Harvard University Press Blog

Baraka’s Blues People

Poet, playwright, activist, and intellectual Amiri Baraka died yesterday at 79. A renaissance man who spent over fifty years fusing art and politics, Baraka was also a brilliant critic whose Blues People: Negro Music in White America has proven an enduring study of black music and its meanings. That work was highlighted in Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, where author Scott Saul recounts Baraka’s heralding of John Coltrane as “the heaviest spirit,” exemplar of a black aesthetic. Baraka wrote of Coltrane that he “showed us how to murder the popular song,” an act Baraka rendered emblematic: “New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.” In the following excerpt from Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, Saul explores Baraka’s location of a new black consciousness in Coltrane’s music.

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“Find the self, then kill it”: such was Baraka’s prescription for a more vibrant black music and a more vital black community, and he began with himself. His Blues People was an unprecedented work of cultural criticism that told the history of black America through its musical forms, but it was also a personal act of re-making—an attack on the white jazz critics who had given Baraka a platform for his own writing, and a critique of the black middle-class world that he had grown up in, as the child of a postal supervisor and a social worker and as a student at Rutgers and Howard University. The basic thrust of Blues People was to reclaim the blues as a way of looking at the world, not just a music: “each phase of the Negro’s music,” he wrote, “issued directly from the dictates of his social and psychological environment.” Baraka attacked white critics for pretending that all music was equal, that it could be evaluated in isolation from the cultural needs of the community that created it. “The catalysts and necessity of Coltrane’s music must be understood as they exist even before they are expressed as music,” he wrote. The question for the critic was less “What do I think of Coltrane’s scream?” and more “Why does this man—and so many like him—feel compelled to scream in the first place?” The goal of jazz criticism was understanding, not appreciation.

Understanding contemporary black music for Baraka meant locating it as part of a long and complicated struggle, one between the dominant forces of Western modernity and a black countertradition that had often been derided and suppressed. This struggle was grounded in separate worldviews, separate systems of ethics and aesthetics. While the “‘enlightened’ concepts of the Renaissance,” he wrote, “created a schism between what was art and what was life,” black music refused to separate art from living ritual. While American culture was geared to rationalization, compartmentalization, and “economic-mindedness,” black music filtered mystery, tragedy, and joy into a compelling form of consolation and resistance. Baraka used this overarching theoretical framework to understand the cultural work of specific musical genres, from work songs, shouts, and spirituals to the blues and jazz in all its forms. At its most incisive, Blues People told the history of jazz as the history of a hybrid music, the sound of creative social antagonism. One of Blues People’s most powerful passages, for instance, describes how early New Orleans musicians were riven by the contradictory desire both to connect with the black community and to “make it” in white and Creole society, and then links this inner conflict between “freedman” and “citizen” identities to the music’s synthesis of blues timbre and brass-band orchestration.

Emily Dickinson, Available to All

Baffled for just a day or two [first line] Autograph manuscript, signed, [1860] MS Am 1118.2 (17a). Bequest, Theodora V. W. Ward, 1974. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

We are extremely pleased to join a whole host of collaborating institutions in announcing the launch of the Emily Dickinson Archive, an open access website collecting high resolution scans of most of Dickinson’s extant poems.

While Dickinson is one of literature’s most loved, it’s perhaps not widely known among her legions of admirers that she did not publish in her own lifetime. Given her tendency to write multiple variations of poems—and her embrace of esoteric punctuation—generations of Dickinson scholars have debated interpretations and transcriptions of her manuscripts. The site now allows both scholars and casual readers alike to see the originals for themselves, absent the layers of mediation added by their posthumous publication.

At the Emily Dickinson Archive readers may browse Dickinson’s manuscript pages by first line, date, or recipient, or search across the full text of poem transcriptions. Readers can also refer to past editors’ transcriptions and use the site’s tools to create their own transcriptions, annotate images, or zoom in to look closely at Dickinson’s handwriting.

In the video below, EDA General Editor and Houghton Library Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie Morris introduces the site and some of its features.

 

Under the guidance of Morris and an Advisory Board of distinguished scholars, EDA is a growing collaboration that includes Amherst College, Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Boston Public Library, Digital Public Library of America, Emily Dickinson Lexicon at Brigham Young University, Harvard Library, Harvard University Press, and Houghton Library at Harvard.

"It's a London Thing"

“It’s a London thing,” shouts a man on a bus in the night, aping a well-known estate agent’s slogan in a piece by the young English poet Ahren Warner. The man, who’s perhaps a bit in his cups and has earned a slap from his girlfriend, is “obviously a knob,” we’re told, but a happy one.

Mark Ford, the editor of our massive new anthology, London: A History in Verse, says the shout of Warner’s man stuck in his mind as “a particularly resonant way of trying to define what it is about London poetry that makes it different from other kinds of poetry.”

It’s always got to have a London thing about it. If you’re in London, you know you’re at the center of something, and that affects the way people behave in London, and it affects the way people write about London. For good or ill, they’re at the center of something and there’s lots of other people competing in that center. So, it seemed to me that the London “thing” was what I was after as I was scouring poetry books from the 14th century—1350s, indeed—to the present day.

Ford explains more about the poetry of London, and about how he approached the task of selecting the anthology’s contents, in this short video:

 

As he lays out in the book’s Preface, Ford intended the collection to mimic the layered feel of the city itself:

The poetry of London reflects all strata of the culture of London, and an anthology such as this might be said to replicate the way so many different types of Londoner, or types of visitor to London, find themselves crammed into the same tube carriage, so to speak—that is, forced to share the contested spaces and resources of the city. The collection is arranged chronologically according to the author’s date of birth, thus allowing, I hope, a sense of the successive waves of the city’s history, as the eras leach into each other, marked, now and again, by some singular crisis or decisive event. The range of poems and authors collected here seems to me a moving and eloquent testimony to the power of London to attract and absorb and inspire and give voice to its residents, and to the power of poetry to create, layer by layer by layer, its own history of the city.

You can scan the anthology’s full table of contents on our website, or, on Facebook, scroll all the way back to the 1300s on a timeline of the included poets’ births. Also on our site, you can read one of Ford’s own poems about the city.

Cupid, Take Your Quiver And Go

Who but Ovid to read on this Valentine’s Day? Below, the fifth elegy of the second book of his Amores, from David Slavitt’s lively volume of translation, Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of Ovid.

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No love is worth this much. Cupid, take your quiver

    and go. Get out of my life! My usual prayers

these days are for death, which seems a better option

    than the torment in which I suffer from that girl!

The evidence is clear. I did not have to infer

    from equivocal clues or see my uncertain way

through ambiguities. These are no mere suspicions,

    and not even a fool would try to refute them.

Happy is he who can in good conscience defend

    his darling, who can swear, “I didn’t do it!”

But stronger than I am in mind and heart is he who can be

    satisfied by proving his mistress guilty,

winning the bloody battle and losing the damned war.

    I saw what you did. You thought I was drunk and asleep,

but through my half-closed lids I watched you play the coquette,

    nodding, flirting, and making that little moue

you sometimes use. I watched your fingers write on the table

    messages that you once traced for me.

And your talk was full of suggestive jokes and double-entendres.

    Then, when the party broke up and most had left,

and only a few of us drunks were still in the room dozing,

    I saw you and him kissing, no mere pecks

of the kind a brother and sister might very well exchange

    (Diana and Phoebus, say) but deep probings

as if you were trying to swallow one another’s tongues

    (for example, Venus and Mars in the heat of passion).

“What in hell is this?” is what I shouted out.

Ovid Cares Not For Your Hairdo

“For a good time, read Ovid; for a very good time, read Slavitt’s Ovid.” – Michael Dirda

For your very good time, the 14th poem of the first book of Ovid’s Amores, from Love Poems, Letters, and Remedies of Ovid, a new volume of translations by David R. Slavitt:

 

How many times did I tell you to leave your hair alone?

    Well, look at you now. There’s nothing left to dye.

All you had to do was nothing at all, and now

    you’d still have hair, wonderful, fine in texture,

long enough to reach down to your waist. Chinese

    silkworms don’t make anything quite like it.

Spiders, spinning their webs that hang from beams and branches,

    would have to defer to it for sheer beauty.

It was neither black as jet nor blonde like flax, but mixed, 

    rather like what you might find on Ida

where, on the slopes, there are handsome cedars of just that shade.

    Aside from the color, your hair was easy to manage,

and you could find a hundred different ways to wear it.

    It gave way to the teeth of the finest comb,

and it held a hairpin in place. Your hairdressers loved their labor.

    I often watched as they hovered over you

and saw them grin in delight at how well their work was going.

    And early, when you hadn’t arisen from bed

and lay supine with your hair streaming out on the pillow,

    you had a Bacchante’s beauty—or what I imagine

as those mad dancers dropped down on the grass in exhaustion.

    But for all their docile beauty, what pains did they endure,

what tortures did you impose, what patience did they exhibit?

    The hot curlers for ringlets burnt them. I saw 

the smoke that would arise, and I cried out against it

    and asked you to spare your hair, not out of kindness

but vanity because it was beautiful as it was.

    O iron-hearted girl. Your natural curls

could have taught the curlers to what their art aspired.

    And now, your tresses, your beautiful tresses are gone.