The Changing Same (Part 2) (Preview)

Preview of a post on Substack: a second book chapter (on jazz poetics), and a survey of the critical field--jazz/poetry, critical legacies, collective remembrance. Fifteen years after Maryemma Graham and Jerry W. Ward edited The Cambridge History of African American Literature, and twelve since the publication of The Cambridge History of American Poetry, comes The Cambridge History of African American Poetry. Editor Keith Leonard had a chapter in on the first of these volumes, on Paul Laurence Dunbar: here he’s assembled a sweep of contributors to continue the story. My chapter in the new volume, a very small part of that story—available to subscribers as a PDF below—examines the relation between poetry and jazz via three poets: Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, Jayne Cortez. I’ve written on these three writers in various other forums over the past few years. (An earlier draft of the chapter also featured Stephen Jonas, who I wrote about in David Buuck’s Tripwire and in my book on Boston and…