Muse Is Music

Meta DuEwa Jones is an associate professor of English and African and African diaspora studies and a faculty affiliate in the Center for Women's and Gender Studies and the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

• Acknowledgments   ixIntroduction   1Riff, Remembrance, and Revision1. Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes on the (Jazz) Record   332. Jazz Prosody: The Gendered Contours of the Post-Soul Coltrane Poem   85New Traditions, New Translations3. Opening the Canary's Cage: Sex, Gender, and the Jazz Body   1294. A Cave Canem Continuum or a Dark Room Renaissance? From Jazz Improvisation to Hip-Hop Stylization in Contemporary Black Poetry   167Epilogue. "When the Muse Is Music": Collaboration and Improvisation in Jazz Poetics   209Notes   231Works Cited   249Index   273

Received an Honorable Mention in the competition for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA), 2012."An important addition to the growing literature about jazz poetry.  Recommended."--Choice"An extraordinarily original and important book about the musicality of African American poetic performance. Meta DuEwa Jones offers insightful and sophisticated readings and analyses of the relationship between black poetry and jazz. This wide-ranging and ambitious book will make an immediate impact on African American literary and cultural studies as well as performance studies."--Farah Jasmine Griffin, coauthor of Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever "Like Melba Liston stepping to the microphone, trombone in hand, to punctuate one of her own arrangements with a newly improvised statement, Meta DuEwa Jones takes up the changes in the interrelationship between jazz and poetry and turns them out. Even those few readers who have read everything in print on the subject of jazz and verse will find that Jones has both new chapters and new verses, well worth multiple hearings."--Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovation "Highly original… Jones's authoritative knowledge and passion for jazz and for poetry infuse this book, and allow her to move with sweeping range through nearly a century of African American poetic production."--Wasafiri "Meta DeEwa Jones's recent tour de force of contemporary criticism, The Muse is Music, most certainly must take its place among classic and recent critical studies of African-American poetry and, as Jones describes her topic, 'jazz resonant' writing."—The Black Scholar