The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spo

This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz´s influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary sponken word poetry. Through attention to cadence, rhythm, and structure, The Muse is Music fills a gap in literary scholarship by attending to issues fo gender in jazz and poetry and by analyzing recordings of poets both with and without musical accompaniment.
Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights the interesections of race, gender, and sexuality withing the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. Jones also incorporates a finely honed discussion of the Black Arts Movement, the poetry-jazz fusion of the late 1950s, slam and spoken word performance milieus such as Def Poetry Jam, and other contemporary venues for black writing such as the Dark Room Collective and the Cave Canem Foundation.