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

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

Blues to the Future

Sterling Plumpp's poem "216" comments on the blues' personal use.

   Blues/everybody wants
   to tell me/is personal
   and I nod half-approval.
   For I know birth
   elevates. I know growth
   is sanctity. And adulthood
   is divine. For gods/rise
   from dreams rolling into
   dreams. Everybody gotta
   heart. They say/blues
   is what everybody feels;
   when they connected/won't let
   go hurt. Keep it alive til
   they can soothe it to sleep.

The safe bet is that the blues will still be relevant to serious writers for a very long time to come. As A. Van Jordan said: "I think the blues will influence African American and American writers, in general-much in the way it has influenced American music: through osmosis. The interest in hip-hop is no different from the interest in the blues, jazz or any other black style; it's constantly being cross-pollinated and redefined as something else, but it's still the blues."

Perhaps, poetry is the last vestige of our blues that ain't been "taken up and gone," as Langston would say. Still our original voice, we only need to recognize it and shag it aloud on the page.

Tyehimba Jess is a poet and researcher living in Brooklyn, New York.