The word/the blues. A meditation. Investigating blues poetry, an old tradition

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2004 by Tyehimba Jess

A. Van Jordan, author of Rise (Tia Chucha, June 2001) and the forthcoming Macnolia: Poems (W.W. Norton, June 2004), spoke to this heritage in a recent interview. "The philosophy in the blues has had a great deal of influence on voice in American poetry, whether in vernacular or not. Of course, we see it overtly in Sterling Brown or Langston Hughes, but it creeps into John Berryman, William Matthews, the Beats and others--like the blues music is in the Beatles, Cream and American rock acts. The blues is an American art form that has influenced American culture since its inception:'

Kevin Young, author of Jelly Roll (Knopf January 2003), has recently edited the anthology Blues Poems (Knopf/Everyman Library, September 2003). The book features poets from many different ethnicities who have felt the distinctly American blues influence in their work. Marilyn Chin, Sherman Alexie, W.H. Auden and Charles Wright are featured alongside the blues lyrics of Ma Rainey and Robert Johnson. Cornelius Eady and Nikki Giovanni share space with Muddy Waters and Allen Ginsberg. As Young says in his forward: "... now that black people have invented and named the blues, people all over the world speak them." We have invaded the English language as much as it has invaded us.

Bluing the Form

The blues is also an original American poetic form. The music's A-AB structure has been used and rifled upon by countless poets in their quest for meaningful expression. When J.B. Lenoir sang his "Alabama Blues," he used the same structure of Langston Hughes's "Bound No'th Blues." Both troubadours make their lament loud and clear in the first line, and then repeat it in the second, initiating their own call-and-response. The final line delivers resolution.

Other times, however, the resolution lies in the act of witnessing collective trauma. This is a quality that Chicago poet Duriel E. Harris finds liberating in her pursuit of the muse. "The blues form creates a space for conversation" within a culture. Her first book, Drag (Elixir Press, September 2003), contains a "Villanelle for the Dead White Fathers" that overflows with the blues, and a "Crazy Woman Blues" that bemoans relationships. "Blues people are marginalized people, and there is an undercurrent of protest that is sublimated in the blues" she writes. Black folks couldn't just go out and protest racism in the '20s and '30s. But we could give voice to our pain through a blues song, and part of our resolution would be the discovery of solace in our voice.

Writing in the blues tradition does not mean that African Americans are restricted to the A-A-B form, however. As poet Camille Dungy, 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Award-winner, said recently: "Blues is one of the tools I draw on--just like the English sonnet form is one of the tools I draw on:" And when black writers use traditional European forms, they often blue those hand-me-down instruments in order to tell their stories. Sterling Plumpp, acclaimed author of several books of poetry and 2003 recipient of a Keeping the Blues Alive Award in Literature from the Blues Foundation, describes the art form as "the highest and most eloquent form of black expression, particularly at the secular level.