MUHI102 - Fall 2009

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kerouac reading image

+ Introduction to Book of Blues, Robert Creeley

> Listen: Charlie Parker (Kerouac / Steve Allen, Poetry for the Beat Generation)

> Listen: American Haikus (w/ Simms and Cohn, Blues and Haikus)

Blues and Haikus image

+ Hearing Kerouac

Gerald Nicosia, Kerouac as Musician- "Kerouac's only album without actual musical accompaniment ... [is] perhaps the best demonstration of the musicality of Kerouac's art. To appreciate the genius that has gone into these readings, one should have Kerouac's texts in fron tof him. Kerouac uses the actual printed text the way Charlie Parker would use the score of some old jazz classic, merely as a guide form which to improvise his own variations of tempo and mood and, at times, brand-new melodic flights. In Kerouac's work, the difference between what eye records and ear hears givesa measure of how Kerouac was creating each piece afresh simply in the act of reading it aloud."

+ From San Francisco Blues

BOOK OF BLUES IMAGE

> Listen and Read / WebCT;"Poems from the Unpublished Book of Blues," Blues and Haikus; Kerouac with Zoot Simms and Al Cohn

> Or Selections from San Francisco Blues, solo voice, "2. Poems Fragments," The Beat Generation;text as  Chorus 29 . .. Book of Blues.

? DISCUSS BLOG PROMPT . . . What kind of voice do you hear in your head? How would did you imagine them to be spoken aloud? How do you respond to hearing Kerouac's own performing of them? In what ways does it seem appropriate to call these texts "jazz poems"? What are the jazz elements reflected, imitated, or evoked by these poems?

++ Kerouac's note

What aspects of jazz in general or Bebop in particular seem to interest Kerouac? To what degree are these exemplified in the poems?

- jazz as a soloist, not ensemble art

- blues onality

- swing - modern time

- sensibility: expressive, individualistic, soulfull, virtuostic, inventive or exploratory

+ Bebop and the 1950s Writer

Mexico City blues IMAGE

++ Fantasy - The Early History of Bop

> Listen

Other "Beat" writers include: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Ted Joans, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McLure, Diane DiPrima, and Robert Creeley.

Robert Creeley - "line-wise, the most complementary sense I have found is that of musicians like Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. I am interested in how that is done, how "time" there is held to a measure peculiarly an evidence (a hand) of the emotion which prompts (drives) the poem in the first place."

Ted Joans - 

"Jazz is My Religion" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc9yodZ29UE)

Scatting with David Amran (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAoxZXYuZvE)

". . . . the time has come to deal with the Beat generation and its indebtedness to Bird. The young people who became what Time-Life pronounced "the beat generation" grew up with contemporary jazz. Of course there was schmaltzy pop corn music nightly and daily being dished out for white America's consumption, but wise ofays fished around in the deep dark waters of jazz. At the beginning there was only a small minority interested in poetry, jazz, and contemporary painting. But the hipsters spread the contagious words about what was really happening that had positive values.

Some of the poets often "preached" their poems, or attempted to "blow" the poem as they were playing a sax or trumpet. All these poets were on Bird or Prez. The latter was the bridge that many poets crossed into Bird's land, thus arriving hip.. . . . San Francisco was the first place that the Beat generation started doing great poetry readings in clubs and coffee shops. It was in Frisco that Allen Ginsberg first exploded his masterpiece Howl on the world..... Back in the good/ole-bad/old days we often read our poems with jazz recordings. It wasn't rare to see a poet walking to his coffee shop reading gig carrying a portable phonograph and an attaché case full of poetry and a few records. Bird was our main man of music, and many of us used his recordings to fly on. Jack Kerouac was the first white poet that I met that was hip to bird, " - Ted Joans, Bird and the Beats

http://www.nathanielturner.com/charlieparker.htm

Allen Ginsberg - Howl

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ginsberg.html

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

. . . .

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

. . . .

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years."

Bob Kaufman, Crootey Songo -

DERRAT SLEGELATIONS, FLO GOOF BABER,

SCRASH SHO DUBIES, WAGO WAILO WAILO.

GEED BOP NAVA GLIED, NAVA GLIED NAVA,

SPLEERIEDER, HUYEDIST, HEDACAZ, AX--, O,O.

DEEREDITION, BOOMEDITION, SQUOM, SQUOM, SQUOM.

DEE BEETSTRAWIST, WAPAGO, LOCOEST, LOCORO, LO.

VOOMETEYEREEPETIOP, BOP, BOP, BOP, WHIPOLAT.

DFEGET, SKLOKO, KURRITIF, PLOG, MANGI, PLOG MANGI,

CLOPO JAGO BREE, BREE, ASLOOP ERED, AKINGO LABY.

ENGPOP, ENGPOP, BOP, PLOLO, PLOLO, BOP, BOP.

+ Kerouac as Novelist

Kerouac ON THE ROAD IMAGE

Jack Kerouac wrote some twenty books, including novels, poetry, and memoir - not all published during his lifetime. He is most widely known as a novelist, and noted for One the Road. Though like many writers of the 1950s, he chafed at the restrictive notions of genre and form, he did lay out some aesthetic principles. A few relevant passages from "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" include:

"PROCEDURE. Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on the subject of image.

METHOD. NO periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas - but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases) - 'measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech' - 'divisions of the sounds we hear' - 'time and how to note it down.' (William Carlos Williams)

. . . .

CENTER OF INTEREST. Begin not from preconceive idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion . . . .

MENTAL STATE. If possible write 'without consciousness' in semi-trance (as Yeats' later 'trance writing) allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so 'modern' language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typing-cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich's 'beclouding of consciousness,' Come from within, out - to relaxed and said."

> Listen to

Readings from On the Road / Visions of Cody (3:30)

OR
> View Kerouac on Steve Allen - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzCF6hgEfto

SCROLL IMAGE

Read selections from Kerouac's _Book of Blues_ (414-421) to yourself. What kind of voice do you hear in your head? How would you imagine this to be spoken aloud? In what ways does it seem appropriate to call these texts "jazz poems"? Do the themes, short lines, language, or voice invite the comparison? Then listen to the audio of Kerouac with Zoot Simms and reflect upon the vocal style and the interaction with the saxophones.  How does this collaboration come across in terms of the balance between music and language (music with poetry added, poetry with music added, poetry and music side-by-side, a marriage of poetry and music)? Write a post in response to these questions and any others to which your listening and reading gives rise.
AUDIO ON WEBCT

Jazz lovers value he music of Louis Armstrong (as in West End Blues) and Charlie Parker (as in Bloomdido), yet they are very different styles. What do they have in common, and what separates these two styles? Which do you prefer, and for what reasons? 

Ellison, Ralph - The Invisible Man

1. Background

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Ralph_Ellison_photo_portrait_seated.jpg/200px-Ralph_Ellison_photo_portrait_seated.jpg

• background of author: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/ellison_r_timeline_flash.html

• 1914-1994; studied trumpet and piano as Tuskegee; published one novel and many essays on jazz; won the National Book Award.

• status of novel: 20^th century work of genius

  • General trajectory: bildungsroman, the real and psychological journey from rural south, to a historically black college as scholarship student, to New York factory work, political involvement and disenchantment, to "hibernation" under ground.
    

_______________________________________________________________

2. Race in America: W.E. B. DuBois

"Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." (W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folks)

• Stephen Colbert: "I don't see race"
• DuBois: "double-consciousness
• coming to awareness of self as an unavoidably racial subject-- a rite of passage for Fredrick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Barak Obama

Rhapsody in Black and Blue, Armstrong 1932: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3CcAD_seww

* West End Blues, Armstrong 1952 (transcription and slides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Hbh_-IRs8

* PBS: On West End Blues: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxQGSmi5O6s

_______________________________________________________________

Selections from the Novel (1952/3); chapter 1 published as a short story in 1947

3. Prologue

dramatization: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cctjuE95VA&feature=related

• How does the narrator describe his invisibility? (385-6/3-4)

• What is the symbolic power of his battle with "Monopolated Light and Power"? (6-)

• Armstrong, "What Did I do to Be so Black and Blue"(7-8)

  • jazz / blues as source of vision, act of resistance

  • the song

  • the discourse on time and rhythm

• Descent into Hell - the dream vision - allegory / Dante (9)
  

  • orality / sermon on "blackness of blackness"

  • dialogue with the mother, singer of spirituals

• Music / Writing / Enlightenment

  - through music, and the compulsion towards some revelatory truth about self and world

  - to see music, to hear, to "make a music of invisibility" by "put[ing] invisiblity dwn in black and white" (by writing) (13)

http://www.chgs.umn.edu/histories/otherness/images/dancingsamboA.jpg

Little Black Sambo, Helen Bannerman. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17824/17824-h/17824-h.htm

_______________________________________________________________

4. Chapter 1 -

"Battle Royal" (published as a short story in 1947)

PBS Dramatization http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=defTU3_2yrA

• narrator's acknowledgement of past shame (15); separate but equal

• Puzzle of the grandfather's deathbed message, and its "danger" (16) - confusion for N.

• N's success and graduation speech about humility as the secret to progress

• "Bring up the shines, gentlemen" (18)

  • discuss the spectacle and the distress, confusion of it as entertainment: why are they conflicted, crying, trembling? (20-21)

• Explain the narrator's desire to speak, to be judged a good speaker - and the twisted irony of it (25)

• The speech - (29)

  • its accommodationist theme of "cast down your buckets where you are"

  • the mistake of mentioning "equality

• Final praise and the "prophetic dream" of his grandfather (33)

Concluding paragraphs of Invisible Man

_______________________________________________________________

http://audibleword.net/upload/Armstrong-BlackAndBlue.mp3

What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue

(As performed by Louis Armstrong)

Below are two prompts. Choose whichever one appeals to you:

What makes a Blues?

Blues lyrics are often composed by singer/performers who may have mastered a hundred or more traditional blues songs composed by others. Internalizing elements of the form and tradition, they may be able to write a blues without a conscious or clearly articulated sense of what makes a blues really a "Blues." Imagine, however, you want to teach young people to write a blues lyric, students perhaps who are not steeped in the tradition.  What are some of the important rules, conventions, or features that you see as characteristic of the blues we have read? Write your response in the form of a "how to" or even a lesson plan for a class.


What makes the blues literary?

Blues lyrics clearly have "literary" dimensions: highly charged, expressive language, arranged according to special conventions in order to produce an aesthetic effect. Yet they were not immediately nor have they typically been recognized as literature. Discuss some of the challenges or barriers to including blues lyrics in the canon of literary masterpieces alongside troubador songs and Shakespearian sonnets; explain whether and why you would include them as legitimate literature.

Romare Bearden - Bluer Than Blue, 1981

* Crossroads Blues
* Kind Hearted Women Blues

http://audibleword.net/upload/

1. What makes it a blues?
"There are three foundations upon which  my understanding of the blues rests: [1] that it began as an oral art, [2] that it veers almost compulsively towards repetition, [3] and that it seeks an empathetic though not sympathetic audience -- in other words. . . no matter the problem the blues is not a call for help but rather an itemization of the problem itself.  It is a desire embedded within the blues to articulate a problem without servicing it, a crux Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, labeled as 'tragicomic.'"  (Rowan Ricardo Phillips, "The Blue Century" in _A Concise Companion to 20th Century American Poetry_.)


2. What makes the blues literary?  
Blues lyrics clearly have "literary" dimensions: highly charged, expressive language, arranged according to special conventions in order to produce an aesthetic effect. Yet they were not immediately nor have they typically been recognized as literature. Even in his 1922 _Book of American Negro Poetry_ James Weldon Johnson does not collect any blues lyrics as poems, even though he mentions the blues in his preface.  (http://www.bartleby.com/269/1000.html)
* You'll Never Miss Your Jelly

3. Harlem
"Between 1910 and 1930, the black population of New York increased form under 100,000 to over 300,000. The mass exodus from the south had several causes: a deteriorating social climate (including an increase in lynchings), an economic depression, and such natural catastrophes as cotton boll weevils and floods. . . . By 1920, Harlem had become, as James Weldon Johnson put it, 'the greatest Negro city in the world.' A self-contained community of over 100,000 blacks, it was a 'City of Refuge' from racist attitudes .... [and] a cultural center for artists, writers, musicians, intellectuals, and various other individuals could feel free to meet, express themselves, and test their creative energies in an environment undisrupted by white America." (Christopher Beach, _The Cambridge Introduction to 20th Century American Poetry_)

* Juke Box Love Song (381)

4. Langston Hughes "Blues poet"?
(1902-1967) - Educated at Columbia and Lincoln University of PA, he travelled in Europe and Mexico while younger, but lived in Harlem, NY through the period that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance 1920s, 1930s.  

* What are some of the issues and tensions regarding the blues for Langston Hughes? See David Chinitz, "Literacy and Authenticity: The Blues Poems of Langston Hughes" http://www.jstor.org/pss/3299349

Language, rhythm, theme, and address

* Midwinter Blues 344

* "Weary Blues" 344

5. Dream Boogie - rhythm, dialogue
A dialogue with musical elements, from blues but also jazz (specifically bebop).
* Montage of a Dream Deferred (the set list)
* Children's Rhymes (347)
* Easy Boogie (349)
* Neon Signs (350)

Consider the introduction to Slave Songs of the United States, printed in the coursepack. The authors of this text are Northern Abolitionists who had moved to South Carolina (what is today Hilton Head Island, a major vacation spot) during the Civil War after the Union captured the fort there. For this reason we can assume that the authors have at least some good will towards the African American ex-slaves they are writing about. Given this background, how do the authors seem to view the music, customs, culture, and qualities of the African Americans they encountered?  What specifc quote(s) can you cite from the introduction that exemplify this attitude? What do you think they wanted readers in their day to take away from this introduction? How were they trying to affect how other Northerners perceived African Americans?

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/johnson/johnson.jpg

Background :

• Born 1871 in Jacksonville, FL; died 1938.
• Founded newspaper, served as school principal, admitted to bar, wrote lyrics hit songs with his brother, and served as NAACP General Secretary, and Consel to Venezuela.
• Associated with the "New Negro" movement, which presaged the Harlem Renaissance.
• Also published the _Book of American Negro Spirituals_, a novel _The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man_, and other books.

The "New Negro" movement stressed racial price and self-reliance, full rights for blacks as American citizens and, in general, the desirability of assimilation into white middle-class culture. Another important element in the New Negro movement was the interest in the African heritage of American blacks: this heritage was held up as a source of pride and the basis for a worldwide racial solidarity. (Christopher Beech, Cambridge Introduction to 20th Century American Poetry)

_______________________

A Key Issue: Language and Liberation

• recognition of African American writers seen as progress towards fuller recognition of African American humanity and rights of citizenship; W.E.B. DuBois' idea of the "talented tenth."
• dialect a fraught issue:
• tradition of minstrel shows, coon songs; parody of African American dialect

• Writers interested in folk tradition or the vernacular (common speech) had to contend with the racist associations minstrelsy; The challenge for many African American writers: how to succeed in achieving recognition, drawing upon ethnic tradition while evading racist associations.
• Johnson rejected the dialect style of his contemporary Paul Dunbar in poems like "When Malindy Sings;" (Dunbar himself was conflicted, and also wrote formal sonnets with elevated diction like "We Wear the Mask")

• Elevation of folk materials like "Spirituals" can highlight tradition while skirting issues of racism: see JWJ's "Black and Unknown Bards"
  

_______________________

Black Lecturer
_______________________

Johnson's Preface
Read from Johnson's preface, page 294, on the "oratory" of the preacher and on being moved by the old-time preacher's inspired sermon...; and on difficulty of intoning them properly (295)

? What is it that explains the power of an old-time preacher for Johnson? Why does he feel compelled to write poems in this mode?

? What are his reservations about language choice?

The Sermon

An "old time" traditional preacher, W.T. Goodwin, "Easter Sunrise Sermon" at St. James Church, Johns' Island, SC 1971 (302). Bio



_______________________




Johnson - God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse
"The Creation" published in 1918, other poems published in the mid 1920s. The volume was first published in 1928

scanned text and images

Noted for minimal use of dialect forms, but an achieved "racial" effect through the quotation and echo of biblical passages, other sermons, and spirituals (Jean Wagner, "The Experiment of God's Trombones").

_______________________


Discuss Performance Approaches to God's Trombones

• Read "The Creation" aloud
• Listen to James Weldon Johnson

? In what ways is the language like or unlike minstrel speech?

? In what ways do the poems evoke oral performance? In what ways do they lend themselves to speaking aloud?

? How does the appropriation of biblical messages and themes shape the poems?
 
? How does "The Creation" revise the biblical text, bringing God close to a congregation?

? How do the original images frame your reading; what do they depict? What do you make of the style?

(Images: Aaron Douglas.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Douglas)

• Listen to "Listen Lord: A Prayer"
• Listen to "Go Down Death"
• Read "The Judgment Day"
  

_______________________

Further Note on Dialect

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/johnson/creation.htm

"As Hughes, Hurston, and Brown would all recognize, Johnson was after an idiomatic vernacular poetics, recognizing that a break with the "dielect" tradition was prerequisite to a more variously self expressive poetry. "The Creation" shows, better than anything by Dunbar, the black folk preacher as a superior verbal artist--a virtuoso word-crafter and image-maker; it recuperates precisely the sort of syncretic linguistic feats that had been a butt of humor in the minstrel show:

    And God stepped out on space,
    And He looked around and said,
    "I'm lonely
    I'll make me a world."

How can anyone say that such writing "only passes for 'colored'"? This is a stanza that rives the walls of genteel dialect poetry. As Louis D. Rubin has pointed out, most convincingly, Johnson had demonstrated the possibility of moving back and forth between "formal intensity" and "colloquial informality"; just as important, the lessons of free verse are applied to make each line correspond to a breath: "Here was the flowing, pulsating rise and fall of living speech, making its own emphases and intensifications naturally, in terms of the meaning, not as prescribed by an artificial, pre-established pattern of singsong metrics and rhyme." Gayl Jones backs up Rubin's point with the authority of someone who has studied the matter with an eye to getting work done: "Johnson maintains the syntax and expressive language and rhythms of the folk orators and seems to presage more contemporary ways of transcribing dialect or folk speech as a self-authenticating language."(George Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. )