gay friend who left a small town in Oklahoma because he had no emotional or social home there. To find an emotional home, they had to leave a geographical home. This is a very American theme. That’s why so much of the blues and jazz—and of American poetry—is full of place names, geography, travel. These songs and poems are set on planes and boats and trains. Perhaps they offer the other side of Whitman’s great empathetic ideal that if you can make a home wherever you go, no place is really more a home than any other.

Yusef has stressed the emotional sources of jazz and poetry, and that raises a perplexing question. If the ultimate sources for poetry and jazz are the life of the emotions, the extreme difficulty of describing that life, and the great spiritual cost of not trying to describe it, then poetry and jazz are rooted at the very center of what it’s like to be human. They ought to be of wide interest, therefore, and yet both poetry and jazz find themselves existing in tenuous relation to a comparatively small audience. Their vitality is honored in largely sanctuarial settings—colleges, art institutes, community centers, and so on. Outside the sanctuaries, the situation reminds me of Yogi Berra’s comment about baseball fans not coming out to the stadium: “If they want to stay away in droves, you can’t stop them.”

The contrast between the centrality of the enterprise and the size of the audience is not something we should necessarily feel guilty about, as if we had ourselves caused it. But there is a danger that despite deep and powerful emotional bases, poetry and jazz can turn into museum arts, losing the nourishment that more direct access to an audience can provide. We couldn’t—and shouldn’t—have asked John Coltrane to back off and play a lot of four-four stuff in order to enlarge his audience. The artist’s job is not to solve the problem—but the problem exists.

[Komunyakaa:] What I meant by discovery, or rediscovery, is that jazz can link us to surprises in content. I wanted to write a poem that dealt with childhood, so I put on Louis Armstrong. What I’m going to do is just read you “Venus’s Flytraps,”and see if it has anything to do with jazz and syncopated rhythms:

I am five,
Wading out into deep
Sunny grass,
Unmindful of snakes
& yellowjackets, out
To the yellow flowers
Quivering in sluggish heat.
Don’t mess with me
’Cause I have my Lone Ranger
Six-shooter. I can hurt
You with questions
Like silver bullets.
The tall flowers in my dreams are
Big as the First State Bank,
& they eat all the people
Except the ones I love.
They have women’s names,
With mouths like where
Babies come from. I am five.
I’ll dance for you
If you close your eyes. No
Peeping through your fingers.
I don’t supposed to be
This close to the tracks.
One afternoon I saw
What a train did to a cow.
Sometimes I stand so close
I can see the eyes
Of men hiding in boxcars.
Sometimes they wave
& holler for me to get back. I laugh
When trains make the dogs
Howl. Their ears hurt.
I also know bees
Can’t live without flowers.
I wonder why Daddy
Calls Mama honey.
All the bees in the world
Live in little white houses
Except the ones in these flowers.
All sticky & sweet inside.
I wonder what death tastes like.
Sometimes I toss the butterflies
Back into the air.
I wish I knew why
The music in my head
Makes me scared.
But I know things
I don’t supposed to know.
I could start walking
& never stop.
These yellow flowers
Go on forever.
Almost to Detroit.
Almost to the sea.
My mama says I’m a mistake.
That I made her a bad girl.
My playhouse is underneath
Our house, & I hear people
Telling each other secrets.

Essentially, what I was hearing were the secrets coming out of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, and I tried to relate to those and let the music take me back to that time when I was five years old— to those memories. The music becomes a place in which to recapture, to reexperience, certain things.

As a black American poet, however, I don’t want to be stereotyped into a convenient slot— merely a jazz poet. I write about whatever captures my imagination. Anything that touches me significantly: philosophy, psychology, nature, cultural concerns, folklore, world history, sex, science, from the gut-level to the arcane, whatever. Yes, for me, jazz moves underneath many of these topics. It is often a necessary balm. We now refer to jazz as America’s classical music. Unfortunately, until recently, many middle-class African Americans saw jazz as the devil’s music that evolved from the whorehouses of Storyville. It wasn’t sacred. Second-class citizens can be awfully puritanical, and this is especially true when they’re striving for acceptance by the dominant culture.

Look at the Harlem Renaissance—the cultural straitjacket—the whole movement defined by European standards, except Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston. In fact, only Hughes wholeheartedly embraces jazz and blues as major influences. Most of these poets, including Claude McKay, Anne Spencer, and Countee Cullen, gravitated toward British Romantics such as Keats and Wordsworth. Many found more interest in New England transcendentalism than in the folk tradition of blues and jazz. Or, they connected to the flight motifs of the spirituals that had informed early black poetry. The two voices that are associated with the postrenaissance period of the 1950’s are Sterling Brown and Frank Marshall Davis—both wrote jazz-and-blues-influenced poems. Gwendolyn Brooks also has a few. But the real synthesis of jazz and poetry happened in the 1960’s and 1970’s with Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka—the two jazz/blues philosophers. And we get someone like Jayne Cortez whose whole body of work is tied completely to jazz.

In the early 1970’s, when I was listening to Miles, Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and a lot of other progressive players, I didn’t know they were influencing my poetry. I just loved the sound. The music helped me free up my mind for more vivid extrusions. Jazz was just a part of my life, a continuous score to the images inside my head. It helped to expand my creative universe. It taught me I could do anything in a poem—more so than what Villon or Ginsberg taught me. The music took me back to the importance of irony, to how the dynamics of insinuation work, particularly in African- American poetry. Jazz is tonal insinuation, and it showed me how to make writing fun.

[Kelly:] William, can you speak to the point about the “recaptured past”? Some of your poems refer to Ben Webster, Bud Powell, and other jazz figures from the thirties and forties. Why is that period important for you?

[Matthews:] Actually the period of jazz I love most is the one that took place in my teens and twenties, when I made my personal discovery of it. I think this may be true for many jazz buffs. Orwell said—I think it was Orwell—”What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate in one’s childhood?” Essential jazz for me was Thelonious Monk, the Miles Davis quintet with Coltrane and Red Garland, and the Mingus workshop bands with Danny Richmond on drums. I must have logged a hundred hours listening to those Mingus groups in a little bar called The Showplace, long defunct now, on West 4th Street. I went to school in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and I would come down to New York on weekends to sit in various jazz bars and sip slow beers and spend my small money to rent a place so I could listen to the music.

But I learned that to listen to Mingus more alertly, I needed to know a lot more about Ellington. I started working backwards in order to learn where the musicians I loved had come from, almost in the way that at a certain age people get interested in their parents’ youth and their grandparents’ lives. The evidence of this is all over the poems—my interest in Webster and Lester Young and the history of the saxophone as a solo instrument. This was all music I was driven to because, I realize now, I was knocked out by a Sonny Rollins solo I heard when I was seventeen. The presence of older musicians in my poems reflects this sort of personal archaeological exploration: those earlier figures are important in the poems, but the crucial years for me were the ones I spent as a weird white be-bop groupie hanging around the Village and trying to figure out what I was listening to and why I loved it so much. The music I heard then helped me to forge an introduction to my emotional life and not to be terrified of it, and my love and gratitude for that help are undying. Also, of course, it’s a very great body of music.

[Kelly:] Yusef, growing up in Louisiana you must have heard about and listened to Louis Armstrong early on, and you’ve written a poem about Charlie Mingus. What other kind of jazz is important to you?

[Komunyakaa:] I suppose the whole spectrum of jazz would be important. When I think of bebop— well, listening to be-bop released me from that whole lineal connection to everything. I could skip around. I could improvise with words and sound—not necessarily to imitate what the musicians were actually doing, but to discover, again, a direction I could take. I think sound is very important— rhythm—a new kind of meter that can approximate our contemporary landscape. And also, you have to realize that there is a kind of internal and psychological landscape that one gets to. This is not necessarily thought out, but is something that is achieved improvisationally.

[Matthews:] I think it would be wrong not to talk about—though it’s very difficult to talk about—the fact that rhythm is crucial in poetry and rhythm is crucial in jazz. It’s not possible to make exact correlations between the two kinds of rhythm, but the complex and beautiful rhythmic patterns of the best jazz allow variation a larger role than is usual in poetry, and the lure of this can be powerful to a young poet.

When I was a student, for example, I might go to sleep with whole passages from Dryden running through my head. They were very beautiful passages, though not in the rhythm of the talk in my classes or the chatter of the guys in the gym I played ball with or the banter of the folks I worked with for beer money while I was in college. I knew all kinds of people who didn’t even know who Dryden was, but who were every bit as interesting. Their rhythms, too, were in my head when I lay down to sleep. If it weren’t for something I learned listening to jazz, the gap between the two kinds of English would have seemed vast to me, but it didn’t because jazz gave me permission to begin composing a poetic language based on the rhythms of the speaking voice: the voice rationalizing to itself, jiving other people, trying to seduce a comparative stranger, explaining why a paper is not ready on time, doing puns and jokes and imitations—in sum, doing the real emotional business of daily life, full of weird quirks and odd lilts. To pay attention to everything I wanted to hear, I needed as many useful models as I could get my hands on, and jazz helped me at least as much as Dryden.

As a kid I spoke a rather special dialect, the patois of the well-educated, bookish kid in the culture. It’s the American equivalent, perhaps, of the dialect BBC announcers speak in England. There are a limited number of occasions in life where it’s really the dialect that’s spoken; in that sense it’s just slightly more of a lingua franca than Esperanto. I came to want to be able to speak more like my countrymen and countrywomen; there’s no reason to order a cheese danish at the corner deli in the words of Samuel Johnson. So, for me, linguistic improvisation meant not staying trapped in the dialect of my upbringing and education, meant moving out and experiencing as a ventriloquist the lives of my fellow citizens. That’s what it means to be American, I thought.

I could listen to the weirdest music before I could read Whitman. When I first heard Yusef Lateef or Eric Dolphy, let’s say, I had no idea what they were up to, but I knew I was interested by it. That experience taught me to trust my intuition and ignorance, something I couldn’t do as easily in front of a text. In a way, I learned to read Whitman by listening to Don Cherry play his pocket trumpet.

[Komunyakaa:] Jazz also worked for me as a way of reestablishing a kind of trust. A trust in what I had known earlier. For some reason, I think it directed me back to my need to say something.

What do I mean by that? Whatever it is, maybe I’m trying to say it in these words, in a poem called “Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance Poets at Harold Park Hotel”:

the need gotta be
so deep words can’t
answer simple questions
all night long notes
stumble off the tongue
& color the air indigo
so deep fragments of gut
& flesh cling to the song
you gotta get into it
so deep salt crystallizes on eyelashes
the need gotta be
so deep you can vomit up ghosts
& not feel broken
till you are no more
than a half ounce of gold
in painful brightness
you gotta get into it
blow that saxophone
so deep all the sex & dope in this world
can’t erase your need
to howl against the sky
the need gotta be
so deep you can’t
just wiggle your hips
& rise up out of it
chaos in the cosmos
modern man in the pepperpot
you gotta get hooked
into every hungry groove
so deep the bomb locked
in rust opens like a fist
into it into it so deep
rhythm is pre-memory
the need gotta be basic
animal need to see
& know the terror
we are made of honey
cause if you wanna dance
this boogie be ready
to let the devil use your head
for a drum

Risk: essentially, that’s what I’m talking about. You have to have that need to take risks, and they come to us in varied patterns and intensities. McKay’s protest sonnet “If We Must Die” took a risk in content. Why else was it read into the Congressional Record by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge? But McKay took few risks structurally. Poetry has always been associated with the elite, the leisure class, with “high” culture of Europe, and the African-American poet of the 1920’s was still in almost the same dilemma as Phillis Wheatley when her work was defined by Thomas Jefferson as beneath a critical response. That is, well into this century the black poet was still aspiring to acceptance by whites, still biding for the wand of approval and recognition as a mere human being.

Consequently, few black poets were willing to admit the influence of jazz because it was defined as “low” culture; it had been created by the descendants of Africa. Only during the 1960’s did we begin to rediscover that which was ours, redefining ourselves with Africa as an emotional backdrop. Young black poets began to accept Langston Hughes and Frank Horne and those white poets associated with modernism—an American tongue and ear. Indeed, jazz shaped the Beat aesthetic, but that movement seemed a privilege only whites could afford. Blacks, fighting for inclusion, didn’t have to ostracize themselves voluntarily. Of course, this was a cultural paradox. To many the Beat Movement was nothing more than the latest minstrel show in town with the new Jim Crows and Zip Coons, another social club that admitted hardly any women or blacks. Yet they said that Charlie Parker was their Buddha.

The whole thing seemed like a love-hate complex magnified. Only the spirit of improvisation held it together like a jam session. This was the element of excitement—the same kind of energy that we poets often try to capture in our jazz-related poems—what we see in the work of Michael Harper, Jay Wright, and many others.

[Kelly:] I think I see how, to both of you, jazz is crucial for freeing you from having to listen to voices in just one way and for allowing you to appreciate different rhythms of speech and language. Jonathan Holden has written about how contemporary poets borrow from more familiar kinds of discourse (e.g., letters, confessions, patterned conversations) to inform poetry. Do the formal elements in jazz composition (the improvisational component of a piece, predictable chord changes, refrain, contrapuntal harmony) work themselves into the structure of your poems?

[Matthews:] I think what Holden is talking about has to do with occasions for speech. If you abandon the sonnet and other inherited stanza forms, why not work with rhetorical forms—the letter, the anecdote, etc.? As Mingus once said, “Can’t improvise on nothing, man; you gotta improvise on something.” Holden, in a way, is talking about getting started.

What I’d like to talk about is not only the discovery of the occasion for how a poem might begin, but the discovery of the whole process of a poem, a way of thinking and feeling at the same time, as if it were all one activity—and it is. Writing is a way of being in the world as if the famous mind/body problem didn’t exist. And it doesn’t. It’s only a poor invention of philosophy, one of those road signs rational intelligence puts up to mark the farthest its powers can carry it. To confuse that road sign with the limits of human intelligence is to shrink the word “intelligence” to a mere synonym for “rationality.”

Jazz and poetry are about what it feels like to be whole.

[Komunyakaa:] Often we hear about the emotional thread holding poems together. But, as in jazz, we also have to think about a tonal thread holding the poem together, whereby we are able to make leaps not necessarily through logic, but through feeling.

[Kelly:] Yusef, which poem of yours is it that has the refrain, “hard love, it’s hard love”? [Komunyakaa:] That’s “Copacetic Mingus.” It has an epigraph from the man himself—“Mingus One, Two and Three. / Which is the image you want the world to see?”—and then I carry it on this way:

Heartstring. Blessed wood
& every moment the thing’s made of:
ball of fatback
licked by fingers of fire.
Hard love, it’s hard love.
Running big hands down
the upright’s wide hips,
rocking his moon-eyed mistress
with gold in her teeth.
Art & life bleed
into each other
as he works the bow.
But tonight we’re both a long ways
from the Mile High City,
1973. Here in New Orleans
years below sea level,
I listen to Pithecanthropus
erectus: Up & down, under
& over, every which way—
thump, thump, dada—ah, yes.
Wood heavy with tenderness,
Mingus fingers the loom
gone on Segovia,
dogging the raw strings
unwaxed with rosin.
Hyperbolic bass line. Oh, no!
Hard love, it’s hard love.
[Kelly:] The poem itself seems to be an instrument, one expressing your feeling about Mingus.

[Komunyakaa:] I think so. It’s the whole thing of putting words together to create tension within the context of the poem. What I’m talking about, I think, has to do with language itself, though subject matter creates a poem’s tone, also. In writing the Vietnam poems for my collection Dien Cai Dau, I questioned if I could stay close to the jazz motif, and it was very difficult. I don’t think those poems were influenced by jazz as much as the ones in I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head or Copacetic. However, I know that there is at least one poem informed by jazz in the Vietnam book, “You and I Are Disappearing,” which has a rhythm that came out of listening to Thelonious Monk. Monk would give you enough space to fit your heart into: repetition with slight variations, playing with pauses and silences, an unspoken call-and-response. Monk knew how to be his own Amen Corner. He had listened closely to those gospel singers he’d accompanied as a teenager; his sound is one that always takes me back home to the foundation of my creative impulse. I love his jagged tonality, how he was able to leave a piece unresolved—a door left ajar that invited you in as a participant. I try to write poems like that.

[Kelly:] What you just said about “heart” returns me to “Copacetic Mingus” and in particular its lines “Art & life bleed / into each other.” They say much about the melding of poetry and jazz.

[Matthews:] The art/life problem is rather like the mind/body problem. At our best we like them bleeding into one another, and we like to oppose the ease with which we can set up borders between them. Of course, music draws from the history of music, and in that way music is “about” music. In a similar way all art is partially about art. Any music resembles any other music more than it resembles an insurance policy, let’s say. Thus, while one of jazz’s functions is to be in benign and loving opposition to less improvisational forms of music, it has more in common with them than it does with silence, and perhaps even more than it does with speech. But finally, jazz is not separable from life. Jazz is what life would sound like if the only expressive form it could find were jazz.

[Komunyakaa:] John Cage composed pieces that used silence as music, and many of the Black Mountain poets were aware of silence on the page, how the white space contributes to the poem’s rhythm. Olson and Creeley come to mind. Perhaps this is what first drew Baraka to them. I can definitely see that influence in The Dead Lecturer, but I’m sure that his attraction to jazz was always there. His whole demeanor seems to be informed by jazz, and he also knows the sophisticated nuance of silence in poetry. The jazz-influenced poet is quite aware of silence. Not just how it’s broken up or accented on the page, but many times silence as an implied element.

[Matthews:] The spaces between words are a form of structured silence. The silence that’s terrifying is the one that just goes. . . . That’s the one that is the enemy of love and joy. It’s a whole other matter.

[Kelly:] When you talk about improvisation, I think of the be-bop period and how a lot of improvisational pieces were convoluted re-creations of standard melodies, redefinitions of jazz by a new generation of musicians. To the casual listener, these pieces sounded completely original, but they were built on familiar tunes. When you improvise in a poem, what gives it shape other than your improvisation?

[Komunyakaa:] I mentioned the whole thing about tonal thread. Many times, if you notice, in the jazz-related poem there’s a refrain. Sometimes I will use a refrain during composition—something that I return to—but I’ll go back later and remove it. Essentially, the refrain keeps me going— moving on with the same tone pretty much throughout the poem.

[Matthews:] I’ve already referred to learnable structures that help you save yourself from getting lost in improvising—Mingus saying, “Can’t improvise on nothing, man; you gotta improvise on something.” About half the be-bop classics are based on the chord changes of “I Got Rhythm.” There are “fake books,” so called, that give musicians the changes to numerous songs. There’s even a fake book called The Real Book. As to improvisation ex nihilo, it just doesn’t happen.

An interesting question is, “What in the writing of a poem provides something similar?” There are certain devices—repetition, diminuendo and crescendo—that can be described in musical terms. But, naturally, something happens in the course of a poem that doesn’t happen in a piece of music. Words have conventional meaning, and so something’s being proposed—to the reader at least, and in many poems to an implied listener, some second character of the poem beside the one we usually call “the speaker.” Is it believable or not? Interesting or not? There are issues of persuasion and consent raised by any given poem that I believe are important sources of improvisation in the writing of poetry.

Here’s a piece of mine with some jazz subject matter. As Yusef said so wisely at the beginning, it’s a sense of procedure rather than subject matter that is the deep link between jazz and poetry. I happen to write frequently about jazz because I write about what I love, but it’s the procedural link that interests me most.

This is a poem called “The Accompanist.” It’s spoken by an old guy who made a career as an accompanist to a famous singer, and who has been asked what it was like to be around her. He also knows a few things to say to people who may be interested in what the skills of a good accompanist are. I had no particular singer or accompanist in mind. The poem’s written to discourage identification.

The poem may well be about erotic life, and how hard it is to maintain in erotic life that equilibrium between the parties we rather grandly call “equality.” But I choose to quote the poem here partly because it lives, if it does, by raising some of the issues of persuasion and consent and credibility I was just talking about.

Of course, there’s an important difference between the kind of improvisation in poetry I was mentioning and improvising on the bandstand. At home, if I get lost, there’s always the friendly wastebasket, and then I can make another try at it. Get lost on the bandstand, and you have a bunch of half-drunk people pointing and laughing from the audience—or at least that’s how it could feel.

The Accompanist

Don’t play too much, don’t play
too loud, don’t play the melody.
You have to anticipate her
and to subdue yourself.
She used to give me her smoky
eye when I got boisterous,
so I learned to play on
tip-toe and to play the better half
of what I might. I don’t like
to complain, though I notice
that I get around to it somehow.
We made a living and good music,
both, night after night; the blue
curlicues of smoke rubbing their
staling and wispy backs
against the ceilings, the flat
drinks and scarce taxis, the jazz life
we bitch about the way Army pals
complain about the food and then
re-up. Some people like to say
with smut in their voices how playing
the way we did at our best is partly
sexual. OK, I could tell them
a tale or two, and I’ve heard
the records Lester cut with Lady Day
and all that rap, and it’s partly
sexual but it’s mostly practice
and music. As for partly sexual,
I’ll take wholly sexual any day,
but that’s a duet and we’re talking
accompaniment. Remember “Reckless
Blues”? Bessie Smith sings out “Daddy”
and Louis Armstrong plays back “Daddy”
as clear through his horn as if he’d
spoken it. But it’s her daddy and her
story. When you play it you becomes
your part in it, one of her beautiful
troubles, and then, however much music
can do this, part of her consolation,
the way pain and joy eat off each other’s
plates, but mostly you play to drunks,
to the night, to the way you judge
and pardon yourself, to all that goes
not unsung, but unrecorded.

[Matthews:] Contributing or giving something that is already ongoing, to be sure. Also, for me, the almost theatrical or dramatic meaning of your “part” in it, your role in it. This refers to what I said earlier about experiencing the lives of your countrymen and countrywomen.

There are two responses that people can make to pieces of writing they like. One is “I can really relate to that because my grandmother died, too.” But that’s not really what reading and writing are about. All our grandmothers are going to die. What that person means is “I looked into your book and lo, it was a mirror, and in it I saw myself.” The connection that I love, both as reader and writer, is the other one: “I would never have thought or felt such a thing without this text.” It takes you outside your narrowest self. You’re other, larger, different and more strange than you knew. So in that way “your part in it” is to be somebody a little different from yourself, to play that role and know what it’s like.

[Kelly:] Which means creating the voices.

[Komunyakaa:] Those are the extended possibilities. I mentioned the Vietnam poems, and the one informed by Thelonious Monk. If you listen to Monk, you hear all of his repetition constantly, and I tried to capture that repetition, that “other role” Bill noted, in the very short space of “You and I Are Disappearing”:

The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak
she burns like a piece of paper.
She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.
We stand with our hands
hanging at our sides,
while she burns
like a sack of dry ice.
She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker’s cigar,
silent as quicksilver.
A tiger under a rainbow
at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.

The poem pretty much ended itself when Thelonious ended the record. What I’m saying is that there is a kind of accidental closure, a kind of completion that happens that you cannot plot. Jazz helps you to discover this, too.

[Matthews:] You may have taken on certain formal housekeeping duties—a twelve or thirty-two bar structure, let’s say—and knowing that can help you discover accidental closure, but only a little. You’ve still got to find your way from the middle to the end, even if you have a notion when the end’s coming up. So far as you can manage it, a good place to stop is when you’ve said what you can find to say—as I will stop right now.

[Komunyakaa:] I’d like to believe that jazz could parallel the act of demanding a spiritual and cultural freedom, that it can connect us to who we are as well as to others. And I hope it keeps me connected to what I have to do as a poet. I love surprises. As I listen to Dolphy or Dexter, I think their music works like a refrain underneath my life keeping it all together and in focus. If I’m having a writer’s block, a couple of days of Coltrane or Miles does the trick. It seems that all my muses are tangled up in music, that they are hip enough to connect me to Soyinka or Robbe-Grillet. I don’t have to torture my imagination to put Miles side by side with Sartre in a poolroom. Anything is possible; this is what jazz had taught me about life. My creative universe is always in a flux. Active. Anything and everything inform my work. It is my nature to embrace whatever is out there, and jazz has been the one thing that gives some symmetry to my poetry, gives it shape and tonal equilibrium. This is something that I only realized recently, and I don’t want to be overly conscious of it. I like the implied freedom jazz brings to my work; a soloist can go to hell or heaven and back, bending a tune into an extended possibility, and bringing it all around together as if his life depended on it.

For some, jazz-influenced poetry might appear as a threat to the canon. This isn’t new. Jazz has always been somewhat of a threat, and not only in America or England. Look at the stir it created in 1938 at that “Entartete Musik” exhibition in Dusseldorf, Germany, with Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf. But it has also survived the cultural critics and the accountant’s calculator at the record companies. I feel blessed that something pulled jazz and poetry together inside me.

Source: Yusef Komunyakaa, William Matthews, and Robert Kelly, “Jazz and Poetry: A Conversation,” in Georgia Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 4, Winter 1992, pp. 645–61.

In “Ode to a Drum,” Yusef Komunyakaa enters the mind of an African drum maker as he tacks the hide of a gazelle to a drum of wood and begins to make music. On a literal level, “Ode to a Drum” takes the form of a heartfelt monologue of an artisan voicing his concerns and problems to the spirit of a dead gazelle as he performs his craft. But a closer reading of the poem reveals that Komunyakaa has fused elements of traditional blues with the form of the ode to address nothing less than the profound political, historical, and spiritual significance of the drum to African and African American cultures. And in doing so, he has used the modest voice of a lone drum maker to create an allegory and an anthem of political and cultural renewal and rebellion.

To understand the allegorical meanings of Komunyakaa’s richly textured poem, a basic understanding of the role of drumming in African and African American cultures and an overview of the relationship of blues to traditional African music are necessary.

In his study of delta blues, Deep Blues, Robert Palmer describes how as the African slave trade evolved, several traditions and styles of African music made their ways to the American South with the slaves. In the early years of slavery, traders focused their efforts on the section of West Africa they called “Senegambia”—a region that extended from the dry northern areas of Senegal down to the northern coastline of Guinea. Because most of the area bordered the Sahara desert, there were few trees, and as a result, drums were far less prevalent than were the more Arabic-influenced stringed instruments. It was not until the slave trade moved farther south to the more heavily forested region that came to be known as the “slave coast”—the coastal regions now known as Sierra Leone and Liberia—and then even farther south to the mouth of the Congo River to what is now Angola that traders encountered Africans whose music was steeped in the rich percussive sounds and drumming that has come to define African music for most of the West.

Although Komunyakaa does not refer directly to a “tribe” or region in his poem, one can deduce from this basic overview that the drum maker in “Ode to a Drum” is from one of the more southerly regions of the West African coast. In fact, one could further deduce, though not definitively, that the drum maker is from the Congo River region and that the “[t]rouble on the river” he refers to in the poem could very well be slave traders. The Congo River and its many tributaries allowed easier access to the inner villages of the mainland than did the difficult and dangerous African terrain, and they became the main routes to and from the ships for many traders. (Because a time frame is not mentioned in the poem, it is conceivable, though unlikely, that the poem takes place in the present day, and the “troubles” could be contemporary issues such as AIDS or another infectious disease. However, the poem’s setting does not affect its allegorical interpretation.)

In traditional African villages, drumming and music making played a role in virtually every aspect of daily life. Palmer points out that, although there were the individual shepherds who serenaded their flocks and lone musicians who played to entertain themselves, music was by and large a communal affair that was included in every activity of the village. And within each body of music that defined those activities, there was little distinction between the musician and the audience. Whether it was what we know now as a “call and response” or a method of harmonizing called “hocketing,” the forms of music Africans played relied heavily on full, communal participation. It was those communal aspects of the music, as much as the music itself, that was important for Africans. Music kept villages close to one another, and it kept the people in those villages together. And often the drummer was the only “musician,” per se, with the “audience” turning their bodies and voices into accompanying instruments.

As slaves populated the American South, their music slowly evolved and not only came to incorporate the divergent sounds of the many traditions represented by the slaves themselves, but it also came to merge with classical and contemporary European music so that by the late nineteenth century the musical forms that we now know as the blues and jazz had begun to take shape.

Komunyakaa, an African American, had little access to the public culture that his white contemporaries had growing up in the segregated Deep South. For instance, although he was an avid reader as a young child, the whites-only library was off-limits to him. However, one bit of culture that Komunyakaa had access to growing up in the 1950s and 1960s was jazz and the blues. Through his mother’s radio, the young Komunyakaa was exposed to the sounds of such jazz and blues greats as Louis Armstrong and Ma Rainey, and it is those influences that can be very clearly seen in this poem.

Blues, as the name implies, is a form of music whose lyrics and sounds are largely defined by difficult times. Originating among slaves in plantations and spreading throughout the antebellum South during years when the practice of slavery was illegal but the many practices of severe racial discrimination, including lynching, were not, the blues came to be defined by its sad, soulful sounds and lyrics. Blues lyrics often address the poverty of the musician, the law he was running from, the liquor he drank too much of the night before, and the sex that was both a source of comfort and a source of pain for him. Yet far from being a springboard into “deeper blues” for the musician, the music he created (most of the early known blues musicians were men) helped both the musicians and their communities to deal with their difficult plights. Continuing the communal traditions of their African forefathers, blues musicians, like the griots, or storytellers of African villages whose stories, according to Palmer, came to “constitute a kind of oral history of their people,” grew to become the voices of their communities. And it was through their music and the communal voicing of sorrows that blacks could find strength from one another.

“I heard my daughter praying / for the meat here at my feet,” the drum maker tells the spirit of the gazelle, referring to the hunger his family is experiencing. And later in the poem, echoing what is a typical refrain for a blues lyric, he intones a litany of troubles he is experiencing:

Trouble in the hills.
Trouble on the river
too. There’s no kola nut,
palm wine, fish, salt,
or calabash.

The drum maker’s family is hungry, staples of his life are scarce, and trouble surrounds him. This is the blues.

Another common element of the blues, an element clearly derived from the African tradition, is the merging of the sacred and the profane—the fusion, often, of a prayer to the Lord and a reference to relations between the sexes, as described by Palmer:

Man-woman relationships, probably the most persistent concern of blues lyrics, are also important in traditional African villages, where social harmony is often considered synonymous with or dependent on harmony in the home. And the mixing of the sacred and the profane in black American song lyrics is more easily understood once one realizes that in precolonial Africa these two fields of human activity were not generally thought of as polar opposites.

Komunyakaa consciously weds the sacred with the profane in “Ode to a Drum.” The act of making the drum is a ritual that transcends cultures. Many Native American traditions, for instance, considered the drum to be a sacred instrument. In the poem, out of respect for the sacred, the narrator of the poem takes on a respectful, almost reverential tone as he addresses the gazelle. “You know it wasn’t anger / that made me stop my heart / till the hammer fell,” he tells the gazelle almost apologetically in reference to another animal he has killed to feed his child. And as he ties the gazelle’s hide to the wooden drum, he assures it that now “Ghosts cannot slip back / inside the body’s drums.” The drum maker is not only working to create a drum, but he is also performing the act of making the gazelle “whole” again.

And yet, as he describes the actual act of killing the gazelle, the drum maker evokes a crude image of the sexual act. “Weeks / ago, I broke you as a woman / once shattered me into a song / beneath her weight,” he tells the gazelle.

The incorporation of the blues with the ode is not merely an academic exercise for Komunyakaa. Traditionally, odes have been written for special occasions or to address objects or important ideas. In this case, the object being addressed is, of course, the drum, and the idea being addressed is nothing less than the revitalization of African and African American culture. By using the blues, Komunyakaa is acknowledging both the debt the blues has to African tradition and the importance of blues to African American tradition and history.

In “Ode to a Drum,” the gazelle, an animal of prey, has been killed by the drum maker for the purpose of bringing it back to “life” as a drum, of making it “whole” again. Once “whole,” the gazelle, in the form of the drum (which, significantly, is made of ebony, a deep-colored, almost black, wood) will help the drum maker and his people drive their “troubles” away. In the context of postcolonial African societies, one can equate the gazelle with the Africans themselves, whose societies and traditions were nearly destroyed by European colonialists. The drum maker, in this reading, represents the power of traditional African culture, a power through which Africans can regain their former stature, not as “gazelles,” but as one of the most feared predators on the continent—as panthers.

Similarly, in the African American context, the gazelle can be viewed as representing the descendants of slaves whose culture has constantly been under attack by whites. Black culture has often been dismissed as unworthy of white mainstream consideration. In the poem, the drum, representing the music and traditions of African Americans, is used to bring life back to blacks, and it is through that music that African American culture can be revitalized.

Culture can be a powerful force in a people’s history. In repressive situations or in difficult times, cultural traditions can unify communities and keep hope alive. By evoking the ages-old power of the drum, along with African music and the blues, Komunyakaa has brought peoples and traditions once considered as hapless as slain gazelles to once again walk the earth as proud and mighty panthers. And like the gazelle, the traditions that once defined Africans and African Americans and made them strong, can one day come back to life.

Source: Mark White, Critical Essay on “Ode to a Drum,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2004.