Recordings

• Celebrations and Solitudes: The Poetry of Jayue Cortez (Strata East, 1975).

• Unsulnuissive Blues (Bola Press, 1980).

• There If Is (Bola Press, 1983).

Other

• Orde Coombs, ed., We Speak as Liberators: Young Black Poets, includes poems by Cortez (New York: Dodd & Mead, 1970).

• Arnold Adoft, ed., The Poetry of Black America: An Anthology of the 20th Century, includes poems by Cortez (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

• Abraham Chapman, ed., New Black Voices, includes poems by Cortez (New York: New American Library, 1972).

• Lindsay Patterson, ed., A Rock Against the Wind: Black Love Poems, includes poems by Cortez (New York: Dodd & Mead, 1973).

• Quincy Troupe and Rainer Schulte, eds., Giant Talk, includes poems by Cortez (New York: Random House, 1975).

• Homage a Leon Gontran Damas, includes contribution by Cortez (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1979).

• Erlene Stetson, ed., Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746-1980, includes "Orisha," "Phraseology," "Orange Chiffon," "Under the Edge of February," "So Many Feathers," "In the Morning," "Grinding Vibrato" by Cortez (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981).

• "In the Morning," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

• Amina Baraka and Amiri Baraka, eds., Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (New York: Morrow, 1983).

Jayne Cortez was born in Arizona and reared in Watts, California. Cortez participated in writing groups during the 1960s and was the artistic director of the Watts Repertory Theatre Company from 1964 to 1970. Since 1967 she has lived in New York. From 1977 to 1983 she was writer in residence at Livingston College of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Cortez has traveled and read her poetry throughout North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. She has a son, Denardo, by jazz musician Ornette Coleman.

Cortez began publishing during the 1960s when the civil rights and antiwar movements dominated American life; she has continued to produce poems which testify to her active participation, as an artist, in the struggle for human freedom. Cortez has combined the oral styles of black speech with a range of musical traditions, from African praises and Afro-American folk blues to experimental jazz: she has developed a style of poetry that is emotionally dynamic and technically versatile. She has written with increasing force and mastery of the many indignities that alienated and divided people must bear: poverty, dehumanizing labor, imprisonment, violence, and sicknesses of the spirit. Cortez's poetry is a protest against lost chances for love, against the horrors of life in crowded cities, and against the weakness of those who submit to colonialism, imperialism, and political repression. The bitterness and rage that she expresses are balanced with praise for the artists, laborers, visionaries, and leaders who work toward a revolution in which "everything / in this world changes."

Pissstained Stairs and The Monkey Man's Wares (1969), Cortez's first collection of poems, has musicians as the subjects of many of the poems. "The Road" alludes to the death of the blues singer Bessie Smith, and other poems give glimpses of Leadbelly, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Clifford Brown, Sun Ra, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Fats Navarro. She emphasizes the deaths that some of these musicians met through drugs and she confronts the bleakness of many of their lives. Cortez writes of blues and jazz artists because for her they constitute a pantheon of revolutionary heroes and heroines who have prepared the way for the new order that they sing about. Love and sexuality are also major themes in Pissstained Stairs. Love is generally unrequited and sex is portrayed more as an irresistible physical need than as an act of mutual pleasure; there is nothing of the puritanic or conventionally romantic treatment of sex in these poems.

The style of the poems in Pissstained Stairs is unique, but varied. The poems differ in length; within the poems line lengths vary, and there is little shown in the way of formal control. Most of the poems consist of fragmentary snatches of blueslike cadences that attempt to create the spontaneous speech of ghetto dwellers. The poems present the details of lives lived too closely crowded together: odors, noises, and excretions. The most successful poems are "Race," which bitterly condemns black male homosexuality in unflinching detail, and "Suppression," which uses long, parallel lines to catalogue the nightmarish sensations of unfulfilled sexual desire. Pissstained Stairs placed Cortez among the poets of the black arts movement, and Haki R. Madhubuti (Don. L. Lee) calls her one of the poets whose work "continued to deafen us."

Festivals and Funerals (1971), Cortez's second collection of poetry, was praised by Eugene B. Redmond in Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry, A Critical History (1976) for being "Musical, daring, ambivalent, complex and technically dexterous." The volume extends Cortez's concerns with love and celebrations of sexuality, but the poems exhibit a move to more theoretical concerns: colonialism, African nationhood, revolution, mythology, and the role of the artist in revolutionary politics. The poems are more personal, and the mediating influences of larger-than-life figures are not as important. Life is directly confronted in such poems as "Screams," "Pearl Sheba," and "I Would Like To Be Serene." Other poems are occasional and address the themes of assassination and the culture of colonialism. Festivals and Funerals presents poems with relatively regular lines, and the language is raw, vital, and in touch with people who see themselves as poised between the extremes of creation and destruction. The most accomplished poems in the book are monologues, such as "I'm A Worker," in which the voice of a worn-out garment worker is convincingly rendered: she asks "do you think a revolution is what i need?"

Jayne Cortez's third book, Scarifications (1973), treats new subjects: the Vietnam War, a visit to Africa, police killings, the Attica revolt, New York City life, and the assassination of Kwame Nkrumah. Many of the poems are short, ironic commentaries, and the longer poems use irony to play down the escalation of violence, as when napalm is called "A New Cologne." The subject of genocide is treated ironically when Wounded Knee is compared to ankles damaged by platform shoes. The poems in Scarifications are tighter in form than earlier ones, even when presenting images motivated by madness and desperation. The subject of Africa gives Cortez a chance to write of life in more romantic terms; in "Ife Night" the beauties of nature are directly presented. In "Orisha" and "Back Home in Benin City" images of exotic settings are fused into tense and impassioned songs of praise.

Mouth on Paper (1977) shows that Cortez has continued to develop as a poet. This volume takes up many of the same themes of the former collections, and there are poems about jazz: "Rose Solitude," written for Duke Ellington, and "Chocolate," written for a trumpet player. Mouth on Paper includes poems on Africa, "Ogun's Friend" and "For the Brave Young Students in Soweto," and there are poems about slain heroes and heroines: Henry Dumas, Christopher Okigbo, and Alberta King. Revolution is invoked in "For the Brave Young Students in Soweto" and in "Brooding."

The poems in Mouth on Paper are consistently longer than those in previous collections, and the intention seems to have been to provide sustained texts suitable for being read aloud. The length of the poems in the volume gives the reader time to build the themes, line by line, into structures that nearly approach jazz solo improvisations in their achievement of complexity and variation of sound.

In "Mercenaries & Minstrels," the generalized tormentors of earlier poems, such as "To A Friend" (Scarifications), which tells of "the multilation of things," have been made concrete and given a name: "A mercenary like Rolf Steiner / will split open your head with a bottle of I. W. Harper." Likewise, those who reject a revolutionary solution to social problems have been identified: "so don't tell me / to get down on my knees / and roll around singing mammy like ben vereen." Cortez's fragmented imagery has been integrated into the realistic details of the lines and invested with an exactitude that works to make horror horrible where before the effect was merely strangeness: "he'll cut off your legs / fire-up your things / and twist your balls / into an american eagle and swastika emblem for his bi-centennial."

In Cortez's poems, oppression is oppression whether it is found in Africa or in the United States. This view was symbolized in Festivals and Funerals, for example, in the lines "who killed Lumumba / what killed Malcolm"; in Mouth on Paper, it is made concrete. In "For the Brave Young Students in Soweto," Cortez details the similar fates of blacks in New York and in South Africa: "When I look at this ugliness / and see once again how we're divided and/forced into fighting each other / over a funky job in the sewers of Johannesburg / divided into labor camps / fighting over damaged meat and stale bread in Harlem ...." There is clearly only a single people in her view.

Mouth on Paper also includes poems that attempt to make music; in "Chocolate" there are such lines as "aye ya ya ya ay yo Chocolate" that seek to imitate the trumpet sounds that she also describes with words. Although these lines work on the page because they are not overdone, they are actually oral fragments that allow Cortez's voice to simulate a trumpet solo when she reads the text aloud. Another oral technique that works is the simulation of choral responses. Nearly every line in "For the Poets" ends with an added sound, which works like a response: "I need a canefield of superstitious women a/fumes and feathers from Port Lobito a." The range of sounds has been carefully restricted (a, ah, oh, huh, uh-huh), and they do not move the attention away from the words of the poem. These extra sounds lend a semblance of mystery to the poem, as though some ritual were taking place.

The poems in Mouth on Paper are the culmination and clarification of the themes and subjects that Cortez had been concerned with throughout all of her earlier writing: familiar objects (sander, drill, grinder, drill press, hacksaw, brick ax); flesh (bald spot, toes, chin, penis, mouth, breasts, knees, shoulders); emblems of violence (bullets, razors, cyclone, explosion, smoke); and fluids (blood, cataracts, lizard juice, mucous, spit, goober oil, mud, cognac, champagne, sweat). These materials are blended into new combinations in each line ("peach brandy spit") so that they build up surprising images that give an improvisational effect. These recombinations of things into images also cause the poems in Mouth on Paper to simulate the poetry of African praises.

"Ogun's Friend" in particular stands out as an acknowledgement of the influence of the African praise form. This poem includes exclamations like "Yo" and "Hey" at the beginning of several of the stanzas, and the stanzas themselves are catalogues of repeated sensory experiences: "i saw," "i heard," "i smell," "i feel." The poem is perhaps as African in content and execution as is possible when the medium is American language. In this poem, Cortez is at her best in the use of shocking combinations to create images ("I smell some ratheads in here") and in her approximation of the African appreciation of force and physical vitality ("Whose that one so brown and fine / Ogun's friend ..."). Even though the poem uses the name of an African deity throughout the lines, the language is Afro-American, the use of the exotic is never false, and the poem details an understanding of human limits in an ultimately mysterious universe with authority and good humor.

In 1982, Cortez's collection Firespitter was published. The poems combine a mature expression of earlier themes and forms with a sociopolitical awareness. The poetry of Cortez has moved from the somewhat chaotic style of free verse, with an emphasis on black speech that was common to many of the Afro-American poets of the 1960s, to the controlled evocation of otherness employed by the American surrealist poets. Cortez has been published in the surrealist journal Arsenal and has also been included in the City Lights publication Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices. It is noteworthy that the American surrealists are aware of the affinities between blues and surrealist art both in their affirmation of the power of sex and in their protest against social repression. Blues, jazz, African art, and the writing of the Negritude poets have all been declared surrealist in form and content by American surrealists. By being linked to this school, Cortez has not given up anything or moved away from her past creations. She has been discovered for what she is--an artist committed to the same revolutionary program as the surrealists and one who has employed many of the same materials and methods as Andre Breton, Ted Joans, and other poets of the surrealist school.

The range of Cortez's development can be appreciated in Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (1984). Although many of the new poems in the collection share the raw, sometimes violent language and vision of the poems reprinted from other volumes, they also display a density, or compactness, of form and expression. Cortez has explored the limits of written poetry. She has moved consistently toward texts that ask to be chanted aloud, in contrast to much recent poetry that is actually prose written in short lines. It is for this reason that Cortez has continued to make records of her work. As far back as 1976, Eugene B. Redmond was able to see that her writing in Pissstained Stairs and Festivals and Funerals "is especially rich in its interweavings of music." He spoke of her "earth-woman musicality." Redmond also recognized the intellectual content of her writing and placed her work in the category of "Deeper, searching, and more profound poetry" noting that she "wades into the intense intellectual and psychological realm of blackness."

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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