Sterling D. Plumpp. Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Michael A. Antonucci

Sterling D. Plumpp. Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth. Chicago: Third World P, 2003. 158 pp. $21.95.

In the introductory note to Mexico City Blues (1959), Jack Kerouac frames his extended poetic experiment with spontaneous composition and jazz sensibilities by writing,

   I want to be considered a jazz poet
   blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam
   session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses;
   my ideas vary and sometimes roll from
   chorus to chorus or from halfway through
   a chorus to halfway into the next.

A milestone in these lengthy conversations concerning the terms "jazz poet" and "jazz poetry," Kerouac's passage engages those commentaries, polemics, and verses engaging the expressive possibilities generated where "jazz" and "poetry" intersect. Other notable contributors to this extended literary jam (and cutting) session include poems, critical explorations, and editorial works by Frank O'Hara, Larry Neal, Michael S. Harper, Jayne Cortez, Jeffrey Allen, Sascha Feinstein, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth (2003) marks Sterling D. Plumpp's return to this discussion. Like his earlier volumes Horn Man (1995) and Ornate with Smoke (1997), Plumpp's latest collection exhibits his poetic dexterity and improvisational skills. Throughout this collection, Plumpp demonstrates characteristic attention to craft, form, and execution. Working this groove, he propels Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth into the upper registers of the jazz poetry idiom. As much a poet as an interpreter and translator of musical forms, Plumpp solos and riffs, utilizing a style and phrasing hinged on his sturdy grasp of the blues.

Rich chords thread Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth in textures worthy of its title. Through its interwoven chorus of numbered cantos, the collection (re)calls Kerouac's "long blues." Plumpp's response, however, expands the stated poetic project of Mexico City Blues with its nuanced sense of place and occasion: where Kerouac seeks Sunday afternoon, Plumpp's Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth finds the main stage of Saturday night. In this way, Plumpp considers bebop and jazz mystique with a jazz poetry rooted firmly in Black music traditions and their intimate engagement with African American lived experience.

Freely working with the colors and tones of this blues continuum, Plumpp's lines pull fibers from lived experiences of African Diaspora. Weaving a music and a people with his poetry, Plumpp shuttles between layers of past and present fastened in sound, imagery, and language. Navigating these syncopated blues routes, the dense poetic fabric in Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth traces jazz pathways, leading from turn-rows to the bandstand. As Plumpp writes in the collection's opening canto,

   Be-Bop / the art of breaking
   and / Entering wounds.
   To / Cultivate fields
   of / Dreams. Irrigating pain / That
   flood / With riffs
   and myths / It invent.

   Be-Bop is / Agriculture
   of / Dreams planted
   by / Axe inventions.

Breaking, entering, and bopping, Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth is spun from song and dreams, memory and events. The collection's 46 numbered cantos work in full-measures, arranging patterns unfolding as Plumpp's bebop catalogue. To ground the collection, the poet writes in tune and on time with the stylings of jazz tenor man Fred Anderson. The sustained presence of Anderson's horn/voice in the volume initiates its inclination towards acts of becoming. It is a sensibility Plumpp accounts for in the introduction to Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth: "Be-Bop, at bottom, is about individual freedom negotiated by dialogues with tradition and improvisation."

Guided by Anderson's bopped accents, Plumpp bends these conversations and traditions as he measures, records, and ultimately cracks their codes through his simultaneous translation of the horn man's work with the dizzying lyricism of bebop. This play stands among primary achievements of Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth. Plumpp addresses this dimension of his project in Canto Twenty-Eight when he writes,

   Every Be-Bopper / A Barrister.
   A rifling / Trickster defining turf.
   Decoding / Mother earth. Or / Simple
   birth / Defining a crafted mold.
   He / Craft where
   ever / he go. Or / Blow.

The shifting pulses in Anderson's horn punctuate Plumpp's verse to deliver this collection's scoring of bebop modes and jazz mystique. Coupling his poetic voice with Anderson's playing, Plumpp writes his aesthetic warrant to join the horn man's pursuit of the bebop legacies in the work of composer and innovator Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. As they move together, horn man and poet become an unprecedented tandem, laying down what Plumpp describes as a "Solid brick / Yard / Bird foundation / Of telling."

The bop exchange resulting from these encounters between Plumpp and Anderson's swinging axe distinguish the jazz poetry in Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth. The collaboration succeeds as a result of the shared sensibilities that inform both artists' work. Like Parker, Anderson and Plumpp explore the historical and philosophical movements (or revolutions) driving bebop rhythms and cadences. Describing this approach to fusing form and content, Plumpp writes in the collection's introduction, "Fred Anderson utilizes the tenor axe to locate and preserve his voice. I am a descendant of various axes African Americans have utilized to forge cultural expressions of witnessing and survival. The pen and paper are borrowed tools I claim only to observe the rules of axemanship."