The Spring 2013 issue of The Black Scholar presented a colloquy of poets and critics memorializing Jayne Cortez. The diversity of the writers (Tara Betts, Jodi Braxton, Harryette Mullen, Fred Ho, et al) and their offerings in many ways reflected the diversity and offerings of Jayne Cortez’s oeuvre from serious Pan- Africanist commentary to poems in her manner. My offering was a brief essay entitled “Lodestar.” It begins:

In a way, the opening of the paragraph is my way of grappling with the immensity and achievement of FIRESPITTER: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF JAYNE CORTEZ from Nightboat Books. There’s a lovely photograph of her on the cover taken by Mel Edwards and, yes, you can feel the love.

Indeed, love is a compelling theme throughout Cortez’s poetry even as most critics focus on her themes of Black culture, Black struggle, Pan-Africanism, environmental degradation and reparations, women’s autonomy, and new technologies and innovations in the creation and production of poetry. As Sapphire points out in her foreword to this volume, Cortez provided novel ways to address the many violences put upon women as she focuses on the poem “Rape” and its rage-filled utterance. It is also notable that in that poem Cortez talks about Joan Little whose case was notorious in the 1970s. While Black women were in solidarity with Little, there were issues with white allies—an all too familiar pattern. Cortez focuses on Little’s enraged response to the indignities placed upon her. “Joan came down with an ice pin in / the swat freak mother fucker’s chest.” Sapphire notes that “Cortez was unraveling the very warp and woof of white male supremacy.”

I agree with her, but Cortez does this in a range of poems. In “Festivals & Funerals,” the poet begins, “They winged his spirit & / wounded his tongue / but death was slow coming.” This becomes a blues stanza as she repeats these words but ends with a question mark. She is stating just how important how useful the blues can be in poetry.

This poem builds on those repetitions, builds on the flashes of grief and the refrain: “Who killed Lumumba / What killed Malcolm”—those questions continue to haunt us to this day. Who did it, what did it—the very notion of dynamic Black male leadership is an utter affront to white supremacy, and the answer to Cortez is in Western-led global politics. And yet, if you do ask the question, if you do not repeat that line, if you can’t get into the groove, then you will not be able to deal with that answer.

But here’s what Cortez does that amazes me to this day; she shifts from grief to an eroticized community—those festivals.

And final quatrain “takes it home,” as folks say, while playing a seriously raucous number:

Eros and Thanatos are at play in much of Cortez’s work—how she constructs whole universes from riffs that explore the “perfection the Blues.”

Along with the amazing cadre of Black Arts Movement poets, Cortez connected music, visual arts, and movement to make work that deftly follows the “ancient to the future” slogan of the AACM. “Music makes an image,” Amiri Baraka declared in his essay The Changing Same. Image is often derived from Cortez’s passion for and deep understanding of Black culture in its many manifestations, but music is essential. Poems from Mouth on Paper (1977) shows Cortez making those images ring. “So Many Feathers,” which she read at The Poetry Project in the 1980s, is both a tribute to and critique of Josephine Baker. “[O]f such terrible beauty / of such fire / such flames / all feathers Josephine / This Josephine”—her description of Baker’s costume becomes a phoenix who rises out of adversity in that fire and those flames. Then Cortez lists Baker’s barrier breaking: “this Josephine / breaking color bars in miami / this Josephine / mother of orphans . . .” For me, the poem hits its stride in the second stanza:

How could a former resistance fighter work in apartheid South Africa, asks Cortez, who knows the answer. And yet she allows Baker her complexity in a world where the “death white boers” seek the entertainment of a famous Black performer. Baker’s beauty is her boon and bane and the poet sees it all.

Cortez’s poetry often connects performers, especially musicians, to political and cultural history and change. There are poems for Duke Ellington, Don Cherry, John Coltrane. Bessie Smith is often called upon, as is Cortez’s first husband, Ornette Coleman, but her masterwork is “I See Chano Pozo.” And she really did see and hear him when she was a young woman in California. Pozo, a Cuban drummer, was a member of Dizzy Gillespie’s band and brought those ritmos to American jazz. The poem is a paean to Pan-Africanism and a love song to Black music, across continents.

She really is on the “good foot” in this poem, and she goes on to connect the Americas to Africa through Chano Pozo’s “very fine conga”:

This poem is what makes you know just how much depth of historical knowledge and cultural practice Cortez brought to her poetics. It also reflects her very serious engagement with Negritude poets, especially Léon Damas. The poem’s final stanza is a litany to drums and drummers:

The rituals, the rules, the rites of passage that were distributed and disturbed by the Transatlantic Slave Trade returns repeatedly in Cortez’s poetry. Poems that are clearly a refashioning of cultural history—the Black side. Others connect cultural production and expression with Black people’s survival worldwide. Like her contemporaries June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, she made efforts to work in a variety of ways to get her message across and engage with African writers and artists such as Ama Ata Aidoo with whom she founded Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA). Because of her image-making, repetition, and surprising word choice, you can hear her voice on the page, which is quite an achievement.

Her passion for Black people, her culture, a deep concern for the role of women within the culture, and her unwavering independence in thinking and action—all of this is on display not only in the poems, but also in speeches and texts outside of poetry collections. Cortez wrote for the 20th and 2lst centuries, but she seems to carry the prior and following centuries in her work. Hearing her perform “I am New York City” or the “you know” people or damning death white boers, not only of Durban but Detroit and Malibu and the Upper East Side, was a great pleasure and inspiration. This is a volume that allows the wisdom and wit, the sensual and sexual, the rage and righteousness to be found across fifty-plus years of writing. Death may have taken the body, but this volume allows us to hear her voice.