for acknowledging the fact that life is a lowdown dirty shame and for improvising or riffing on the exigencies of the predic- ament" (Murray 16). After all, the poem starts by saying that the need is so deep "words can't / answer simple questions," implying an inherent and "natural"

creativity that has sometimes been associated with black identity even as it articulates the low-down, dirty shame that the (black) self has been silenced. But with referents and antecedents unspecified, the pronouns and metaphors provide no definition of "it" in the poem at all, despite appearances. The "it" and "need" seem to be synonymous at times, but most of the time the poem asserts that we "need" get into "it." What does it mean to need to get into need? Or if "need" is not synonymous with "it," then what is "it"? And what is "this boogie," if not the poem itself? If the poem is the boogie, how does a poem let the devil use one's head for a drum? The poem questions all of its own implied and explicit descriptions of its own sources of meaning, ideally provoking the reader to recognize that the ultimate rejection of essentialism of all sorts is the result of this pursuit of this essentialist need itself. There is no primitive essence here, after all, no inherent capacity to dance or sing, even as we seek that inherent capacity to find voice. Essentialism, primitivism, romantic inspiration? these discourses are all resisted by the mind that makes the music. There is only desire, the welter of emotions and sensations that are never entirely distinct from the discourses that construct them, and the pursuit of a capacity to separate emotion from discourse. This desire and pursuit creates that self and its momentary capacity to

express itself.

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In short, consciousness for Komunyakaa is neither entirely discursive nor inherent, an evasive condition that allows this mind to be the source both of genuine creativity for performance poets and, more broadly, for the agency by which that mind resists the oppressive discourses that construct it. This postmodern mode of self-creation redefines the political terms of jazz poetics by making thought into political resistance and the recording of thought in a poem into a revisionist agency, shifting the antiracist

agency of the music subtly from heritage of form to the mind that makes the heritage and that is framed by it. In contrast to Williams's assertion that "the internal strategy of the blues is action, rather than contemplation" and that "the impulse to action is inherent in any blues which functions out of a collective purpose" (Williams 125),

contemplation is action for Komunyakaa because, without such individual self-

creation, the meaning of the individual African-American self is left to the whim of a

powerful (racist) other, and any action derived from it would merely remain tied to the limiting logic of the existing social order. The central irony of the poem is that, in

contemplating his own silence in the face of incompetent performance poets, the

speaker "provides" this poem which, though an internal monologue, defies these taboos in the external world. We as readers are privy to this contemplation of silence and expression and, by being in the speaker's head, we "hear" him speak himself into existence without, in the "plot" of the poem, really speaking at all. As Mark Sanders

put it in describing what he called Sterling Brown's "Afro-modernism," such poems refute how "objectified blackness [in modernist literary discourses and practices] serves as a repository of reifying antithesis" by which "whiteness, the sign of

humanity, intelligence, and civilization, achieves coherence." In essence, "the claim of historicity . . . [and] of both social and psychic complexity [become] the salient

rejoinder to assertions of black absence, antithesis [and] stasis" (Sanders 75). Like Brown's blues poems, "Blue Light Lounge Sutra" represents a psychic complexity of the speaker that he does not entirely recognize, but since readers can see it, that

complexity maintains its antiracist agency. The speaker's self is circumscribed but not determined by the silencing taboos. Thus, a self-creating identity, with all of its

contradictions, is, as Komunyakaa put it, "almost Hegelian. We refused to become

only an antithesis?lost and incomplete" (Kelly 646). Improvisational thoughts are antiracist acts, a rejection of antithesis more by implication than by intention, especially since the poem even more fully enacts the poet's mind.

Not only does the poet's mind represent an ideal of these speakers' minds, then, it

provides for Komunyakaa the most substantive ground for the "collective purpose" and communal values of the blues. In the two above poems, the reader is asked to

identify with a speaker's process of mind, a point upon which Komunyakaa elabo- rates in several other poems as being the process that gives the social and historical communities their most substantive connection, a meaning to their community be?

yond the associations of shared social identities and circumstances. "Fog Galleon," the very first poem of Neon Vernacular, most explicitly clarifies how communal association and communal values are implications of the acts of the individual

introspective mind:

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Horse-headed clouds, flags & pennants tied to black Smokestacks in swamp mist. From the quick green calm Some nocturnal bird calls

Ship ahoy, ship ahoyl I press against the taxicab Window. I'm back here, interfaced With a dead phosphorescence; The whole town smells Like the world's oldest anger. Scabrous residue hunkers down under Sulfur & dioxide, waiting For sunrise, like cargo On a phantom ship outside Gaul. (3)

The speaker?an artist figure, presumably Komunyakaa himself?returns to Boga? lusa, Louisiana, and its paper mills and confronts a past that he clearly rejected by leaving. In fact, however difficult this homecoming is, the imagination allows the

speaker to create an insulating beauty that is, in effect, a self-imposed silence and the worst possible political implications of introspective poetry. Even when in the town, the imagination continues to reject that past. This speaker's reluctance to participate in self-awareness is clear in his admission that "I am back here," which first of all declares that he has been away, both literally and figuratively, then also implies resistance to being back. Thus, in addition to the surreal images and the self-

consciously literary non sequitur of a phantom ship, the speaker personifies a "scabrous residue" as waiting for the light of dawn, ignoring the people who actually wait for the dawn to go to work and who are presumably affected physically by that residue. The return is associated with a "dead phosphorescence" of a past whose aura remains with the speaker just as scent sometimes remains in clothes and on skin long after the source is gone. The speaker is "interfaced" despite his attempt to use his

imagination to avoid the "smell" of the town's anger. The implication is that by being beautified imaginatively, the phosphorescence of this past can be contained and the

speaker can avoid being "back." This kind of self-absorption and escapism is exactly what Williams was rejecting in her defense of the blues, a musical form that came under fire in the Black Arts Movement for its failure to call to action. Poets like Sonia Sanchez wrote poems in which explicit action took precedence over the emotional action of the blues that Ellison defines as its impulse and that Komunyakaa reclaims in his introspective poetry. But Komunyakaa, in describing the escape, has already acknowledged that it is not possible.

What's more, Komunyakaa proclaims that even this escapist imagination is the

very means by which community is possible for the isolated, introspective jazz-blues consciousness, a paradox that goes a long way toward explaining how an existential music has come to be understood so simply as a communal music. Again, conscious?

ness, in its activity, defies the discourses that construct it?in this case, in both the

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process and product of achieved formal art rather than a plotted meditation on failed

performance. The cool of the taxicab window evokes the traditional idea that art is

transparent in order to suggest the ideal central to postmodern poetics that it is the

poem's materiality and opacity?not its transparency?that motivates individual self-awareness and the recognition of a common social condition and a common

process of mind.

Cool glass against my cheek Pulls me from the black schooner On a timeless sea?everything Dwarfed beneath the papermill Lights blinking behind the cloudy Commerce of wheels, of chemicals That turn workers into pulp When they fall into vats Of steamy serenity. (3)

The cool reality of the window implies that the poem's use of metaphor is mystifying rather than illuminating, as the title "Fog Galleon" suggests, because the materiality of the window?like the materiality of all art, including performance?reminds the

speaker that metaphors always implicitly acknowledge the "reality" from which they separate the viewer. Though the purpose is to create a fog of escape, then, those surreal metaphors and analogies call attention to their own absurdity, even if the viewer privileges the abstraction that a given metaphor was meant to convey. Behind the flight of imagination is a material factory with material scabrous chemicals and with actual, embodied workers who are sometimes literally turned into pulp "when

they fall into vats / of steamy serenity," a serenity that is analogous to the speaker's alienating self-absorption. Despite the speaker's best efforts, then, the process of

writing the poem?like his resting on an allegedly isolating window?brings him back to the reality he seeks to escape. Or, to put it another way, the analogy between the factory and a phantom ship is superceded by the more valid analogy between the two kinds of f alse serenity shared by the speaker and the workers, the process of mind that aligns them with the discourses of individualism, isolation, and social mobility that oppress or separate them. Sharing a history of exploitation, the speaker and the workers become a community only when they constantly recognize those conditions of exploitation created by the wheels of commerce and the discourses?like imaginative escapism or an art transcendent of the social world?that facilitate and "justify" that exploitation. If they do not recognize how they are constructed discursively and alienated physically, they will be destroyed by those wheels in part through accepting the "idealization" of their situation, which, as Altieri put it, consists of "failed

ideologies and class interests." The capitalists would be perfectly happy to have art facilitate the "serenity" of the false ideology of a transcendent universal. In this way, the speaker consciously and actively recognizes his kinship and embraces it by the

self-recognition facilitated by the art by which he sought to escape that recognition. Contemplation is indeed communal action.

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That "Fog Galleon" is the first poem in the volume is crucial?it anticipates the variations on the theme of how this jazz-blues consciousness creates the postmodern African-American and human "community" by recognizing itself in its process of

inevitably incomplete becoming and in creating the artistic conditions by which its

implied interlocutor canbe constructedby, and (ideally) can enact analogous process? es of, self-creation. Instead of thinking of community as preexisting, in other words, even given a common racial heritage and common social circumstance, Komunyakaa sees it as likewise a self-conscious act of the mind and part of the means by which

"psychic complexity" prevents African Americans from becoming an antithesis: "the world is so large, and we are so small. How dare an artist not imagine the world from the perspective of someone other than himself? It's all part of the on-going dialogue we must have between ourselves and the world" (Salas 36). Community in African- American music is generated by a self-conscious act of sympathetic role-playing, and a difficult one at that, a mode of awareness that actively constructs and then claims

kinship with others who share an empirical commonality that does not actually necessitate emotional community, even if, politically speaking, we think it should.8 By speaking of her own pain to herself, the jazz-blues artist motivates the hearer or reader to speak his pain to himself. If successful, the speaker and hearer recognize them? selves in each other, not in some mirroring or sameness, but in the recognition of the shared process or activity of the mind itself. This act of sympathy or self-recognition invites community with those whose social circumstances are quite different: and Salas points out very well how many different non-African-American characters

Komunyakaa inhabits (Salas 36).9 These effects are predicated for Komunyakaa on the

acknowledged desire for an independent and self-unified consciousness, a desire that is the defining component of that consciousness.

In "Songs for My Father," for example, Komunyakaa confirms this consciousness as the source of community by making the reader's mind, as constructed by the poem, the ultimate locus of the poet's love for his father. Defying discourses of masculinity that, in their Freudian terms, are also discourses of a white Western world, the poem conceives of love as a shared imaginative process. Invoking the jazz song of the same name by the Horace Silver Quartet, this improvised sonnet sequence depicts in fourteen lyrics of fourteen lines of varying lengths how a deep-seated masculine

competition between father and son motivated the failure of identification. That failure is ideally resolved in the postmodern materiality of poetic language in which the insights of the reader substitute for an "actual" connection between father and son.

I told my brothers I heard You & mother making love, Your low moans like a blues

Bringing them into the world. I didn't know if you were laughing Or crying. I held each one down & whispered your song in their ears. Sometimes I think they're still jealous Of our closeness, having forgotten

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We had to square-off and face each other,

My fists balled & cocked by haymakers. That spring I lifted as many crossties As you. They can't believe I can Remember when you had a boy's voice. (28)

Explicitly addressing the father and claiming his legacy, the speaker initiates his

attempt to re-create a bond with that father who, it becomes clear, is dead. That awareness of the father's being dead heightens the urgency of the poet's resistance to

having his isolation from his father become alienation from himself. The speaker creates this possibility by seeking to replicate the father's creative and procreative blues as an alternative to the alienating masculine competition that led to their conflict. Though a possible means to represent the shared activity of consciousness that actually makes them both "men," this claiming of the father's song?ostensibly an act of identification?motivates the speaker to subdue his brothers and then,

through the poem, to supercede the father. Superceding the father is then posited as identification with him, a "community" the reader is asked to join, even though this ideal is enacted within the very terms of masculinity that the poem is trying largely to resist. The success of these antithetical processes of competition and community depends upon how an implicitly addressed and constructed reader provides a bridge. Our sympathy must fill the void created by the fact that, ultimately, the speaker and his father never fully realized their connection.

So, though the father's engendering song?his blues while impregnating the

speaker's mother?provides a locus for possible identification, it is only like a blues, and soon gives way to masculine competition. Rather than seeing the son as partici- pating in an analogous form of self-creative expression, a similar impulse to find solace from an unavoidable discursive oppression and psychic pain, the father, like the oppressive racists who harm him, forces the son into a narrow category of

masculinity predicated on power and physical dominance.10 Thus, as in the competitive collaboration needed to build a well in the fourth section of the poem (29), the work of lifting as many crossties as the father in the first section is a victory for the son in his unspoken physical competition with the father and his brothers. The line breaks of the last three lines of the first section suggest that the little brothers can believe neither that the speaker can lift as many crossties as the father, nor that he remembers the father's blues, his "boy's voice." Their resistance to this possibility is likewise due to masculine self-definition because they too want to identify with the father. The tonal logic of this section of the poem thus revolves around this layered interaction

among expression, identification, and competition, as present participles emphasize an ongoing process of "bringing" sons into the world and crying for one's pain, in contrast to the finality of the end-stopped masculine face-off that ends self-definition.

So, though the process of creation should reclaim the young blues voice of the father,

especially when the father acknowledges the son's song, it actually leads to silence: "You smile, look into my eyes / & say you want me to write you a poem. / I stammer for words. You / Toss another stone at the dogs / & resume raking the leafless grass"

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(31-32). Even for the dogs engaged in copulation, the happy ending of loving embrace is always deferred. Creativity?that defining evidence of "shared" consciousness?is channeled into isolated modes, making it almost impossible for that creativity to create connection within those channels.

Since the speaker explicitly acknowledges that the poem can create neither a new, less competitive masculine identification nor any other presumptive form of commu?

nity with the father, it simultaneously creates and addresses two other "readers," the

speaker's self and an implied addressee who is constructed as a more capable reader than the father. The poem, then, is first of all a sustaining organization of memory and

introspection for the poet-speaker, a rewriting of his relationship that ideally rewrites the discourses of race and masculinity in his own mind, which is almost as important as rewriting them in the world.

Goddamn you. Goddamn you. If you hit her again, IT1 sail through That house like a dustdevil.

Everyone & everything here Is turning against you, That's why I had to tie the dog To a tree before you could chastise us. He darted like lightning through the screen door. I know you'll try to kill me When it happens. You know I'm your son & it's bound to happen. Sometimes I close my eyes till I am On a sea of falling dogwood blossoms, But someday this won't work. (29)

In this fifth section of "Songs for My Father," the present moments of anger are

represented in end-stopped lines: "Goddamn you. Goddamn you"; "He darted like

lightning through the screen door"; and even "But someday this won't work." These

end-stopped lines have the effect of counteracting the control and continuity implied by the enjambed lines dealing with possibilities that can still be avoided: "I know you will try to kill me / When it happens. You know / I am your son & it's bound to

happen." The violence of the relationship is apparently inevitable and is controlled by the poet only through different strategies of lineation, a mark of the poet's capacity for artistic control of meaning but not of material reality. Moreover, this section of the

poem is addressed neither to the father?its themes of restraint run counter to the idea that the speaker would be so bold?nor to the actual reader, as we are but voyeurs. The

speaker is talking only to himself. Therefore, the last three lines of the section

exemplify how the effort to contain violence, both physical and epistemological, places a great strain on the imagination, something akin to the avoided solipsism of

"Fog Galleon." The sea of falling blossoms is the imaginative alternative to a potentially deadly fight between the father and the son, an alternative that actually prevents the fight, an alternative that will not always work. But for now poetry sustains the

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speaker against the oppressive masculine ideals the father perpetuates in response to his own alienation caused by racism.

However, in other sections of the poem, the "you" being addressed functions more

clearly as the reader along with the father, a practice that evokes Shakespeare's complicated ideals of love and beauty in the Petrarchan sonnet tradition. Here is an influence that would have been silenced by the great "wailing" of jazz that Jones discusses. Here also is a conception of community that would have been taken too

fully for granted when that community is the defining desire of the poem. Art can immortalize a love that, in certain terms, did not exist in the embodied life of the

speaker and his father by engaging the cooperation of the reader. The poem constructs what Wolfgang Iser would call the "implied reader" as it "awaken[s] false expectations, alternately bringing about surprise and frustration, and this in turn gives rise to an esthetic experience consisting of a continuous interplay between 'deductive' and 'inductive' operations which the reader must carry out for himself" (Iser 59).u The false expectations evoked in the poem include a positive resolution of the father-son

relationship and a moment of mutual appreciation, an end of the competition. But these expectations, tied to conventional stories like those told by inept performance poets, imprison rather than liberate the mind. The reader must understand the

speaker's loving rejection of his father and his rejection of the accompanying mascu?

line, antipoetic ideas that made the father, if you will, a poor reader of poetry. As with the speaker in "Fog Galleon," the reader here must recognize a connection with others

through a shared condition and a shared desire for consciousness that we call identity. Thus the reader "becomes" the father:

You banged a crooked nail Into a pine slab,

Wanting me to believe I shouldn't have been born With hands & feet If I didn't do Your kind of work. You hated my books.

These lines evoke an almost archetypal generational conflict wherein the younger generation differs from and even supercedes the older generation, a convention that, as Iser suggests, functions as a place in which the poem incorporates a portion of the reader's world in order to challenge it. That stark line "You hated my books" evokes both the father's hatred of the books the speaker read and the distaste of an implied reader who hated the books the poet wrote, both of which are predicated implicitly on the father's preference for pragmatic, "masculine" work. The line challenges us as readers to recognize the divisive meaning-making of traditional masculinity and of

generational conflict and to avoid it in our own reading. As Altieri suggests, "Poems must [and, I would add, can] foster readerly identities that simultaneously align imaginations with specific processes confronting dominant ideological structures

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and reflect on what is at stake in the choices made as one reads" (Altieri 265).12 The choice we make as readers must be to resist the dominant ideological structure of

masculinity that dominates certain terms of literary value. In its place, we must find value in the speaker's impulse to self-constitution that may or may not reflect our own

conceptions of our own internal lives. In the end, then, literary value in Komunyakaa's jazz-blues artistry is not in the

subordination of the Other, in replicating cultural heritage, or in transcendence, but in enacting the mode of mind best capable of capturing the multiplicity of the self by which, in rejecting narrow channels of social roles and conventions, identification with other selves is possible. In other words, as both Shakespeare and Komunyakaa know, the ordering effect of poetic artifice calls attention to the reader's active

meaning-making in reading the poem, making sympathetic interpretation an act of love between reader and writer that can potentially redeem the "father" in all his Freudian symbolic implications. The logic and language of the father can become instead the intersubjectivity that the poem projects by evoking the possibility that,

through our own implication in patriarchal discourse, we can see the poet's anti-

patriarchal, anti-discursive mind. The poem ends,

Before ... I could say I loved you, you began talking money, Teasing your will with a cure in Mexico. You were skinny, bony, but strong enough to try Swaggering through that celestial door.

Not only does the father's immortality depend on the poetry he misunderstands and

disparages, but that immortality, and the poet's generous gesture in providing it,

depends on the sympathy of the "you" that is not the father and who has not died. After all, words fail the speaker who is unprepared to express his love to the father who is unprepared to hear it. The masculine will is teased by the possibility of physical survival, but the decayed body says otherwise, and both the will and body limit the

capacity of a clear and direct expression of the prospect of something shared beyond basic biological and social connections. The speaker both admires and disdains this masculine bravado (which he has inherited, as the poem itself embodies) of "swagger? ing through that celestial door." But only the poet can make that swaggering into an actual testimony to bravery, redeeming the father. And only the reader can make it matter fully. The father's masculinity fails, but the poet-speaker's poetry may not, as

long as it is read sympathetically, even in defiance of the masculine bravado of the

poet himself. If it is so read, then all that went between the father and son is finally fully shared. But the poem can leave this loving resolution only as an open question, an affirming and anticipated possibility.

What is ultimately universal in the construction of ethnic community, and what makes Komunyakaa's jazz-blues consciousness such an innovation in African-Amer? ican poetry, is change?shifting meaning, process?a point that, in "Changes; or Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road, with Two Women Talking Blues in the Kitchen," makes blackness universal:

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It's afast world

Out there, honey

They go all kinda ways.

They just buried John Henry

With that old guitar

Cradled in his arms.

Over on Fourth Street

Singing 'bout hell hounds

When he dropped dead.

You heard 'bout Jack

Right? He just tilted over

In prayer meeting.

The good & the bad go

Into the same song.

How's Hattie? She

Still uppity & half

Trying to be white?

dragging up moans from shark-infested

seas as a blood moon rises. A shock

of sunlight breaks the mood & I hear

my father's voice growing young again,

as he says, "The deviFs beating

his wife": One side of the road's rainy

& the other side's sunny. Imagination?

driftwood from a spring flood, stockpiled

by Furies. Changes. Pinetop's boogiewoogie

keys stack against each other like syllables

in tongue-tripped elegies for Lady Day

& Duke. Don't try to make any sense

of this: just let it take you

like Pres's tenor & keep you human.

Voices of school girls rush & surge

through the windows, returning

with the late March wind; the same need

pushing my pen across the page. (8-9)

In this poem that resists easy digestion, Komunyakaa provides two typographically separate columns of different fonts, a visual analogy for the poet's isolation both within the poem and in relationship to a "real" reader. That separation also stands for an ideal, if unrealized, possibility that such isolation need not be alienation, since the

"plot" of the poem is the speaker's abstracted meditations on the nature of art

juxtaposed with family gossip that would seem to be a "lower" register of thought than that of the poet. Within the poem, the poet-speaker traces his desire for expres? sion to the most basic of human impulses and activity?sexuality, self-revelation, and the ordering of experience?an imaginative motivation directly parallel to the self-

creation, communal affirmation, and the ordering of experience effected by gossip. As

such, the poem presumes but does not entirely represent a connection between its two columns in these principles of expression. But it does conjure an ideal or readerly "expectation" of unity by having the two columns "united" under one long poetic title that does enough explaining to set the stage for the discovery by "negation," as Iser

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would put it, of the principle by which the poem's form is unified. That principle includes some aspect of the blues, which, as I will show, is the introspective conscious?

ness, the universal, that blackness exemplifies. In other words, what is implied by this negation of unity is the dynamics or

strategies of reading by which that negated unity may happen in the mind of the reader and that "transcends" the most explicit of physical and social boundaries, whether of the poem's layout or of the social identities?male, female; poet, laypeo- ple; black and whoever else?that are evoked in the poem's structure. The left column records the voices of two women's "blues," the gossip by which communal mores are reinforced and through which memory and pain are ordered into expression, as in the

judgment of uppity Hattie "half / Trying to be white?" The gossipers also rehearse the death of a misunderstood artist (like Komunyakaa himself?) whose blues songs of "hell hounds" seem to justify his passing, a judgment of his sinfulness. But that

judgment is immediately tempered by the death of "Jack" in the prayer meeting. Society's values sometimes change in the process of expressing them. How could there be real judgment when all die, regardless of their goodness? These "changes" are unified by the gossipers by a word of wisdom on which Komunyakaa's poet- speaker places his faith: "the good and the bad go / into the same song." After all, the

poet's musings on changes and the imagination?which skims its subjects ("driftwood") from the "flood" of experience?resolves itself in part as follows: "Don't try to makes any sense / of this: just let it take you." Such advice lays claim to a common emotional resource, like the sexual implications of the spring flood or how the voices of "school girls rush and surge"? by which good and bad go into the same song, by which the achieved form can "take you." The communal mores affirmed by gossip are also the values of the poet's work: "The same need / pushing my pen across the page." Here the artifice, emblematic of the tension between isolation and community, implies that all that can be taken for granted is the experience of isolation and change, and the yearning for connection articulated in response. But these are also the

components of an imaginative unity that is ultimately as real as the isolation. Gossip and poetry are both unifying arts with contingent meanings whose expressions identified the most fundamentally shared components of a community?the "mind" that wants it.

These common experiences of isolation, change, and desire, though they some? times negate connection in social interaction, are the terms by which the reader can

unify the columns and thus identify the emotional commonality that is beneath or

motivating the difference. What potentially unites the speakers within the poem are the "sounds" of their voices (including the poet's internal monologue?actually "heard" by no one) as they overlap, primarily in the poet-speaker's consciousness, as

expression of common yearnings. Otherwise they overlap only when the poem is

read, if such a simultaneous reading of the two columns is possible for a single reader.

Perhaps this unity is only possible with at least two readers, a communal effect of its own. In any event, the ideal is that the speakers in the poem, to put it a bit too simply, are of one mind?the reader's, a mind that is constructed by the poem as the

polymorphous, multidirectional matrix of the blues. This effect is valid whether based on a single reader who tries to imagine the literal situation of the poet's internal

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monologue going on within the sound of two women gossiping, or on a pair or trio of readers each reading a column and its three voices. And since Komunyakaa is not at all interested in prioritizing his audience by race, as is clear by his consistent pursuit of what all his characters share, this gesture presumes that a readerly consciousness from any background can "unify" the changes that are implied to be the process of life and mind and that lead to expression. It also implies that these dynamics are uniquely recognizable in African-American culture in general and the blues in particular, since the poet's meditations and the gossip are both linked to the "blues" of the title. Riffing on the exigencies created by isolation, both poet and reader improvise antiracist connections out of individual expression. Difference is only the expression of an

underlying possibility of commonality in the ways that consciousness and expression work. That which unites is this model of black consciousness.

And this ideal of the jazz-blues mind as the most fundamental humanity is

Komunyakaa's ultimate triumph in this Pulitzer prize-winning volume. Jazz and the blues are communal music for Komunyakaa and his art is meant to have communal

effect, but only if we recognize that even the remarkably cohesive culture of jazz and blues is constituted by individuals who consciously and semiconsciously claim that

community by claiming and manipulating similar forms of expressive self-creation in

the face of a common existential dilemma. But to recognize this, we must also

recognize that identity politics and multiculturalism sometimes fix boundaries on

conceptions of selfhood in the process of celebrating difference. For Komunyakaa, we do not need to define difference or commonality in terms of one tradition's exclusive?

ly resisting the influences of another, because within and across groups, what is shared is this fundamental condition and process of mind out of which the distinctive cultural traditions emerge. Resistance and conflict are real and even necessary but need not be the terms by which human selfhood is defined, except as the constant conflict of the mind against the terms by which the world tries to fix it and by which it therefore is forced to fix itself.

Komunyakaa is instead interested in celebrating difference to break down bound? aries. The beautiful paradox that he illuminates is the fact that communal values are solidified and communal morale heightened because of the recognition of another's isolated existential struggle both within and beyond the bounds of shared heritage and circumstance. The activity of consciousness is the ultimate implication of this ethnic music and the ultimate foundation of community. We need not share specific racist experience (though many of us do) in order to identify with the desire to sing out in the face of pain or injustice like a jazz musician. For the jazz and blues musician, as for the poet, sometimes the blues has to be enough and here, because the jazz-blues consciousness?this always-deferred desire for self-recognition?is what makes us human and what allows art to have its effects. In terms such as these, scholars can

begin to develop more persuasive ways of understanding how African-American

poetic practice "riffs" on mainstream American cultural terms, identifying in its individualism a truer individuality that African Americans have had to develop through community to defend themselves against the erasures of that ideology. More than political activism, it is the practice of reclaiming the "self" as a product of the

dynamics of an incessantly self-pursuing mind that creates African-American impro-

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visational art and ethnic community. And this difficult possibility is the triumph of Yusef Komunyakaa's innovative blues.

NOTES

1. Kelly, Robert. "Jazz and Poetry: A Conversation/' Georgia Review 46 (1992): 647. 2. Komunyakaa, Yusef. Neon Vernacular. (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993): 178.

All subsequent references to Komunyakaa's poetry will be from this edition. 3. Most other jazz and blues poetry critics tend to emphasize how blues poetry replicates the

twelve-bar blues form and its typical themes or how jazz poems are defined by references to jazz musicians or jazz sounds, equally substituting the meaning of form and community for the dynamics of imagination. See Chinitz, David. "Literacy and Authenticity: The Blues Poems of Langston Hughes." Callaloo 19.1 (1996): 177-192; Dickson, L. L. "'Keep It in the Head': Jazz Elements in Modern Black American Poetry/' Melus 10.1 (Spring 1983): 29-37; Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow, 1973; Martin, Dellita L. "Langston Hughes's Use of the Blues." CLA Journal 22.2 (1978): 151-159; Miller, R. Baxter. "Framing and Framed Languages in Hughes's Ask Your Mama: 12 Moodsfor Jazz." Melus 17A (Winter 1991-92): 3-13; Oliver, Paul. "Can't Even Write: The Blues and Ethnic Literature." Melus 10.1 (1983): 7-14 17.4: Tracy, Stephen. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

4. Sollors overstates the case a little, to the disservice of genuine ethnic difference, but the principle of his critique is apt. In his words, "Literary critics have seldom fully appreciated their texts in the context of newer theories of ethnicity_Instead of understanding their texts as codes for socialization into ethnic groups and into America, readers have overemphasized and exaggerated the (frequently exoticized) ethnic particularity of the works_The literature is often read and evaluated against an elusive concept of authenticity, and the question of who is entitled to read the literature is given undue emphasis." Sollors is clearly objecting to a nationalist version of literary criticism, but he is right about exaggerations.

5. As Susan Gubar puts it, Anatole Broyard's "racial imposture [his passing for white] . . . hints that whiteness remains the 'default position' for individuality, whereas blackness continues to be attached to the concept of race, of race type, and thus to race prejudice."

6. Instead of the standard privileging of "orality" of the vernacular tradition over "textuality," a practice that bases effect on only recognized forms, scholars should, as Jones suggests, recognize that jazz and blues poetry are textual traditions responding to but independent from the musical tradition.

7. Nielsen argues, "Recent years have seen a proliferation of critical discussions of 'orality' in African American writing that begin by presupposing what the critical limits of orality are. Current commitment to a critical preference for linguistic 'realism' in the study of black writing founder upon precisely this rock; they have, at the very outset, assumed facts not in evidence, assumed that the contours of black orality are already fully known and understood. Too much current theorizing about black poetics secures its success with a critical readership by eliminat- ing from consideration those poetic practices that might disrupt totalizing theories of what constitutes black vernacular.

8. It almost goes without saying that any political activist will know of people in the community who should be involved but who are not, who choose to neglect what activists consider to be the basically inherent obligation to that preexisting and largely stable community. The fact that one can opt out or, at the very least, choose another community or another version of community?Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell come to mind?reveals the necessity of something like choice, of imaginative sympathy as a defining component of any community upon whose behalf one may come to act. As much as I disagree with their politics, I claim Powell and Rice as part of my community.

9. In Salas's words, "Thus, while tough mindedly rendering racial intimidation in 'History Lessons,' from Magic City, Komunyakaa also imagines the dreams of Vietnamese refuges in 'Boat People,' from Dien Cai Dau." and "While Komunyakaa's attempts to imagine the world from other perspectives have sometimes been audacious, as in the poems 'You and I Are Disappearing' and 'Re-creating the Scene,' from Dien Cai Dau, they have also evolved over the course of his career."

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10. "I never asked how you / Passed the driver's test, / Since you could only write / & read your name. But hell, / You were good with numbers; / Always counting your loot. / That Chevy truck swerved / Along back roads night & day. / I watched you use wire / & sunlight to train / The strongest limbs, / How your tongue never obeyed / The foreman, how the truck motor / Was stunted, frozen at sixty." The inability to read, the closing speed of the truck, and the disobedient tongue of the father testify to the effects of racism that, to an extent, tempers the poem's condemnation of the father.

11. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974): 58-59. "The effectiveness of a text does not depend solely on rhetoric however. The critic must also take into consideration the reader's expectations. Through his past experiences, the educated reader expects specific things from prose and poetry; but many works of art play about with those expectations formed by particular periods of literature in the past. The expectations can be shattered, altered, surpassed or deceived, so that the reader is confronted with something unexpected which necessitates a readjustment. If this does happen, the reader gains what Henry James called an 'enlargement of experience.' However, texts do not necessarily have to be based on expectations formed by the literature of the past. They can themselves awaken false expecta? tions, alternately bringing about surprise and frustration, and this in turn gives rise to an esthetic experience consisting of a continuous interplay between 'deductive' and 'inductive' operations which the reader must carry out for himself."

12. Altieri put it beautifully this way: "For if we concentrate only on how readers as empirical subjects in fact process texts, do we not condemn them to those forces that shape them as such subjects? We ignore possibilities that the text as structure, as willed object rather than as object of free play, can actually modify beliefs and provide alternative modes of sensibility. So it seems that if poetry is to offer effective resistance to aspects of the dominant culture, we will have to grant it the power to construct hypothetical countermodels, or, at the very least, to provide modes of second-order reading by which an audience is invited to take some distance from its own direct first-order habits. Poems must [and, I would add, can] foster readerly identities that simultaneously align imaginations with specific processes confronting domi? nant ideological structures and reflect on what is at stake in the choices made as one reads."

WORKS CITED

Altieri, Charles. "Some Problems about Agency in the Theories of Radical Poetics." Contemporary Literature 37.2: 207-236.

Aubert, Alvin. "Yusef Komunyakaa: The Unified Vision?Canonization and Humanity." African American Review 27 (1993): 119-123.

Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideology and African American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Benston, Kimberly. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African American Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Chinitz, David. "Literacy and Authenticity: The Blues Poems of Langston Hughes." Callaloo 19.1 (1996): 177-192.

Dickson, L. L. "'Keep It In the Head': Jazz Elements in Modern Black American Poetry." Melus 10.1 (Spring 1983): 29-37.

Ellison, Ralph. "Richard Wright's Blues." Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1995. Gelpi, Albert. A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950. Cambridge: Cam?

bridge University Press, 1987. Gotera, Vicente. "'Lines of Tempered Steel': An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa." Callaloo 13.2

(1990): 215-229. Gubar, Susan. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1997. Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic

References. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Jauss, Davis. "Contemporary American Poetry and All That Jazz." Crazyhorse 42 (1992): 125-140.

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Jones, Meta. "Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality." Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 66-91. Kelly, Robert. "Jazz and Poetry: A Conversation." Georgia Review 46 (1992): 645-661. Komunyakaa, Yusef. Neon Vernacular. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Martin, Dellita L. "Langston Hughes's Use of the Blues." CLA Journal 22.2 (1978): 151-159. Miller, R. Baxter. "Framing and Framed Languages in Hughes's Ask Your Mama: 12 Moodsfor Jazz."

Melus 17A (Winter 1991-1992): 3-13. Murray, Albert. The Blue Devils ofNada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement. New

York: Pantheon, 1996. Nielsen, Aldon. Black Chant: The Languages of African-American Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1997. Oliver, Paul. "Can't Even Write: The Blues and Ethnic Literature." Melus 10.1 (1983): 7-14. Patterson, Anita. "Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric: The Poetry of Langston Hughes." Modern

Language Quarterly 61.4 (December 2000): 652. Salas, Angela M. "Race, Human Empathy, and Negative Capability: The Poetry of Yusef Komuny?

akaa." College Literature 30.4 (Fall 2003): 32-53. Sanders, Mark A. Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown. Athens: University of

Georgia Press, 1999. Sollors, Werner. "Introduction." The Invention of Ethnicity. Edited by Werner Sollors. (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1989): i-xvi. Stein, Kevin. "Vietnam and the 'Voice Within': Public and Private History in Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau." Massachusetts Review 36.4: 541-561. Tracy, Stephen. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Williams, Shirley Ann. "The Blues Roots of African American Poetry." Chant ofSaints: A Gathering of

Afro-American Literature, Art and Scholarship. Edited by Michael Harper and Robert Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

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