NOTE
TO READERS:
In
March 1995 I spoke about Sterling Plumpp in the PASSWORDS series at Poets
House, proud to be a Mississippian in New York speaking about a
Mississippian. Poets House was then
located at 72 Spring Street. It is now
located at 10 River Terrace. In 1995, I
thought Plumpp was the finest blues poet our nation had produced, surpassed
only by Langston Hughes. Much has
changed. In 2013, I am convinced Plumpp
is still standing next to Hughes; no writer who claims to be a blues/jazz poet
surpasses him with the exception of Amiri Baraka, who is our most total music
poet. Should I discover that anyone
agrees with my opinion, I shall promptly have a minor heart attack. That person will have killed my ability to
have the blues.
I
venture into the future to find the present and leave the past frozen. Obviously, I am troubled by the apostasy that
infects our contemporary discussions of poetry.
I will learn you to play bid whist with Death. If you
choose, you may turn ice into either steam or water. It is entirely up to you.
THE
TEXT:
One
poet looks at another. He watches him
coming through and out of chaos, out of Mississippi ---the blood, sweat, mud
and terrors of the near past, coming out of Clinton, MS --a hoot and a holler
down the road from the Delta, the womb of the blues. Watches him follow that smokestack lightning,
up the tracks the train will take to sweet home Chicago, Mecca, Chi-town, the
promised land. Watches too the proverbial
progress from the frying pan to chaos to the skillet, the jump from bad to bad
in the territory where one sings the blues, or constructs a sensibility, an
aesthetic, a whole body of work from Portable
Soul (1969) to Hornman (1995)
Intervention at 12:32 a.m. ---For commentary on Plumpp and his post-1995
books -- Ornate With Smoke (1997), Blues Narrative (1999), and Velvet
Bebop Kente Cloth (2001), read Valley
Voices 9.1 (2009), edited by Hermine Pinson and Duriel E. Harris. The deep pleasure of remembering that Plumpp,
Keropetse Kgositsile , and I listened to Fred Anderson playing horn and Duriel
Harris reading her poetry at the Velvet Lounge (Chicago) in 2001; that Lorenzo Thomas, Plumpp and I had to do
some serious learning when Junior Wells sang somewhere at sometime.
One
poet worries out the meaning of the other poet’s dark journey from peasant
origins to achievement by dint of pure will, mastery of craft and the
particularity of speech and music as referents that mark the contours and
qualities of the new black [American] poetry (Stephen Henderson’s theory), by
continual autobiographical exploration of the ethos of the blues until the
other poet strikes a massive vein of gold in the rockbed, only to reveal that
there under everything is a diamond in his African ancestry.
The
poet from Clinton, who now claims and is claimed by Chicago, is Sterling
Dominic Plumpp. It is his work I
celebrate, not by lecture but by a collage of sound -- an effort to freeze patterns of meaning in
his work. For he is the best blues poet
of my generation (alongside the blues musicians who are poets) driven to an
awakening by Johannesburg and the possibilities of finding the majesty of the
blues in jazz.
In
his first book, Portable Soul
(1969), Plumpp’s poems conform most to
an urban mode or to the UpSouth idioms of the 1960s/1970s to be found in much
black poetry, that reformation of language which threatened to render all of
the collective voices, in the worst instances, not distinguishable from one
another. If you did not know how to pay
attention to context clues, you might mistake a poem by Plumpp for a poem by
Don Lee (Haki Madhubuti) -- so strong was the OBAC/Chicago sound issuing
from the workshops as the seeds of the Black Aesthetic began to assume
shape. But the blues in Plumpp came
through in the poem entitled “Black Resurrection” (Portable Soul 18).
Three
deep blues features in this poem deserve
special attention. First, there are the
compressed images of blues origin ( murmur of chains/ chords of my captivity)
which evoke a cause-effect relation between historical experience and musical
expression. The surreal, gripping image
of “tears hanging / down into the waiting grave” strike a tonal memory of the
blues as “crying songs of laughter.” The
crossing of the sacred and the secular where the specific song titles are the
communion bread and wine (Roman Catholic rite) is a counter-gesture to the
usual careful distinction kept between the godly and the ungodly among blues
people.
So
the blues was a way out of the dilemma of craft for Plumpp. Not to write in the fashionable style, but
(like some early 20th century Harlem Renaissance poets) to mine what
had always authenticated Black Art, namely according to Plumpp in his essays on
psychology (Black Rituals 1972), the
Blues, Spirituals, and the Black Church.
Even if one rejects the so-called intentional fallacy in interpretation,
it does not hurt to know that Plumpp was working through an
ideological/technical crisis that put him in some opposition to the poetic
outpourings of cultural nationalism.
Plumpp has intentions.
Listen
to this: “Another misunderstanding concerns the Blues. People who sing the Blues are reflecting a
worldview that is particularly Black.
They have not resigned to accept their fate but have found ways to admit
to themselves and their brethren their troubles. I don’t think this necessitates a dichotomy
with Blackness” (Black Rituals 71).
So
Plumpp would opt for the blues basics of his origins in Mississippi. The option does not bespeak raw imitation of
blues structure but sophisticated use of blues substructures, the multi-leveled
feelings behind the class AAB stanza and it variations. Yes, Plumpp could do that. Two demonstrations. Listen to the version of his poem “Son of the
Blues” recorded by SOB/Chitown Hustlers [ Billy Branch and Sons of Blues, Where’s My Money?( Red Beans RB 004)]
and then read/juxtapose “Worst Than the Blues My Daddy Had” which was published
in the 1993 collection Johannesburg and
Other Poems, pages 10-11. Both poems
come from the 1982/83 manuscript entitled “Worst Than the Blues My Daddy
Had.” But the bulk of the poems written
in this style are not published. There
was a watershed moment in Plumpp’s understanding of what he was doing as a
poet. Referring to such poems in notes
appended to the manuscript, Plumpp claimed
The individual blues piece, Blues
Song-Poems as I call them, are direct referents to a wide variety of feelings,
emotions, concern, attitudes, and situations which confront on three
levels: as an individual, as a member of
the Afro-American national group, and as a member of the human world threaten
[ed] with extinction because so few men hold the power to destroy. For me, they broaden the range of my voice
and bring into focus elements of concern submerged: irony, lightheartedness, empathy with
females, and a deep preoccupation with the sensual.
……
They are pieces reaching to the largest
possible audience since aside from the blues form (AAB) they deal with
situations real people find themselves in and they don’t pose any easy
solutions.
…..
The blues poet writes so his lines are
lyrical yet song as read; they do not depend upon a performance for their
effect. The temptation to condense and
edit out the raw oral quality of blues poems will only amputate their
authenticity; for blues are feelings at their most unexpurgated level.
Are
we quite certain that blues effects do not depend upon a performance? Make a test.
Listen to the bluesman Willie
Kent sing Plumpp’s poem “911.”[Too Hurt
to Cry. Delmark DE 667] Kent’s vocal
interpretation convinces me that performance makes all the difference.
On May 20, 1983, I wrote to Plumpp:
Sterling, I feel the poems that are
identified as blues songs are too conscious of the formal properties of
blues --you let repetition and the
impulse to rhyme dominate feeling, the heartbeat and muscle of the blues.
In making your blues song-poems you are
too aware of yourself as a poet, too little inside your feelings or the
feelings you assign to the persona in the poems. Remember Ellison’ saying the blues are about
running one’s finger over the jagged edge of life? Well, after you cut your finger, you suck the
poison out, wrap the wound in a cobweb, and keep on moving. If the blues was about staying with the pain,
the jooks would be empty on Saturday night.
Sterling’s revenge was to dedicate the
poem I said was the best example of a Sterling Plumpp blues, “Muddy Waters,” to
me in Blues: The Story Always Untold.
Intervention at 1:57 a.m. My letter to Plumpp was written after reading
and discussing Plumpp’s manuscript with the young poet Charlie Braxton.
A historian might connect Mississippi and
South Africa through comparative study of systems of oppressions. Plumpp
connects those sites of humanity and experience by responding to a historical
call in “Thaba Nchu” (Johannesburg and
other Poems 107) When a special
collection of signature poems by twenty-three poets was printed in September
1994 for the “Furious Flower: A revolution in African American Poetry” conference
(James Madison University), “Thaba Nchu” was Plumpp’s contribution. This poem may be a new writing of his name, a
poetic completion of the search for temporal location (not to be confused with
search for roots) which is initiated in early poems in the volumes Portable
Soul and HalfBlack, Half Blacker
and in a telling stanza in the long poem Steps
to Break the Circle (1974):
My
Black Man’s days are epic curtains
Drawn
shades of my light moments
Pyramidal
drapes of red, green and black
Shaking
their round asses to the beat
Of
a tom-tom and conked conga
Falling
dreams sliding down
To
ponderous claps of wonder
And
a predictive closure
My
feetsounds is thunder blows
I
shango I shango shango shango
Shango
down the freedom road…
a
return to the ancestral homeland of the
New
World blues. The circle can only be
broken
by taking the steps to reestablish the
circle of African authenticity in
which
the African gods are active verbs,
because
anyone who dares to transform
the
name of a god into a verb certainly would have to go where the
mojo
hands called. (25)
From
the collection The Mojo Hands Call, I
Must Go (1982), which won the 1983 Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry, your reading of the stunning “I Hear the
Shuffle of the People’s Feet” (35-42) can perform the verbalizing of a
god. When Plumpp started talking on the
autobiographical highway of Clinton
(1976), he told you everything you must know until you arrived at Johannesburg & Other Poems (1993)
and heard Hornman (1995). In his early poems and in Blues: The Story Always Untold (1989), Plumpp had played the
totality of the blues, inscribing the urgency of refiguring his Mississippi
self in relation to Africa by way of the rituals, social performances, and
folkways urbanized in Chicago. He mapped
the territory in sentiments and forms.
He was a native son of the blues, sending its light through the Chicago
prism of his imagination until….until Hornman
celebrated the saxophonist Von Freeman and took us and him into a jazz end
zone.
Jazz
appropriation does not mean Plumpp has abandoned the blues. No.
The man has gone deeper. Through
the prism of his acute sense of where he came from and who he is, Plumpp has
made poetry an instrument of consciousness.
At the crossroad of blues and jazz, reading Plumpp’s poetry is an act of
metamorphosis, one poet talking to another in the university of a blues club.
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