Toward feminine mythopoetic visions: the poetry of Gayl Jones

"The center of Song for Anninho is a love story and I also wanted to move beyond the 'blues relationships' of most of my earlier published stories to perhaps the "spiritual mode.'"

--Gayl Jones (qtd. in Rowell, "Interview" 41)

Gayl Jones's distinguished body of fiction--including the controversial debut novel Corregidora (1975) and National Book Award nominee The Healing (1998)--has received significant accolades and critical attention. By contrast, her comparably quiet, yet formidable, corpus of poetry--three books and an assortment of uncollected published pieces--has been overlooked, if not almost ignored, by readers and scholars of her work. (1) Significantly, Jones's first publication appeared in verse; and her literary production from 1969 through the early 1980s includes nearly as many poems as short stories, betraying both a formative and consistent involvement with poetry. (2) Furthermore, Jones's serious interest in the intellectual and cultural legacies of African American verse in particular is confirmed in her critical study of African American literature, Liberating Voices (1991), in which she makes the important general observation, "African American poetry from the turn of the century to the present shows a movement toward the freeing of African American character and voice in literature" (17). Jones's critical summary of the genre in which she practices has consequences for her creative work as well for in its own particular development across the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, Jones's poetry, on a smaller scale and over a much more compressed period of time, reflects a similar narrative aesthetic shift, from a concern with separate single voices involved usually in problematic personal relationships to viewpoints and utterances articulating cultural issues across time and place--a shift that would eventually become palpable in her fiction as well with the publications of The Healing and Mosquito (2000).

Jones's lack of critical recognition as a poet is at least partially traceable to her documented ambivalence regarding genre boundaries and artistic identity: "I've never really considered myself a poet. I've written what I call poetry but I've always thought of myself as primarily a fiction writer and so I write poetry from the viewpoint and interest of a storyteller--the concern with character and event" (Rowell, "Interview" 39). Consistent with this self-conceptualization of her creative output, Jones's critical observations regarding the work of other poets often are based on the execution of techniques traditionally associated with distinguished fiction writing. For example, she declares Sherley A. Williams's "Someone Sweet Angel Chile" is an important poem because "She makes the character/singer speak for and identify herself, take authority over her own story, and recreate her song. In the multitude of other voices we have listeners/witnesses become storytellers and storytellers become listener/witnesses" (Rowell, "Interview" 43). For Jones, narrative and its rendering usually appear to outweigh the various poetic conventions of prosody and form. While reviewing the work of Sterling Brown in a critical capacity, Jones provides a checklist of what chiefly attracts her in poetry: "The variety and quality of characterizations, the interplay of voices, dramatic forms, histories, scenes, portraits, the range and integrity of voice" ("A Review of the Collected Poems of Sterling Brown" 43). Again, characterization and narrative voice appear in the foreground, accompanied by such structural concerns of fiction as dramatic forms and scenes, all of which come together to reveal a sensibility interested primarily in formulating a poetics of effective storytelling.

Also listed among Jones's poetic concerns is an interest in "histories," the implications of which hold a special significance for African American poets. Lorenzo Thomas, speaking for a multitude of scholars, describes the persistent inability of African American writers to be aesthetically insular in the face of their collective histories: "[E]ven had black poets wished to create within the pristine seclusion of a 'dark tower,' their color made it impossible for them to avoid involvement in the turbulent racial politics of the United States" (8). Abstracting her historical interest in race beyond the boundaries of the United States, Jones's work is unique in its specific, repeated meditations on historical, race-based oppression in Brazil. Perhaps this foreign focus is not altogether unusual since, in the very broadest of terms, contemporary Brazil shares with the United States a climate of race-relations generally governed by class status, in which prejudice against African ancestry often is outweighed by respect for higher class. Yet the fact that Jones imports the overwhelming majority of her historical material from South America significantly differentiates her from most other historically-minded African American writers working in the United States. As the Brazilian scholar Stelamaris Coser summarizes, "Jones's research on slave history in Brazil informs a kind of work that is original and unique" (122). Coser also correctly observes that in Jones's first book of poetry, Song For Anninho, she, "with an identification and a solidarity based on gender and race, brings out of forgetfulness voices of black women abused in the Brazilian past" (123)--an endeavor that separates the work from the verse that Jones produced in the early-to-mid 1970s, poems dealing primarily with romantic and philosophical relationships between African Americans in the contemporary United States.