Catching Holy Ghosts: The Diverse Manifestations of Black Persona Poetry.

You can refer to Amiri Baraka as a poet if you like. But truth be told, he's a conjure-man of sorts. His inclinations for black magic are quite apparent in his live performances. What are billed as poetry readings actually become opportunities for Baraka to invoke the spirits of the dead. He eschews conventional epigraphs and introduces many of his poems through hummed melodies of jazz tunes. Baraka regularly, or perhaps ritually, summons Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and, of course, "the heaviest spirit," John Coltrane in his readings by dramatizing their music. And when Baraka is really feeling it, as he was during a performance with musicians Archie Shepp, Andrew Cyrille, Reggie Workman, and Roswell Rudd, he departs from the printed text of his poems, moves his body dramatically, and shouts and screams wordless phrasings. (1) Who knows what conventional academic discourse would make of Baraka's presentadon? But in the cosmos of black church-talk, his acts would more than likely be classified as a form of catching the Holy Ghost.

Interestingly enough, catching holy ghosts or embodying the spirits of others has become as integral to the tradition of black verse as jazz poetry, though without the critical fanfare. Typically referred to as "persona poetry," these poems are written from the first-person perspectives of characters other than the poet-authors. According to M. H. Abrams, "persona was the Latin word for the 'mask' used by actors in the classical theater," and by referring to the speakers in poems as personae, "we stress the fact that they are all part of the fiction, characters invented for a particular artistic purpose" (131). The entry on "persona" in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics notes that the "mask permits the poet to say things that for various reasons she could not say in her own person" (901). Epic poetry regularly features varied personae and dramatic monologues, and persona poems by John Milton, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and Robert Browning hold an important place in English and American literature. Although African American persona poems relate in a general sense to these broader, largely Eurocentric traditions and writers, black poets tend to also fulfill alternative and distinct cultural imperatives in their works.

Notably, the personae or masks that black poets regularly choose to adopt allow them to provide commentary on African American history and society and participate in a longstanding tradition of speaking in the tongues of various black people. Unlike epic poetry, most individual persona poems by black writers are relatively short, usually focus on a brief episode in the lives of central speakers, and often appear in venues that privilege African American writings and audiences interested in black personalities and topics. Persona poems or poems with prevalent masking elements by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to name just a few, have become their more canonical texts, an indication that generations of publishers, editors, and general readerships have actively participated in the increased circulation and favorable receptions of these types of poems. As a result, an examination of persona poetry by black poets would need to move beyond conventional Eurocentric traditions and definitions of verse in order to appreciate fully the acts of masking, passing, catching holy ghosts, speaking in tongues, and sampling that occur in the compositions of African American artists.

Black poets of the contemporary era have advanced the practice of wearing the masks of varied characters and historical figures in their works. Camille Dungy explains in an article in Black Issues Book Review that several poets, including A. Van Jordan, Natasha Trethewey, and Tyehimba Jess, utilize persona poetry in their volumes published at the beginning of the twenty-first century: "These young black poets often employ personae to create more fully fleshed out characters, and they frequently include explorations of the past and various ties of kinship or community" (16). The title poem of Trethewey's Pulitzer prize-winning volume Native Guard (2006) contains a crown of sonnets written from the perspective of an African American infantry unit during the Civil War. Over the last ten years alone, persona poems have been a prevalent feature of volumes of poetry published by established and emergent poets such as Rita Dove, Cornelius Eady, Thylias Moss, Frank X. Walker, and Kevin Young. Nonetheless, this mode of writing has eluded scholarly notice.

The dearth of criticism on black poetry in general prevents us from developing a more comprehensive view of the diverse interconnectivity that exists among generations of black poets and black poets of this generation. Recent works by Melba Boyd, James Smethurst, and Cheryl Clarke usefully situate several writers within historical contexts, and the criticism by Tony Bolden and Aldon Nielsen treats a variety of works by a select number of poets. My project complements and differs from these studies by explicating the diverse manifestations of a particular, recurring mode of delivery adapted by an assorted group of black poets across multiple generations. This essay assists in the development of criticism on African American poetry by illuminating the art of masking and charting notable innovations in processes of representing personae. Overall, I attempt to make a useful, if not unique contribution to African American literary studies by analyzing a prevalent yet understudied approach to composition taken up by historically significant and contemporary black poets.

In particular, a consideration of select poems by Robert Hayden, Evie Shockley, and Opal Palmer Adisa shows different methods they use to testify from the perspectives of enslaved people. An examination of audio recordings by Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Saul Williams, Tracie Morris, and Patricia Smith clarifies how poets embody and project sonic forces in the process of adapting their poetic voices to a variety of sounds. Finally, explicating Tyehimba Jess's volume of poetry leadbelly reveals how a contemporary poet utilizes multithreading in verse to weave a striking re-presentation of a historical figure. For some poets, the use of masks facilitates modern samplings of supposed testimonies from slaves and runaways. For others, adapting varied personae empowers poets to rewire their voices as musical and mechanical instruments, and still for others, extended series of persona poems accommodate their objectives of embodying multiple characters and becoming like human iPods. The prevalence of black persona poems, not to mention acts of catching holy ghosts, suggests the enduring presence of these masking rituals in African American literary history and expressive culture.

Sampling the Narratives of Runagates

Back in the day, Robert Hayden produced a consequential remix. During a visit to Fisk University in 1963, the anthologist Rosey E. Pool read Hayden's poem "Runagate Runagate" to an audience where Hayden was in attendance. Hayden's poem, which presents portions of a first-person account of a fugitive slave or "runagate" making an escape from slavery, was originally published in Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps's The Poetry of the Negro in 1949. After the poem's initial publication, Hayden had placed it aside for several years, viewing it "as another of my many failures" (qtd. in Pool 42). However, Pool's reading of the poem at Fisk inspired Hayden to reconsider his poem and make revisions. He sent the new version to Pool, and she in turn published an essay praising Hayden's work in the June 1966 issue of Negro Digest. At Pool's request, the magazine published a 1949 and a 1964 version of "Runagate Runagate." (2) Evidently, anthologists took notice of Hayden's work. Between 1968 and 1973 alone, yet another version of "Runagate Runagate" appeared in no less than eighteen collections of African American verse, becoming one of the most anthologized poems of the black arts era and one among several ostensible first-person accounts from enslaved people and runagates.

Brian Conniff explains in an essay on Hayden's "Middle Passage" how the poet both responds to T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land" and serves as a source of inspiration and guidance for subsequent generations of African American poets such as Michael Harper, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Jay Wright. Conniff identifies Hayden as a "post-traditional" poet, that is, a poet who is conscious of tradition but is inclined "to view any distinctly literary tradition as historically contingent." Often, "the post-traditional poet uses this sense of contingency to construct from disparate sources a personal heritage--provisionally, heterogeneously, willfully--in order to address some perceived historical crisis or, especially in recent years, some immediate social need" (489). More so than Hayden's most critically acclaimed work "Middle Passage," it is actually his "Runagate Runagate" that contributes to the social need within black culture of presenting heroic ex-slaves, especially in a U. S. context. The large number and wide circulation of persona and tribute poems featuring Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass alone suggest a tacit agreement among poets and editors of keeping the spirits of these beloved fugitive slaves on the minds of the living.

Typically, the practice of altering, intermingling, and re-projecting excerpts and sound-bites from varied sources into a single text is referred to as sampling in musical discourses. The concept of sampling might adequately be used to describe the active approaches that a poet like Hayden took when merging multiple voices and sources into individual poems. Hayden had gathered a body of knowledge on black history and culture while working with the Federal Writers' Project, and he had developed his literary craft as both a student and practitioner of poetry. Accordingly, he utilized verse to re-present historical knowledge. As a result, his "Runagate Runagate" is not a persona poem in any strict sense in which a single poet is writing in the voice of someone else; instead, Hayden samples multiple literary devices, slave-era materials, and song lyrics in order to present an episode in the lives of Harriet Tubman and a band of runaways. Describing Hayden's approach as a linguistic version of sampling suggests the analogies between his style of composition and the sampling done by musicians such as rap artists and turntablists.

"Runagate Runagate" serves as a testimony to Tubman's courageous leadership, as a main speaker of the poem is a passenger on Tubman's expressway from slavery to freedom. The design of Hayden's poem in particular his choices of mood, pace, and collage--functions to dramatize the heroics of an escape mission. The poem opens with the real-time thoughts of a fugitive slave on the move: "Runs fails rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness / and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror / and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing" (ll. 1-3). The short, present-tense verbs that open the poem, along with the narrator's descriptions of stumbling in fearful darkness, produce a rapid, rambling, and exhilarating effect.

As the poem progresses, the speaker begins to articulate a more coherent narrative, but the mood and pace have been set; readers are thrust into the startling right now of the escaping slave's experience. The sense of real-time is especially prevalent at one point in the poem as the sound of dogs causes the fugitive slave narrator to panic:

    And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it,
   we'll never make it. Hush that now
,
   and she's turned upon us, levelled pistol
   glinting in the moonlight:
   Dead folks can't jaybird-talk, she says;
   you keep on going now or die, she says. (ll. 47-52; original italics)

In this swift, intense moment, the runagate feels an inner fear, links that fear to failure, expresses that fear of failure aloud, and receives admonishments at gunpoint from Harriet Tubman to "hush" and keep on moving. "Runagate Runagate" places readers in the midst of a rapidly moving escape and provides them with reports from the first-person perspective of a runaway. The setting of the poem and the identity of its speaker creates a suspenseful and historically plausible sequence of events.

Hayden further diversifies the narration of his poem by interspersing a mixture of historical references, including familiar sayings and songs produced by slaves, testimony from a slave-owner seeking the return of human property, and a wanted poster for Harriet Tubman. At one point, a speaker in the poem asserts, "No more auction block for me / no more driver's lash for me" (ll. 19-20); later a speaker announces "And before I'll be a slave / I'll be buried in my grave" (ll. 30-31). These narrators project the sentiments of nameless runaways who vociferously opposed the laws of enslavement. At other intervals in the poem, Hayden appears to borrow passages from songs composed by slaves. When describing the liberating space of the "O mythic North," a speaker possibly sings the lines, "Some go weeping and some rejoicing / some in coffins and some in carriages / some in silks and some in shackles" (ll. 15-17). And most likely, the narrator sings the question, "Tell me, Ezekiel, oh tell me do you see / mailed Jehovah coming to deliver me?" (ll. 59-60), since in the discourse of slavery, the lines resemble a spiritual.

During one passage, the voice of a slaveowner enters the poem and informs listeners, "If you see my Pompey" and "my Anna ... catch them if you can" and quickly adds "but it won't be easy. / They'll dart underground" (ll. 21, 23, 25, 26-27). Hayden also presents what appears to be the content of a poster seeking the capture of a slave owner's property: "Wanted Harriet Tubman alias The General / alias Moses Stealer of Slaves" (ll. 58-59). The apparent poster goes on to point that Tubman is "In league" with well known anti-slavery activists such as William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass. Hayden thus uses the poster as a way of projecting Tubman into a broader discourse. Toward the end of the poem, Hayden presents the italicized lines of apparent song lyrics about a locomotive running on what is most likely the Underground Railroad: "Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering, / first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah" (ll. 69-70). Overall, Hayden's sampling of statements from runagates and a slaveowner, lyrics of gospels and spirituals, and the words on a wanted poster reveals that a single poem can effectively transmit the spirits of multiple personas. Moreover, the prevalence of poems featuring the personae of slaves and runagates in African American literary history suggests that a chorus of modern poets have joined Hayden in the task of re-envisioning the accounts of slaves and runagates.

Poems featuring the personae of ex-slaves exhibit the entrancing power of first-person testimony. Slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Venture Smith, to name a few, drew and maintain wide appeal in large part because they offered readers eye-witness accounts of slavery. "I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment," wrote the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison describing the first time that he heard Frederick Douglass speak about his experiences in bondage. According to Garrison, the effects and consequences of slavery were "rendered far more clear than ever," as Douglass narrated "some of the facts in his own history as a slave" (388). In the tradition of the slave narrative, Hayden's "Runagate Runagate" places readers in direct contact with the presumable words of fugitive slaves. Hayden's contemporaries Margaret Walker and Dudley Randall would take similar approaches.

Margaret Walker's "Harriet Tubman," a ballad containing thirty-six quatrains with an alternating rhyme scheme, charts Tubman's experiences in slavery, her escape, and her return "to my Maryland / To guide the slaves away" (ll. 75-76). Walker's Tubman also emphasizes the apparent need for slaves to use violent force to attain freedom. When an overseer mentions striking Tubman on her head with a piece of iron, Tubman declares,

    I stabbed that overseer;
   I took his rusty knife;
   I killed that overseer;
   I took his lowdown life. (ll. 45-48) 

Dudley Randall takes a similar approach in his "Frederick Douglass and the Slave Breaker," a persona poem that transmutes a dramatic scene from Douglass's narrative into verse. In Randall's poem, Douglass fights his overseer, and "So all day long we battled, / the man and the boy, sweating, / bruising, bleeding ..." (ll. 9-11). The violent refusal of Randall's Douglass to be broken serves as a lesson "I'll never forget" (l. 17). Like Hayden's work, the poems by Randall and Walker emulate and echo slave narratives and thus give "utterance to many noble thoughts and thrilling reflections" (Garrison 389).

A range of modern poets have composed testimonies from the perspectives of enslaved people and fugitive slaves, including Opal Palmer Adisa, Elizabeth Alexander, Alvin Aubert, Lucille Clifton, Lance Jeffers, Gayl Jones, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Naomi Long Madgett, Thylias Moss, Tim Seibles, Evie Shockley, Frank X. Walker, and Jerry W Ward, Jr. For the most part, their poems highlight eyewitness accounts of people struggling within and against the institution of slavery. There are, however, exceptions to the rule, as some of the poets offer alternative portraits of well known slaves. Unlike most poems focusing on heroic fugitive slaves, Shockley's "From The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass" presents the esteemed ex-slave well outside his years in captivity. And unlike most poems which showcase the dramatic experiences of slaves on the run or in bondage, Shockley's poem presents Douglass in a much different phase of his life. (3) The author of such volumes as The Gorgon Goddess (2001) and A Half-Red Sea (2006), Shockley has published her work in venues alongside other contemporary poets. Her status as an emergent black writer suggests alternative or developing routes in the presentation of black historical figures.

Shockley adopts Douglass's persona by way of an epistolary poem and illuminates hidden aspects of his post-bondage years, especially in regard to his intimate relationships. Writing to his daughter, Rosetta, in a letter dated June 5, 1892, Douglass explained his "quick" marriage to Helen Pitts, a white abolitionist, after the death of his first wife Anna Murray (ll. 21-23). Douglass informs his daughter that if her mother

    had your
   education as a girl, my love for
   her would have been as passionate as it
   was grateful. But she died illiterate
   when I had risked my life to master language. (ll. 25-29) 

He goes on to explain that "The pleasures of book and pen retain / the thrill of danger" (ll. 30-31) and thus accounted for his dose relationship to Ottilie Assing, a German journalist who reportedly had an intimate affair with Douglass. (4) "Forgive me," Douglass asks his daughter, "for broaching such indelicate / subjects" (ll. 37-39), but he wants her to understand that

    Helen became the new
   Mrs. Douglass because of what we shared
   in sheaves of my paper: let no one
   persuade you I coveted her skin. (ll. 41-44) 

Douglass closes by requesting that Rosetta "be kinder, much / kinder, to your stepmother. You two are / of an age to be sisters" (ll. 58-60).

Readers have long considered and celebrated the efforts of the heroic slave Douglass who fought against the larger injustices of enslavement. Now, though, Shockley creatively prompts us to imagine how Douglass, the father, may have struggled with his eldest daughter. By presenting Douglass attempting to explain himself to his adult child concerning his relationships with white women, Shockley makes the ex-slave a far more vulnerable--and arguably more complex--figure than he is typically portrayed in verse. Persona and tribute poems featuring famous slaves typically showcase their extraordinary heroic qualities. By contrast, Shockley utilizes the persona poem to simultaneously demythologize and diversify views of Douglass's life.

If Shockley's poem is notable for its ability to present Douglass as an ordinary human, then what distinguishes Adisa's poem "Peeling Off the Skin" is its sci-fi and multifaceted presentation of Nat Turner. Adisa's poem contains three parts, presenting Nat Turner first as a ghost, then as a purse, and finally as a lamp shade. In the first section, Turner's ghost announces that he

    would do it again
   plot and plan
   and kill too
   if pushed (ll. 1-4) 

in the hopes of making it possible for at least "one black child / to glance unshackled / at the moon" (ll. 26-28). Throughout the section, he repeats the lines "i would do it again" and thus clarifies his resolve in leading a violent insurrection. Speaking in the form of a ghost means that Turner survived his execution and lived on as a spiritual inspiration for others seeking freedom.

According to some accounts, whites beheaded and skinned Turner's body after his death. The second and third sections of Adisa's poem extend the reports that Turner's skin was used for the purposes of making a purse and lamp shade, facts that associate the mutilation of Turner's body with the persecution of Jews at the hands of Nazis. In the poem, Turner retains his mind and voice even though his body has now taken the forms of a purse and lamp shade, and he takes advantage of his close proximities to his owners by providing surveillance of their private lives. As a purse, Turner observes a woman who is apparently abused by her husband; she is

    afraid to be free
   but she
   lives the underground
   railroad
      through    me. (ll. 61-65) 

As a lamp shade, Turner sits patiently in the parlor of a man's home "listening to the talk" and "licking my time" (ll. 81, 85). And because he has studied the habits of his owner, Turner vows that "next time / i will know / next time," a possible warning that he will plot a more successful insurrection in the future (ll. 88-90).

Adisa's poem constitutes a notable innovation to methods of presenting the persona of slaves; her presentation of a historical figure who takes on different forms is a fairly unusual approach. First, Adisa embodies the spirit of Turner, and he in turn embodies the spirit of a ghost, purse, and lamp shade. In short, Adisa projects a multi-layered mask that speaks in a haunting tongue. Unlike "Runagate Runagate," which presents a collage of voices, "Peeling off the Skin" presents three different figures that are possessed by the singular voice of Nat Turner. Adisa thus offers yet another creative possibility for how the adoptions of a persona can be configured to resurrect the spirit of a fugitive slave. Modern poets who compose persona poems focusing on slaves are, by definition, creating speculative fictions. Adisa, however, intensifies the speculative nature of her work by giving her figures the ability to speak as inanimate objects. As a result, "Peeling Off the Skin" simultaneously operates as a ghost story--a ghost story made all the more threatening since its protagonist had a history of brutally killing whites.

The different approaches taken by Adisa, Hayden, Shockley, and several other poets reflect the diverse manifestations of poems that adapt the voices of runaway slaves. The poems serve as tributes and continuations to the legacies of heroic slaves, and the works showcase poets' interests in taking interactive approaches to black history by adopting the very spirits of their slave ancestors. These modern-day, poetic treatments of the experiences of runagates complement such neo-slave narratives as Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966), Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990) and reveal that poets, like novelists, have consistently addressed subjects pertaining to slavery over the last half century. Ultimately, the extensive publication of persona poems focusing on slaves represents a virtual, resurrected Underground Railroad, as black poets and their supporters who present their works continually liberate slaves and runagates from the confines of the past and transport their spirits to contemporary readerships.

The Crossroads of Sound and Emulation: Sonic Persona Moments

In a review of audio recordings featuring Amiri Baraka accompanied by various jazz musicians, Aldon Nielsen observes that Down at the crossroads, where poetry and music meet, strange things are happening every day" (25). Nielsen's observation serves as a basis for my contention that down at the crossroads where sound and emulation meet, even stranger things are happening. Poets are projecting the sounds of musical instruments, some are embodying electronic machines, and at least one black woman poet is speaking in the voice of a skinhead. In the process of representing qualifies of music and varied sounds in their poems, black poets often embed their work with what I refer to as "sonic persona moments." These moments, or sonic adaptations to be more precise, occur as poets imitate distinct sounds and wordless phrasings in their performances.

Wordless phrasings--the moans of the spirituals, the shouts and screams of blues, R&B, and gospel, and the beat-boxing of rap music--have a rich history in black musical discourses. And for some time now, poets interested in the resonances of musical performance and black orality sought to transmute these utterances to the page. When Langston Hughes, Sterling Plumpp, Henry Dumas, and countless other poets structured their verse in an AAB rhyme pattern, the speakers of the poems invoked the music of blues singers. The "scrEEEccCHHHHH" of Sonia Sanchez's "a/coltrane/poem," the "screammmmming" of Carolyn Rodgers's "Mc, In Kulu Se & Karma," and the "SCREAM-EEEeeeeeeceeee-ing" of Haki Madhubuti's "Don't Cry, Scream" all invoke Coltrane's signature practice of producing screeching sounds with his instrument.

Musicians have also significantly developed styles of play and performance based on their observations of distinct expressive modes. Coltrane uses his saxophone to imitate specific words, as he matches his playing with each syllable of his poem "A Love Supreme" on the song "Psalm." Coltrane's adaptation of a screeching technique in his later years typifies the sound of some church members, especially black women, who might shout and scream while catching the Holy Ghost. The late James Brown also adapted black church discourse in his performances to dramatic effect, often characterizing a shouting preacher or a screaming congregant. Musicians such as Brown and Coltrane, who exercised the interplay between words and sounds, served as important models and muses for Amiri Baraka, a poet whose live and recorded performances exemplify my conception of sonic persona moments.

In performance after performance, Baraka emulates the soundings of musicians--he projects the percussive beats of a drummer, the wailings of a saxophonist, and the shouts of a black soul singer. At intervals throughout his performance of a tribute poem to John Coltrane entitled "I Love Music," Baraka re-presents the sounds projected by the saxophonist. He begins the poem reading softly and slowly, his rhythm corresponding to the solemn tempo of his accompanying musicians, the drummer Steve McCall and saxophonist David Murray. The trio increasingly picks up speed and Baraka eventually begins presenting wordless squeals and shouts, sounds that match Murray's playing. Hearing Baraka alongside Murray highlights the links between the shrieks of a voice and a saxophone. Baraka's use of screams and squeals in the poem make it possible for him to produce a persuasive adaptation of 'Trane's specific methods of delivery. Baraka moves beyond a conventional tribute and actually channels the spirit of the great saxophonist. As a result, he showcases the ability of a poet to blend acts of reading with enactments of musical performance.

Baraka implements this fusion of poetry reading and musical performance in his poems "In Walked Bud," "Bang, Bang Outishly," and "Somebody Blew Up America." In these works, he intones the spirit of Thelonious Monk by humming aspects of the pianist's songs. His fusion of verse and music is especially pronounced in "Bang, Bang Outishly" and "In Walked Bud" where he regularly interrupts the reading with the hummed melodies of Monk's tunes. His vocal emulation of Monk's piano playing constitutes a more interactive relationship to music than simply reading words. Baraka's sonic interaction with the music initiates an experience that further transforms a poet into an instrumentalist and connects him to both literary and musical discourses.

Sonia Sanchez similarly transforms herself from poet to instrumentalist in a presentation of her poem "Resist." During the course of presenting the poem, Sanchez takes dozens of approaches to shouting, chanting, moaning, whispering, and grumbling the word "resist" as she imitates the sound of a jazz musician working through a select combination of notes in multiple registers. Her varied utterances of the word "resist," for instance, resemble Coltrane's musical articulations of the phrase "A Love Supreme" in his song "Acknowledgement." Sanchez's use of a 'Trane-like technical approach allows her to embody the presentation style of a musician and offer a more dramatic performance than a conventional reading. Sanchez interacts with both musical discourse and her audience, asking at one point during the reading, "Can you say resist?" to which they respond "resist." She then asks, "Can you really say resist?" to which the audience responds with "resist" even louder.

Like Baraka, Sanchez demonstrates how the emulation of a musical technique enlarges the function and reach of a poem. The dramatic nature of Baraka's and Sanchez's poetry performances reflects the extents to which they have responded to Larry Neal's call for a "new synthesis" of literary art that liberates poets and audiences from the constraints of printed words. "Listen to James Brown scream," wrote Neal in the after-word to Black Fire (1968), '[Ask yourself, then: have you ever heard a Negro poet sing like that? Of course not, because we have been tied to the texts, like most white poets" (653). Since the publication of Neal's remarks, Baraka and Sanchez as well as other Black Arts era poets such as Jayne Cortez, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Eugene Redmond have transmuted the technical practices, and occasionally the personas of musicians, and sought to unshackle themselves from some of the limits of strictly linguistic texts. Accordingly, their performances create alternative conceptions of poetry readings.

Unlike during Neal's day, modern listeners aware of Baraka's work do have experience with a black poet who performs like James Brown. Baraka's repeated shouts of "Who" in his poem "Somebody Blew Up America" and his screeches in "I Love Music" slightly parallel Brown's emphatic screams of "please" in his song "Please Please Please." Both men adapt the sonic force of field hollers and black church discourse in order to enliven their performances. In one instance, however, Baraka has used a persona approach as a method for intensifying his parody and critique of black preachers. His poem "Dope" satirizes African American ministers who encourage their congregants to blame their hardships on "the devil" while overlooking the role of "rich folks" and various adversaries. Although the printed words offer evidence of the poem's satirical slant, Baraka's live performance provides audiences with an even more revealing and dramatic parody of certain kinds of black preachers.

Baraka begins the poem by uttering "uuuuuu" in the spirit of a wordless prayer, and he changes the speed and volume of his reading throughout the poem, accentuating his message at particular intervals. For instance, at one point, he repeats the word "yessuh" several times, and with each utterance of the word, he speaks louder and more emphatically intensifying his delivery. Later, he strains his voice when he instructs congregants to "gimme your money put your / money in this plate" (ll. 125-26) and thus signals the preacher's impassioned requests for larger sums of money from his followers. Baraka's vocal inflections are not evident in the printed version of the poem; however, the recorded version of "Dope" renders the work more fully realized and shows Baraka enacting multiple tonal registers and cadences with his voice in order to humorously reflect the preacher's disposition. The application of multiple registers and different rhythms gives listeners a vision of the figure Baraka parodies in ways unavailable to those who only read the poem on the page.

Several contemporary poets have expanded the models and muses for sonic emulation to include the distinct sounds that emerge in rap music. In particular, some poets emulate drum-machines and beat-boxing in their poetry. Well known beat-boxers such as Doug E. Fresh, the late Buffy of the Fat Boys, Rahzel, and Scratch actually implemented sonic persona moments in their own performances, as they imitated the sounds of musical instruments and sampled an assortment of voices. Beat-boxing became a staple of rap performances, especially for those who lacked access to drum-machines. Modern beat-boxers have created increasingly complex displays of vocal performance. In a rendition of Aaliyah's "If Your Girl Only Knew," Rahzel emulates the sound of the singer's voice and lyrics and at the same time performs the beat and bass line to the song with his mouth. Scratch performs all the music with his mouth on his album The Embodiment of Instrumentation, and he announces on the liner notes that the album contains "no loops, no beat machines, no machinery at all." Scratch alters and adjusts his voice in various fashions in order to embody the spirit of rap music and project a distinct sound.

In a recording of his poem "Ohm," Saul Williams fuses his reading with beatboxing--simultaneously an act and emulation--setting a vivid mood for listeners to envision his enactment of a rap DJ. The author of such volumes of poetry as The Seventh Octave (1998) and The Dead Emcee Scrolls (2006) and the lead vocalist on the albums Amethyst Rock Star (2001) and Not in My Name (2003), Williams gained widespread notice as a poet and performer after playing the leading role in the film Slam (1998). Williams opens "Ohm" by stating "Through meditation, I program my heart to beat break-beats and hum bass-lines on exhalation"; his words are followed by brief beat-boxing and the projection "ohmmmm." He then states "I burn seven day candles that melt into twelve inch circles on my mantle and spin funk like myrrh"; he again follows with beat-boxing and the projection "ohmmmm." Williams's assertive tone in the poem resembles the bravado of a rapper, and his wordless percussive phrasings invoke the distinct rhythms and sounds of the music. He ultimately adopts multiple masks or sonic persona moments in a single work and effectively blurs the lines between poetry, rap, and beat-boxing.

How listeners classify "Ohm" may depend on where they encounter it. The piece can be considered a spoken word performance when viewed on the DVD Slam Nation: The Sport of the Spoken Word (1998), and Williams's work can be viewed as rap, when it appears alongside compositions by Kool Keith, De La Soul, Q-Tip, and Talib Kweli on the compilation Lyridst Lounge, Vol. 1 (1998). "Ohm" might be received as poetry when listeners encounter it on the compilation Our Souls Have Grown Deep (2000), which features readings by such established poets as Rita Dove, Robert Hayden, Quincy Troupe, and Yusef Komunyakaa. The appearance of "Ohm" in three distinct venues which showcase different genres confirms the degrees to which Williams convincingly adapts and diversifies particular personas. Whereas Williams's poem displays the promise of poets taking up the art of beat-boxing, Tracie Morris's "Project Princess" embodies the practice of tumtablism.

Although Morris has produced two books of poetry Chap-T-her Won (1993) and Intermission (1998), she is perhaps most widely known for her remarkable talents as a live performer of her works. On the page, Morris's "Project Princess" reads as a vivid description of the attire worn by a street-wise confident young woman. The woman's "hands [are] mobile thrones of today's urban goddess" (1. 10); she sports "gold initials" on her two front teeth (1. 13); and "Multidimensional shrimp earrings / frame her cinnamon face" (ll. 17-18). The printed version of the poem offers a striking portrait; Morris's auditory performance of "Project Princess," however, transforms the work into a tremendous force of sonic energy. Throughout her performance of the poem, Morris reads at accelerated speeds; she loops phrasings; and she utilizes her voice as an instrument. Overall, her supernatural display of sounds and tempo resemble a DJ cutting and scratching.

Morris swiftly repeats and deviates the opening lines of the poem three times, notably changing the word "socks" to "so-so-so-so-so-socks" and then "so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-so-socks." Her voicing resembles a turntablist rapidly looping a specific word, and the speed of her speech gives her wording an almost electronic sound. In the printed version, Morris writes "Jeans oversized belying her hips" (l. 6), but in the recorded version she reconfigures the phrase by stating "je-je-je-je-je-je-je her jeans oversized belie her hips." Similar to her presentation of "socks," she creates a deliberate malfunction in her delivery of the word "jeans." That apparent malfunction occurs throughout the poem and actually corresponds to signature techniques of scratching and cutting that characterize rap music. The mechanical resonances of Morris's projections and her unbelievably quick pronunciation of words represent a remarkable feat. Her voice performs the work of an electronic machine and the art of turntabling. Ironically, Morris demonstrates the wonderful possibilities of vocalization by imitating a DJ distorting a human voice.

Taken together, the audio versions of Williams's "Ohm" and Morris's "Project Princess" exemplify diverse and complex manifestations of poets who enact the sonic discourses of rap music. Since practices of sampling and remixing are so central to the art form, the multilayered nature of the performances by Williams and Morris should come as no surprise. Nonetheless, there remains something fascinating about human voices projecting such dramatic wordless phrasings and performing at such uncommon speeds. Literary critics often remark on the debts that rap owes to poetry; however, pieces like "Ohm" and "Project Princess" provide us with the opportunity to consider how rap discourse might influence the performance of new and innovative verse. To uninitiated ears, Morris's vocal tumtablism and Williams's beat-boxing might sound like indecipherable projections. For listeners familiar with the sounds of hip hop, though, these poets' sounds constitute acts of speaking in the tongues of a distinct musical discourse. As Williams and Morris reveal, adopting the sounds of rap music allows poets to extend into a discourse beyond conventional poetry and thus stretch the possibilities of vocal masking.

Poet Patricia Smith offers yet another possibility when she adopts the persona of a white supremacist in her poem "Skinhead." Smith has authored volumes of poetry such as Close to Death (1993) and Teahouse of the Almighty (2006), which was selected as a National Poetry Series winner, but she is widely known as a skilled performance poet. "Skinhead" features the first-person narrative of a violent and racist figure who sees himself as "just a white boy who loves his race, / fighting for a pure country" (ll. 52-53). The printed version of the poem carries a distinct sense of white supremacist hate, but the audio version of the poem invokes an even eerier effect as Smith incorporates minor yet convincing aspects of her figure's possible character traits. The strength of Smith's performance rests on her attention to detail and on her skillful incorporation of multiple tonal registers.

Smith, adopting the voice of her protagonist, opens with an assertive projection of the statement "They call me skinhead," then in a softer, though still assertive tone, says "and I got my own beauty." Later, after describing how he might violently attack blacks, he lowers his voice and coolly observes, "I was born to make things right." During one section of the poem when the skinhead is speaking to a reporter, his tone reflects a speaker talking directly to his questioner with listeners overhearing the conversation. The tone shifts again as he reflects on and discusses the meeting with the reporter. Towards the end of the poem, the skinhead uses a derisive tone to announce that "I'm your baby, America, your boy." In the printed version, his closing lines are "And I was born / and raised / right here" (ll. 73-75). In the recorded version, the skinhead offers a menacing chuckle just before saying "right here." The insertion of the laugh at the end gives the poem a chilling effect.

Smith's application of varied tonalities in "Skinhead" equips her character's voice with a more well rounded and distinct sense of personality. The speaker adjusts the volume and tempo of the narrative at various points signifying a lifelike scenario; the tone adapts to changing factors of circumstance and audience. The force and conviction in Smith's voice as well as her talents as a performer make it possible for listeners to hear and believe the white supremacist that is channeled in the poem. Smith accomplishes a challenging task in her "Skinhead" performance: a black woman poet literarily wearing whiteface. The poem demonstrates the possibility of Smith's dramatically adopting the mask of a white male racist who violently terrorizes black people, and more broadly, Smith's presentation along with the audio recordings by Baraka, Sanchez, Williams, and Morris, showcase the transformative power of sonic persona moments.

Although Morris, Smith, and Williams are regularly labeled as "slam poets" and "performance poets," the techniques they employ in order to achieve distinct sounds derive from different rhetorical discourses. Morris regularly projects hip hop aesthetics in her performances, but notably experiments with other sounds as well, and Smith presents an oratorical approach that draws on such vast expressive modes as black drama and sermonic traditions. Williams initially invoked the personae of male rap artists and the aesthetics of hip hop in his presentations, and now, his works which include music videos and CDs--also incorporate R & B and rock music. The abilities of these and other poets to adapt oratorical elements, musical styles, and personas from a variety of discourses contribute significantly to the distinct sound of their works and their ability to appeal to the interests of multiple audiences.

Over the years, Baraka, Sanchez, Morris, Smith, and Williams have all developed large and popular followings, especially among college students and listeners. The appeal that poets with impressive performance skills have generated among their audiences suggests that publishers, reviewers, literary critics, and conventional "poetry readers" are hardly the only figures involved in the active transmission and reception of poetry. The increasing appearance of black poetry on MySpace and YouTube indicates that down at the crossroads where poetry, emulation, and new media meet, strange things are happening with every post. Indeed, a search for one of the most viewed references to "Saul Williams" on YouTube turns up the Swedish rock band The Hives covering Williams's song "List of Demands." (5)

Like A Human iPod: Tyehimba Jess and Multithreaded Verse

During a poetry reading on November 2, 2005, at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, Tyehimba Jess performed a percussive, polyrhythmic rendition of his poem "leadbelly sings to his #1 crew." Only an awareness of innovative verbal skills, black poetic militancy, and chain-gang cadence could have fully prepared us for what we witnessed that day. This skillful blend of folk tune and prose poem was nothing short of dazzling. Here was a literary artist combining the locomotive rhythms of a work song with the testimony of a fiery, folk singing convict. The performance demonstrated a poet's capacity to emulate musician Huddie Ledbetter's singing to his crew and just as well illustrated Jess's ability to download, retain, shuffle, and play multiple modalities of folk music and oratory. In effect, Tyehimba Jess was like a human iPod.

Jess has established himself as both a skilled performer and writer: he is a 2006 Whiting Award recipient, a 2004 winner of the National Poetry Series, the 2001 winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, and a former member of Chicago's Green Mill Slam team. Jess's volume of poetry leadbelly (2005) consists entirely of persona poems concentrating on the life of a legendary musician. The book appears to be part of a growing trend in black publishing history; over the last decade, several poets have produced books featuring persona poems focusing on the experiences of a single person or on a particular set of historical circumstances. Rita Dove's On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999) and American Smooth (2004), Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination (2001), Marilyn Nelson's Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), Natasha Trethewey Bellocq's Ophelia (2002) and Native Guard (2006), Ai's Vice (2000) and Dread (2003), Honoree Jeffers's Outlandish Blues (2003), Frank X Walker's Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (2004), A. Van Jordan's M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2004), Quraysh Ali Lansana's They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems (2004), Thylias Moss's Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse (2004), and Kevin Young's Black Maria (2005) all incorporate persona poems to varying degrees. Altogether, the volumes access a range of historical facts and convey that information through an assortment of imaginative first-person accounts. In addition, the works suggest a prevalent trend among contemporary poets and publishers to produce books that showcase persona poems on historical figures. The variety of characters in Jess's book and the nature of his innovations distinguish leadbelly among many of the other recent works featuring persona poems.

In addition to speaking in the voice of Leadbelly, Jess takes on the personas of more than twenty other characters in his volume, including the musician's parents, his former wives, his handler John Lomax, prison officials and fellow inmates, his mentor Blind Lemon Jefferson, Texas Governor Pat Neff, and blues musician Josh White. In the tradition of folklore, Jess also personifies such inanimate objects as Leadbelly's gun, his guitar, the street that he frequented, and the recording machine that captured his voice. The variety of speakers instills the book with a striking polyvocal quality and displays Jess's impressive efforts in researching and representing a broad range of historical figures. The weaving together of numerous characters and several narrative strands in leadbelly corresponds to a practice known as "multithreading."

Steven Johnson, in his book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter explains that multithreading refers to the ways that a television program "weaves together a collection of distinct strands," presents an increased "number of primary characters" and leaves "threads open at the end" (67). Multithreading, explains Johnson, "is the most acclaimed structural convention of modern television programming," an approach utilized by the writers for such shows as ER, 24, Lost, The Sopranos, and Family Guy (65). The shows contain multiple interrelated storylines, feature a large number of characters, and present a several scene shifts. As a result, the programs place increased cognitive demands on viewers by prompting them to "remember" and "analyze" the information presented on screen in order to fully understand the overall narratives (64). Multithreading serves as a useful concept for describing how poets connect a wide assortment of interrelated figures and narrative strands in a single volume. The multithreading qualities of Jess's work are particularly pronounced given the chorus of voices that populate leadbelly.

The characters and inanimate objects in the volume speak directly or indirectly about Leadbelly, extending the musician's legendary status. In "sallie ledbetter: a mother's hymn," the singer's mother anticipates the troubling future that awaits her son

    when the black boy climbs out of my womb:
   how to peel dynamite from his bones?
   how to strip tornado's hum from his ears?
   how to weed graveyard from his garden of tongue? (ll. 1-4) 

And she wonders in closing "which revengeful breast fed him this poison? / which breast gilded his mouth with song?" (ll. 10-11). This poem, appearing near the beginning of the volume, foreshadows the contents of the other poems in the book that will detail the storied life of Leadbelly. The poem thus functions as a mother's questioning testimony and also as a link to a broader network of narratives on the volume's protagonist.

Individually, Jess's poems in the volume present a specific scene relating to Leadbelly's life, but taken together, the pieces link to each other in stimulating and deliberate ways. The poems "loving era" and "era washington on leadbelly's stella," for instance, appear on adjoining pages and directly correspond to one another. In "loving era," Leadbelly describes a violent dispute with a woman, apparently Era, after she destroys his guitar. The events of the dispute come into even clearer focus as Washington has her say in the subsequent poem, where she explains "i got no regrets for smashing stella [the guitar]. / i'd beat her broke again, / rip chords out her throat" (ll. 1-3). In the context of the larger narrative, it is fitting that Washington views the guitar as a rival, since in the poem "mistress stella speaks," the musical instrument had announced that she "owned" Leadbelly and he returned to her each day, bending "his weight around me / like a wilting weed" (ll. 23-24). These three poems, like almost all of the poems in the volume, display an interconnectivity that unites this collection of distinct voices.

Jess visibly highlights the divergence and connection between different voices in his series of "lomax v. leadbelly" poems. These poems concentrate on the contentious relationship and differenced perspectives of Leadbelly and John Lomax. Leadbelly was an ex-con and folk singer traveling with ethnographer Lomax on the road, as Lomax collected songs and arranged performances for Leadbelly.

The men were tensely dependent on each other, as Leadbelly controlled the talents of "negro folk singing" and Lomax had access to the means of getting the songs recorded, published, and produced.

Most written accounts on Leadbelly draw from Lomax's assessments of the singer; however, Jess provides alternative opportunities for readers to imagine Leadbelly telling his version of the experiences with Lomax. Jess's "lomax v. leadbelly" poems present excerpts from the writings of Lomax and juxtapose that description alongside Leadbelly's imagined account. For example, in "lomax v. leadbelly: on the road, 1935," Jess writes,

    ... i had made only a few requests of him
, there were some things
   i was prayin' he'd do
      and those for his protection
 --things to keep peace while
        in strange country
;  travelin' together:
            i wanted him
  to quit botherin' on where
          to eat good food
,  and what's healthy, and
       to take plenty of rest
,  risin' with the sun, and
         not to sing and play
  no midnight parties
            for groups of negroes
  at no jook joints
              late at night
,  until dawn. (ll. 1-9) 

The italicized words are drawn from Lomax's words in Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly. Jess has referred to these columned compositions as "double-jointed" poems in honor of the black workers interviewed by Alan Lomax whose strong and flexible limbs made them "stronger than ordinary men." According to Jess, each voice of the double-jointed poems "tries to match the other, with as close a match in syllables as I could muster, so that each speaker uses approximately the same amount of breath for their thoughts" (Ervin 17). The poems are also designed so that each column can be read separately and together. During poetry readings, Jess has a volunteer from the audience read the Lomax column first; then Jess reads the Leadbelly column, and then they both alternate between the Lomax and Leadbelly columns. The poems represent a visibly perceptible innovation to the presentation of persona poetry. The construction and threading of each "lomax v. leadbelly" poem requires at least three reads in order to effectively appreciate and perform the piece. Jess's double-jointed poems echo and dramatize W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double-consciousness in visual manner. The poems also create an opportunity for Jess's Leadbelly to offer his perspective, and the double-jointed poems reflect a contemporary poet's contributions to innovating the designs and operations of persona poetry.

In ways similar to those of Patricia Smith, Saul Williams, and Tracie Morris, Jess masters the art of performing poetry. During readings, he applies multiple tonal registers as he speaks in the voices of Leadbelly, Sallie Ledbetter, Mistress Stella, Leadbelly's wife Martha Promise, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and John Lomax. (6) Jess's performances display his abilities of multithreading a range of narrators and narrations; he implements a number of sonic persona moments. In addition, Jess's performances of his poetry become more communal and interactive affairs than conventional poetry readings. He often relies on an audience volunteer to assist in the presentation of his "lomax v. leadbelly" poems, and he regularly uses an overhead projector to explain and display the appearance of the double-jointed poems to the audience. Overall, Jess's performances of select poems from leadbelly confirm the integral relationship between persona poems and the dramatic arts; his readings make use of props, and he assumes the roles of narrator and actor.

Jess's emergence as a performance poet prior to attaining critical accolades for his writings represents a fairly recent development in fields of American and African American poetry. During the late 1960s, Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and other Black Arts writers encouraged poets to embrace the possibilities of performance, calling for a shift from the page to the stage, so to speak. Conversely, Jess and Patricia Smith participated in communities of performance poets before winning prestigious national awards for their volumes of poetry; and thus, the trajectory of their careers suggests subtle shifts from the stage to the page. In a blog on the Poetry Foundation's website, Jess noted that "the list of slam poets who are infiltrating the academy is growing each year." Consequently, an accomplished writer and performer of verse exemplifies an intriguing sense of "double consciousness"; and thus, a poet like Jess perhaps "ever feels his two-ness" as he possesses the apparent "warring ideals" of the stage and the page "in one dark body" (Du Bois 9).

Jess's brand of poetic, double consciousness actually corresponds to larger histories concerning the labels and personae adopted and rebuked by African American poets. For example, Langston Hughes expressed his regrets in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" that a promising Negro poet wanted to be a "poet--not a Negro poet" (1311), and during the Black Arts era, several artists debated what aspects of their identities--poets, black people, or activists--were primary. In the contemporary era, "many African American poets," observes Evie Shockley, "needing to find a nurturing, reliable community in which to work, have felt pressure to modify their identities and mold their poetics to fit the expectations that audiences and critics have for black writers" (12).

The modulating subject positions of one writer in particular from Everett LeRoy Jones to LeRoi Jones to Imamu Ameer Baraka and finally to Amiri Baraka appear especially unusual. Then again, however, given the large number of poets who prominently and ritually channel the spirits of ex-slaves, embody and project diverse sonic forces, and multithread a chorus of distinct personas, the kinds of transformations Baraka experienced are perhaps not so odd. You can confine such transformations to discourses of literary history if you like, but they seem like acts of masking and catching holy ghosts to me. (7)

Works Cited

Adisa, Opal Palmer. "Peeling Off the Skin." Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade. Eds. Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 14-16.

Abrams, M. H., ed. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 4th ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1981.

Bolden, Tony. Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004.

Boyd, Melba. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and Broadside Press. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.

Clarke, Cheryl. "After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005.

Conniff, Brian. "Answering 'The Waste Land': Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence." A frican A merican R eview 33.3 (Fall 1999): 487-506.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Ed. Farah Jasmine Griffin. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003.

Dungy, Camille. "In Others' Voices: The Millennial Poets and Personae." Black Issues Book Review 8.2 (March/April 2006): 16-17.

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964.

Ervin, Andrew. "Writing Double Jointed: An Interview with Tyehimba Jess." Rain Taxi: Review of Books 11.1 (Spring 2006): 16-17.

Garrison, William Lloyd. Preface. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Gates and McKay 387-93.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton, 2004.

Hayden, Robert. "Runagate Runagate." Gates and McKay 1526-28.

Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Gates and McKay 1311-14.

Jess, Tyehimba. Leadbelly: poems. Seattle: Wave Books, 2005.

Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.

Neal, Larry. "And Shine Swam On." Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Eds. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal. New York: William Morrow, 1968. 638-56.

Nielsen, Aldon. "'Real Song' Aldon Nielsen on recent recordings by Amiri Baraka." Shuffle Boil 2 (Summer 2002): 25-26.

--. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.

--. Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004.

Pool, Rosey E. "Robert Hayden: Poet Laureate." Negro Digest 15.8 (June 1966): 39-43.

Preminger, Alex, and T. V. F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 2007.

Randall, Dudley, "Frederick Douglass and the Slave Breaker." Black World (September 1972): 64.

Sanchez, Sonia. "a/coltrane/poem." Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic Reference. Ed. Stephen Henderson. New York: Morrow, 1973. 274-78.

Seibles, Tim. "Douglass, A Last Letter." Tuma 111-17.

Shockley, Evie. "From The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass." Tuma 132-34.

--. "All of the Above: Multiple Choice and African American Poetry." Tuma 1-12.

Smethurst, James. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005.

Smith, Patricia. "Skinhead." Big Towns, Big Talk. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 1992.67-69.

--. "Skinhead." 1994. e-poets network: the Book of Voices: Patricia Smith. 12 Feb. 2007. <http://voices.epoets.net/SmithP/play-Skinhead.ram>.

Tuma, Keith, ed. Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry. Oxford, OH: Miami UP, 2006.

Discography 

Baraka, Amiri. "I Love Music." Real Song. CD. Enja Records, 1995.

--. "Dope." Real Song. CD. Enja Records, 1995.

Coltrane, John. A Love Supreme. CD. UMVD Labels, 2002.

Morris, Trade. "Project Princess." Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers. CD. RHINO Entertainment, 2000.

Rahzel. Make the Music 2000. CD. MCA, 1999.

Sanchez, Sonia. "Resist." A Nation of Poets. CD. National Black Arts Festival, 1990.

Scratch. The Embodiment of Instrumentation. CD. Ropeadope Records, 2002.

Williams, Saul. "Ohm." Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers. RHINO Entertainment, 2000.

Notes

(1.) In his performances of his "Low Coup" poems, Baraka usually begins by humming the melody of Bud Powell's "Un Poco Loco" and intersperses aspects of the song throughout the performance. During a reading at Pennsylvania State University on April 5, 2002, the musicians accompanying Baraka played a rendition of Powell's song as Baraka read. At points during his reading though, Baraka abandoned the page and shouted the melody to match the instrumentalists.

(2.) At least four different versions of Hayden's "Runagate Runagate" have appeared in print: "Runagate Runagate," The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, eds. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps (New York: Doubleday, 1949) 168-71; "1949 Runagate Runagate," Negro Digest 15.8 (June 1966): 44-45; "1964 Runagate Runagate," Negro Digest 15.8 (June 1966): 46-47; and "Runagate Runagate." The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie McKay (New York: Norton, 2004) 1526-28.

(3.) Similar to Shockley, Seibles's poem "Douglass, A Last Letter" also presents a first-person account from Douglass during his latter years. "Douglass, A Last Letter" also appears in Tuma.

(4.) See Maria Diedrich's Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing & Frederick Douglass (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1999).

(5.) Analogous to the ways that poets adopt various personae, musicians have historically sampled and covered the works of other musicians as a way of paying homage to those artists and in order to remix popular tunes. In addition to covering Williams's work, The Hives also perform renditions of Outkast's "Hey Ya!" and Three 6 Mafia's "Stay Fly" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu4XawBelwg).

(6.) Listening to Jess's presentations reveals his expansive range as a reader or vocalist. To hear him reading in the voices of characters from leadbelly visit http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/tyehimba_jess. To hear him reading a variety other poems, visit http://voices.e-poets.net/JessT/home.html.

(7.) According to literary biographer Rampersad, Kenneth Burke "cleverly" made Ralph Ellison aware that Invisible Man opens with 'T' and closes with "you"--a coincidental gesture perhaps of establishing a bond between author and reader (257). Whatever the case, as homage to Ralph Ellison, whose meditations on masking have been essential to my own thinking, I have deliberately invoked Invisible Man and the reader-author bond by opening my essay with "you" and closing with "me."