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

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

"We are descendants of Africa who adopt Europe and make Europe what we want it to be," Plumpp stated in a recent interview. "When Louis Armstrong developed the form of jazz, it was a way of making those instruments blue" Just as black folks have always done in music, taking European instruments and playing them in ways they were never supposed to be played, from the harmonica to the saxophone to the turntable, we have also taken literary form and fixed it to suit our purpose, blowing our blues through its changes.

Gwendolyn Brooks blued the form when she "mastered classical poetics, but blackened and blued those devices without making them cheap." When she employed the sonnet form in poems like "The Children of the Poor" and "The Rites for Cousin Vit." She took the classical trumpet of European form and turned it out with African American voice. This black woman on the South Side of Chicago took a 14-line structure--a device used to carry Shakespeare's woes--and blew African Americans' collective voice through its valves:

   What shall I give my children? who are poor,
   Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
   Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
   No velvet and no velvety velour

Brooks showed the world that the kitchenette realities of everyday, working-class black folks could fit inside the traditional structures but still retain the vibrant warmth of the people in her community. She set an example for black poets today such as Constance Merritt (A Protocol Jot Touch, University of North Texas Press, March 2000) and Natasha Tretheway (Domestic Work, Graywolf Press, September 2000).

Blues Traditions

From Toomer to Morrison, from Hughes to Komunyakaa, the blues line has been passed down in our literature like a well-worn family heirloom, Jean Toomer squeezed the blues into Cane. In 1923, when "Karintha" was published in Broom 4:An International Magazine of the Arts, a note instructed readers of the piece that it was "To be read, (aloud) accompanied by the humming of a Negro folk song." Toomer was entranced by the blues during time spent in the countryside of Georgia. Although Cane did not enjoy wide circulation, it influenced a whole generation of Harlem Renaissance writers. Langston Hughes was on a first name basis with the blues. His award-winning "The Weary Blues" became the title poem for his first book, published three years after Cane, in 1926. It's difficult to remember now, but the first blues recording, Mantle Smith's "Crazy Blues" had just been released in 1920. Langston had the foresight to recognize this form as an authentic voice from his people, to recognize its influence and incorporate it into his verse, in "Weary Blues" he intones:

   Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
   Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
   I heard a Negro Play
   Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
   By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
   He did a lazy sway...
   He did a lazy sway...

Sterling Brown's works such as Southern Road (1932) were planted in the blues tradition. Detroit's Robert Hayden continued in the blues tradition with The Lion and the Archer and Ballad of Remembrance. Both Brown and Hayden have had their collected work assembled in volumes edited by Michael Harper, a blues descendant whose seminal work made the transition to a jazz voice with Dear John, Dear Coltrane (University of Illinois Press, June 1985). There are countless other poets to list: Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Henry Dumas, Etheridge Knight, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez and others. These black poets have all added to the blues tradition in their verse.