Jayne Cortez

Poet

• Born: May 10, 1936
• Birthplace: Fort Huachuca, Arizona
• Died: December 28, 2012

Cortez is known for innovations in jazz poetry. Her surrealist imagery coupled with the musicality of her language resounded with audiences all over the world.

Early Life

Jayne Cortez was born on May 10, 1936, at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where her father was serving in the military. Cortez was the middle child of the family’s three children. During elementary school, Cortez was exposed to a variety of cultures. In Arizona, she also experienced segregation: Cortez and her African American and Native American classmates were educated in a one-room schoolhouse, while white children attended separate schools. When she was seven years old, her family moved to San Diego, California. There she attended elementary school with Japanese students. Later, her family moved to Watts in South Central Los Angeles, where the educational atmosphere for Cortez changed substantially. She attended a mostly white junior high school, located just outside Watts, and she fought constantly in a racially charged environment. At times, she was called names by her white peers.

Cortez lived in a vibrant home adorned with the sounds of jazz greats, such as Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. Her love for music played an important role in the way in which she developed writing techniques. The rhythms and sounds within jazz served as a guide for constructing musical word patterns that would resound in the ears of listeners. Cortez not only listened to music but also learned to play a variety of instruments, including the bass, cello, and piano, at Manual Arts High School.

When she was fourteen years old, Cortez began writing. However, her framework for writing stretched beyond the scope of written words. Cortez’s work, so entrenched in the tradition of musicality, was embedded with African American oral traditions.

Life’s Work

In 1954, at age eighteen, Cortez married renowned jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Coleman is known for breaking new musical ground with motivic chain-associations. Their mutual love for jazz and art spurred their relationship. Two years into their marriage, they welcomed a baby boy, Denardo. Nevertheless, finances for the young family were strained.

In 1964, Cortez and Coleman divorced, possibly because of chronic financial problems. However, Cortez continued to advance her artistic career, and she cofounded the Watts Repertory Theatre, serving as the organization’s artistic director from 1964 through 1970. She also began performing her work with local musicians and ensembles. Though Cortez was a poet and musician, she worked different jobs to achieve financial stability. At times she was a worker in belt and shirt factories.

Cortez moved to New York in 1971, where jazz continued to play a fundamental role in her work and she performed her poetry and worked with musicians. Much of her work is grounded in the metaphysical oration of life experiences. Thus, her experiences as a factory worker served as a source of insight. This is evident in her first collection of poetry, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares, published in 1969, in which she exhibited a sense of interconnectedness with the working class. The acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni called Cortez a “genius” in a 1969 review of the collection that was published in The Negro Digest. The same year, Cortez presented her first major poetry reading in New York City in Harlem.

Cortez published her second collection of poems in 1971, titled Festivals and Funerals. This collection focused on the historical connections between African and African American art forms. Her pan-Africanist trajectory invoked a shared oppression as well as a shared lifeline between Africa and its diaspora. In 1973, she published her third book of poetry through her newly established publishing company, Bola Press.

In 1981, Cortez read a collection of her works, Firespitter, at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater. Performing with a jazz ensemble, Cortez gave a riveting performance that captivated onlookers. In 1982, she published Firespitter and became known as a surrealist because of its extensive verbal imagery. This work perhaps has shaped her public persona.

During the early 1980’s, Cortez formed a band called the Firespitters, which performed high-energy, rhythmically entrenched jazz to correspond with Cortez’s poetry. Her son, Denardo Coleman, who started playing the drums at six years of age, was the drummer in the Firespitters.

Cortez continued to self-publish her works, maintaining ownership and ensuring that the qualities of her work remained intact. She also self-recorded many poems with musical accompaniment. The first time she published with an outside publisher was in 1984, when Thunder’s Mouth Press published Coagulations: New and Selected Poems.

Cortez’s works invoke pan-African connections, jazz-inspired musicality, and unparalleled imagery. Her works include Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares, Festivals and Funerals, Scarifications (1973, 1978), Mouth on Paper (1977), Coagulations: New and Selected Poems, Poetic Magnetic (1992), Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1997), Jazz Fan Looks Back (2002), The Beautiful Book (2007), and On the Imperial Highway: New and Selected Poems (2009).

Cortez created many spoken-word and musical recordings with the Firespitters and other musicians, including Celebrations and Solitudes (1975), Unsubmissive Blues (1980), Maintain Control (1986), Everywhere Drums (1990), Cheerful and Optimistic (1994), Taking the Blues Back Home (1996), Borders of Time Disorderly (2003), and Poetry and Music (2010).

Cortez has been honored and recognized repeatedly for her literary merits. She received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1979, 1986), the American Book Award (1980), and the New York Foundation for the Arts award for poetry (1987, 1997). Cortez is also a cofounder of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, founded in 1991.

Significance

Cortez is an internationally acclaimed innovator in jazz poetry and a renowned “supersurrealist.” She became known for her African-inspired jazz, blues, staccato-styled poetry. Her work follows the tradition of African orature, invoking African gods and ancestors, addressing societal issues with the strength of a warrior voice, and utilizing the power of word.

Bibliography

Anderson, T. J., III. Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004. Anderson explores the surrealist, pan-Africanist, and Black Nationalist ideology at the core of Cortez’s poetic objectives.

Brown, K. “Poststructuralist Fallout, Scarification, and Blood Poems.” In Other Sisterhood: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color, edited by Sandra Kumamoto Stanley. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Brown provides an exploration of African American aesthetics and provides insight into the terminology and theory behind the title of Cortez’s collection of poems Scarifications.

Howe, F., ed. No More Masks: An Anthology of Twentieth Century American Women Poets. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. An anthology of poems by African American women, including those of Cortez, that focus on their life experiences and their self-empowerment.

Ryan, Jennifer. Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Provides an analysis of jazz poetry in the artistry of Cortez and four other African American women poets.

Smethurst, James Edward. The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Smethurst explores African American literature as a vehicle for expression and empowerment during the era of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.