The Poetry of Cortez by Jayne Cortez

First published:Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares, 1969; Festivals and Funerals, 1971; Scarifications, 1973, 2d ed. 1978; Mouth on Paper, 1977; Firespitter, 1982; Coagulations: New and Selected Poems, 1984; Poetic Magnetic, 1991; Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, 1996; Jazz Fan Looks Back,2002

Type of work: Poetry

A Revolutionary Poetics of Anger

Jayne Cortez is a poet of anger who utilizes urban scenes of violence and dehumanization. Her poetry is a volatile mixture of major trends in both the art and the politics of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She is a social revolutionary, passionately interested in the plight of downtrodden people everywhere, and she is a seeker of African roots and bases of morality who uses the techniques of free verse, borrowing artistic concepts from surrealism. Hers is a prophetic voice that uses jazz rhythms and relates existentialist philosophy. Her insistence on discovering the origins of African moral concepts and her use of a voice that has the overtones of Old Testament prophecy indicate that she is also very much aware of the uses of the past.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the great twentieth century French existential writer, named authors who write out of their revolt against colonialism as the mauvaise foi, or those of bad faith. His study of the work of Leon Damas, a black novelist and poet originally from French Guiana, brought to light the elements that enabled Sartre to make his analysis. Damas and his friend Leopold Senghor of Senegal were important writers in Paris in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. These two, along with their friend Aimé Césaire of Martinique, went on to develop the concept of negritude, an aesthetic and ideological affirmation of black culture. The first mention of this concept occurs in a poem by Césaire written in 1939. The ideas of these three writers have influenced Jayne Cortez’s poetic revolt against a racist society and its norms, which she sees as exploitive and destructive. There is another facet to her poetry, however, in her celebratory poems about black and African themes and people, whom she affirms.

Cortez’s revolt against the society in which she finds herself centers on her home of New York City. One of her most powerful poems bears its name, “I Am New York City.” It was originally collected in Scarifications (1973); in the later Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (1984), she gave it the first page. In many ways, it is emblematic of her work. She anthropomorphizes the city, using street language. Her metaphors are violent and often repulsive, and she relies heavily on bodily parts and functions, especially scatological functions.

Responding to Sandburg

Like much of Cortez’s work, “I Am New York City” has literary antecedents, including Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” written in 1914. In Sandburg’s poem, there is a celebration of raw power and untamed insolence. His city is masculine, powerful, and young. Sandburg does mention the negative side of Chicago but gives it only three lines, admitting that in Chicago he has seen “painted women . . . luring the farm boys,” that the city is “crooked,” and that its “gunmen kill and go free to kill again.” His third negative line admits that the city is brutal and that the narrator has seen the marks of “wanton hunger” on women and children’s faces. After this brief unfavorable notice, Sandburg returns to affirming his robust and masculine town. Sandburg’s city is of the working class, but it is young and strong; it hopes to rise in life through strength and “cunning.”

Cortez’s poem does not celebrate New York. Rather, it dissects the city. Sandburg’s city was masculine; her city appears to be feminine. In early stanzas, the city appears to be exploited and old, a woman with “legs apart” who has her “contraceptives.” She is not proud of her profession, however, and says in the next line, “look at my pelvis blushing.” If New York is a painted woman, she is not pretty, desirable, or even healthy. She has only half an ankle and half an elbow, and she wears a “rat tail wig.” This city presents a character completely different from that of Sandburg’s city. Sandburg sees “wanton hunger” on the faces of women and children; readers may wonder if the slut depicted by Cortez is sluttish because of this very real physical hunger. Sandburg has names and metaphors for Chicago; Cortez gives a physical description of the city-woman who sports “my marquee of false nipples/ my sideshow of open beaks/ in my nose of soot.” Sandburg portrays his town as laughing and bragging, but Cortez’s will “piss/ into the bite of our hand-shake.” She ends her description by inviting its citizens to “break wind with me.”

This poem introduces Jayne Cortez’s anger at a society that allows such filth, such waste, and such disregard for decent human values. She blames the economic and political system, laying out her premises quite baldly in “There It Is,” a poem addressed to black people. In this poem she insists that the “ruling class” will try to exploit, absorb, confine, disconnect, isolate, or kill to preserve its privileges. She sees drugs as tools used by white society to “ossify” black society. Her solution is for members of the black community to fight, resist, organize, unify, and control their own lives. She warns that if they do not, the “dehumanized look of fear” and the “decomposed look of repression” will be theirs forever.

Sandburg gives women and children a mere mention, but Cortez is terribly concerned about what happens to them, particularly black women and children, in the city. In her poem “Give Me the Red on the Black of the Bullet,” she asks for the bullet that hit Claude Reece, Jr., a fourteen-year-old shot by New York City police officers. She wants to make a statue, an “explosion of thunder,” and a “cyclone of protest.” She insists that she wants the bullet to make power for “the blackness called pent-up frustration/ called unidentified negro/ called nigger revolutionary.”

In Cortez’s city, black children are shot and women are raped. “Rape” is about the situations faced by Inez Garcia and Joanne Little, who were victims of this crime in the 1970’s. Cortez equates the violence of the act of rape with the violence of the act of war. Inez Garcia’s rapist “carved a combat zone between her breasts.” Then he expected her to “lick crabs from his hairy ass/ kiss every pimple on his butt.” After the rape, when the three-hundred-pound man started coming at her again with a knife, she was able to grab a rifle and started “doing what a defense department will do in times of war.” Another victim, Joanne Little, killed a policeman with an ice pick when he attempted to rape her. Cortez asks whether Little was supposed to: “choke on his clap trap balls/ squeeze on his nub of rotten maggots.” Cortez ends the poem in a celebratory mode, saying “from coast to coast/ house to house/ we celebrated the day of the dead rapist punk/ and just what the f*ck else were we supposed to do.”

Sandburg personifies his city as a strong, young worker who embodies hope because he can work and because he has jobs. Many black people find that there is no way that they can get jobs, no way that they can hope to be part of the mainstream. In “Blood Suckers,” Cortez shows her concern for what happens to people of color both in the United States and elsewhere. She rails against those forces of politics and economics that siphon off the lifeblood of the people. She sees corrupt officials in Miami “resucking/ the dried mutilated scalps of a Seminole nation.” The effect of their corruption is not limited to people—they destroy animals and the environment as well. She finds them “grunting and chewing and pissing” on stuffed alligators. They are sucking in “little Pretoria” and in the dumps of Love Canal, the city built on a toxic dump, and Liberty City, the section of Miami torn by black rioters.

Response to Global Politics

The combination of capitalism and exploitation knows no national boundaries, and in Jayne Cortez’s poems, it knows no moral boundaries. In Firespitter (1982), she includes a poem entitled “Nigerian/American Relations.” It has only two lines, repeated to fill a page: “They want the oil/ But they don’t want the people.” She is equally explicit in “Expenditures: Economic Love Song 1,” which appears in the section of new poems in Coagulations. In that poem, she writes entirely in capital letters. The poem consists of two two-line stanzas that are repeated to fill almost two pages. They read:

MILITARY SPENDING HUGE PROFITS &DEATHMILITARY SPENDING HUGE PROFITS &DESTRUCTION

In “Firespitters,” a poem about an African city, Cortez’s tone changes. Before writing the poem, she attended the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Lagos, Nigeria. This experience served to heighten her interest in African politics and gave her insights into her African roots. For Cortez, the city of Lagos has the element of hope that Sandburg finds in Chicago. Although Cortez recognizes the problems in Lagos, the city calls up images of both her father and her mother. She sees the firespitters in her poem of that name, their “lips spreading like/ stripes and medals from the chest of my father.” She also sees “torches gleaming like/ the gold tooth of my mother.” In Lagos, Cortez finds a homeland that is both beautiful and ugly, that teems with energy just as Sandburg’s Chicago did. She finds “painted skins swiveling pupils gut blasting moans and/ the supersonic sound of invisible orchestras.” Although Lagos is not a perfect city, as she travels past the city dumps on the outskirts she feels an exhilaration at the “dark puree of flesh in a mask of spinning mirrors.” She encourages the city, like a dancer, to “shake everything in your beautiful nasty self/ we’re here.”

Cortez and Music

Although Sandburg merely mentions singing in “Chicago,” he was interested in music and traveled across the country to collect folk songs. Jayne Cortez’s interest in music also goes deep. She often reads her poetry with musical accompaniment, and she has made several recordings of her poetry. At many of her readings throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, she has used a background of music. She also has written a number of celebratory poems about people, especially black musicians. These include “Rose Solitude (For Duke Ellington),” and “So Many Feathers,” for Josephine Baker, the famous singer, dancer, and entertainer who found fame in Paris and worked in the resistance movement in World War II.

In Sandburg’s poem about Chicago, there is only one mention of art. His city is “singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” Music is far more important to Cortez. She invokes it and its artists often, frequently referring to jazz. In “Tapping,” from Scarifications, she calls up a “Johnny Hodges like” theme, “Charlie Parker riffs,” a “Coltrane yelp,” “a Satchmo pitch,” and “Ma Rainey Blues.” She is especially interested in drums and invokes them and their percussive sounds in several poems. One of these is “If the Drum Is a Woman.” She repeats several phrases in this work, using the title line a number of times as well as repeating “why are you” and “your drum is not.” She ends the poem with the drumbeat sounds of “don’t abuse your drum/ don’t abuse your drum/ don’t abuse your drum.” Different kinds of drums occur in “I See Chano Pozo,” all of which have marvelous sounds in their names: Atamo, Mpebi, Donno, Obonu Atumpan, Mpintintoa, Ntenga, Siky Akkua, Bata, and Fontomfrom. Cortez’s drum names are also drum sounds of great subtlety.

With or without mention of music and musicians, Cortez’s celebratory poems often use words or syllables that emulate drumbeats. “The Red Pepper Poet (For Leon Damas)” is one of these. At the end of almost every line, she uses “ah,” “a,” “uh-huh,” or “uh-hun.” The final stanza incorporates “ah,” placing that word next to “I.” This use of single syllables detached from syntax produces a percussive effect that adds emphasis to Cortez’s tribute to a poet whose work embodies many of her own major concerns. Damas’s work reflects his influences: the French surrealist painters, the literature and music of the Harlem Renaissance, and the speech of working-class people. These influences are also Cortez’s, although her criticism of colonial concepts and racism is excoriation rather than protest.

This use of extra syllables at line endings occurs in another significant celebratory poem, “For the Poets (Christopher Okigbo and Henry Dumas).” Both of these young black men were killed early in their careers. Henry Dumas, an extremely talented short-story writer who was active in the Civil Rights movement, was killed by a New York City subway policeman, ostensibly in a case of mistaken identity. Christopher Okigbo, a young African poet who served as a major in the Biafran army during the Nigerian civil war, was killed in action. In her poem, Cortez celebrates their lives, making a “delta praise for the poets,” and lashes out at the killers and at white officials who support black intertribal warfare:

Because they’ll try and shoot uslike they shot Henry Dumas huhbecause we massacre each otherand Christopher Okigbo is dead uh-huhbecause i can’t make the best of it uh-hunbecause i’m not a bystander uh-hun.

Cortez is not a bystander. She is a fighter, and she urges others to stand up and fight.

Formal Protest

Even poetic form is a matter of principle for Cortez. Both she and Sandburg utilize the form of free verse, Sandburg being one of its early pioneers. For Cortez, its use is a matter both of aesthetics and of politics. In “Plain Truth,” she refers to a “They” that can only be the same “They” of “Bloodsuckers.” In this poem, one of the new poems in Coagulations, she says, “They want you/ to hate yourself” and “Suck/ their national standard/ of/ dead metrical feet/ and free-base into/ refugee camp. . . .” This line indicates that Cortez equates the old metrical forms with oppression. Like Adrienne Rich and other contemporary poets, she sees free verse as not only form but also substance.

Both Sandburg and Cortez also use repetition. In “Chicago,” Sandburg slightly rephrases his opening stanza and uses all its ideas in his closing stanza. This is a technique that Cortez uses frequently. A number of her poems repeat the first stanza or variations of it in the last stanza. Her “I Am New York City” does this, making the parallels with Sandburg unmistakable. Her opening line, “i am new york city,” is also the opening line of her last stanza.

In addition to repetition and the sounds from music, Cortez uses the shock value of scatological language and vivid images of degradation. Her metaphors are often unusual to the point of obscurity, although they may at times represent some in-group knowledge. All of her work appears in free verse, but in the later poems in Coagulations she experiments with various shapes on the page. Her early work often used short lines to describe subjects and locales of the United States. In her later poetry, her lines lengthened and her subject matter became universal, but her anger, which was her first hallmark, did not abate. Cortez’s poetic voice is so strong that readers may become confident that it is also her voice in life. She confronts and battles others, exhorting them to take their lives in their own hands, to make their destinies by their own actions. She does not depend on any deus ex machina, any intervention from heaven. She writes about the world in which she lives, and she is determined to work with what is available in the here and now, taking a revolutionary existential approach.

If Cortez’s work is polemic and didactic and if sometimes her politics supersedes her poetry, her outrage against the conditions in New York City and in the world may be justified. Poets are not called upon to be popular or diplomatic. Cortez is very much aware of this, as she fulminates in the manner of an Old Testament prophet. She cares enough about the women and children who are victims to bring their grisly situations to the attention of her readers. She tells the truth about the conditions of people of color around the world. If her metaphors sometimes seem severe, contrived, or contorted, if she relies too much on the four-letter words of the street, it is because of the rage that she feels.

In Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1996), the sultry and revolutionary air of Cuba and Brazil provides a milieu for the themes Cortez seeks to explore. Nicolás Guillén, once Cuba’s national poet, represents a revolutionary artistic ideal in the collection. In 1981, Cortez’s peripatetic voice searches for Guillén, and while she does not find him until 1985, in the process Cortez finds Cuba. Her multitudinous discoveries in her poetry unveil a particular essence that is both visceral and tangible and that ultimately speaks to her concerns as a poet. In “The Guitars I Used to Know,” Cortez unearths the old “excavated rhythms” of her cultural roots that are deep in the “apocalyptic blood-stained finger boards.” Such pursuits are prone to certain disappointments. In “Now I Dig Up Patinas,” the poetic urge to discover and create is finally met with despondency: “I say I’m a poet to . . . corpse of a roach in a cup.” The voice of the collection, however, eventually emerges triumphant and reclaims the revolutionary ideal and confidence of Césaire, whose “poetry became poetry unique to poetry.” By the book’s close, Cortez has made strides in confronting her poetics and cultural heritage, but this is no collection of self-importance or egoism. As a socially aware and prophetic poet, Cortez ends with “Find Your Own Voice.” Her argument is ultimately for collective discovery. “Find your own voice & use it,” Cortez exclaims, for “The river turtle/ does not breathe like/ a slithering boa constrictor.”

A student new to the work of Jayne Cortez may be drawn to Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002), a collection of new and older poems that synthesize what Cortez has called “superealism,” which identifies a worldview prone to intensity of vision, as opposed to the detachment often associated with surrealism. The poetry in this collection represents a fusion of thought. The relevance of cultural heritage and roots is foregrounded, yet Cortez is just as skilled at creating short, immediate poetry that, while it may not penetrate the abyss of cultural consciousness, remains playful and worthwhile. “Ribs and Jazz Fest 94” conveys an American standard in a scant nine lines. As Cortez sees ”This chewing and licking of fingers in my face,” she yelps “Hooray” for the music and finds herself at this moment “very optimistic.”

Cortez’s body of poetic work creates a complex web of jazz, cityscapes, and postcolonial culture. In the midst of all of it is Cortez herself, strong, thoughtful, and in tune. Carl Sandburg was active in the labor movement and was a champion of the common people. He often quoted, with admiration, one of Rudyard Kipling’s characters: “I will be the word of the people. Mine will be the bleeding mouth from which the gag is snatched. I will say anything.” Jayne Cortez has snatched the rag from the bleeding mouth, letting her city and her times speak.

Bibliography

Addison, Gayle. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Brief mention of Cortez’s work. Emphasis is on her background in music, especially bop, boogie, and the blues.

Frazier, Vernon. “The Poetry-Jazz Fusion.” Poets and Writers Magazine 20 (March 1, 1992): 26. Describes how Cortez’s work carries on a tradition that dates back to Homer and Sappho of marrying music and verse.

Melhem, D. H. Heroism in the New Black Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Describes six writers, Cortez among them, who have extended the concept of leadership and thus are heroes. Each essay is clearly written and provides good introduction to a writer’s work. Contains primary bibliographies.

Redmond, Eugene B. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976. Contains two brief mentions of Cortez’s work. Notes her affinity to music as an aspect of form. Says of Festivals and Funerals that it embodies the fast pace of black life that is necessary because of prejudice and oppression but results in an enormous number of deaths.

Wilmer, Val. “Jayne Cortez—The Unsubmissive Blues: The Great Poet.” Coda 230 (February 1, 1990): 16. An interview with Jayne Cortez.