A Way of No Way: Toward Constructing a
Black Male Poetic

       Throughout the 90’s, my grandfather owned a small neighborhood bar outside Philadelphia, in South Jersey, which I managed with the help of other members of my family. We operated the bar as a jazz club. I was an occasional undergraduate with designs on becoming a poet. I watched, befriended and paid the musicians night after night, and I endured their gibes, though good-natured and, I believe, underlined with encouragement. The older musicians joked that poetry—the study, as opposed to the practice, of it—was an effete preoccupation for a young man surrounded by the vices of a jazz club. If pressed, I have no doubt they would have praised the possession of literary knowledge, but there was an attitude that acquiring it was not something black men did publicly.

       Citing the groundbreaking accomplishments of Phyllis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rita Dove, in “Masters and Master Works,” Afaa Weaver asks, “in a poetic tradition...distinguished by the achievements made first by black women, what is a black male poetic?” I take for granted that unconscious racial fears of black masculinity have contributed to the institutional favor enjoyed by black female poets and historically limited the access of black male poets to literary influence. And the conciliatory racial ambivalence of some male figures who did reach such prominence as Dunbar, who once claimed to be “a black white man,” and McKay, who strategically resisted association with Harlem literati during the Renaissance, testifies to the relationship with identity a black male poet risks in the bargain for a mainstream audience.

       Although the Black Arts Movement cast a pantheon of masculine figures, persistent critical inattention to these figures distracts impressionable undergraduates from studying the movement’s craft and denies potential poets access to this range of models at critical stages in their development. In a culture where public black masculinity is skewed toward the carnivalesque, and where its expression of interiority is qualified by its measure of acquiescence, the musicians’ signifying on my literary ambitions at my grandfather’s club, because they made such issue of it, revealed to me more their sympathies than any disapproval.

       The solution to constructing a viable masculine literary self I have been courting is to imagine an interior world informed by the example of jazz musicians. Thus, I’ve been trying to conceptualize and articulate an aesthetics of improvisation as I found it influencing my writing at my grandfather’s club. I begin, as always, toying with nomenclature. “Counter-rational aesthetic” won’t work to describe improvisation because it foregrounds a reactionary attitude. “Anti-rational”? No. Improvisation as an “a-rational aesthetic,” then. The term a-rational might avoid some of the pitfalls I’ve experienced in previous attempts to conceptualize the process. I am intentionally avoiding use of the term irrational because in talking about improvisation, even when we are celebrating it, we often drag in negative connotations of the term, or worse, sentimentalize it.

       Historically, the practice of improvisation has been viewed with ambivalence in American culture. This more than arguably results from racial stereotypes associated with African Americans. Improvisation tends to carry with it connotations of lacking discipline, of lacking the work ethic to learn how something is supposed to be done. To avoid repairing something the proper way, for example, is, in popular terms, to “nigger-rig” it. Even after the Second World War, when the mainstream began to attempt to appropriate and thereby legitimize improvisation, it was done in a way that falls short of capturing the richness of character I witnessed in my grandfather’s club. After WWII, practitioners of mainstream culture began to recognize the power of improvisation to express social and political dissatisfaction, its power to express dissidence. The counter culture of American youth, specifically, began to embrace the improvisational quality of black urban culture, and we find in evidence Mailer’s “White Negro”; we find the gestural improvisations of Abstract Expressionism; Beat literary improvisations a la “first word, best word”; the ad-lib experimentation of Lenny Bruce… But the form of improvisation that reached popular culture, in my view, was a misinterpretation. Unable or unwilling to look beyond clinical theories of free association; unable or unwilling to effect the second sight necessary to take on the subjectivity of the Other; unable or unwilling to apprehend the structures of improvisation as employed by the jazz musicians they idolized, these inheritors of the mainstream reinforced existing stereotypes to arrive at their ideal definition of man on the cultural margin. They promoted an overly simplistic and sentimental reading of improvisation as an aesthetic based merely on spontaneity, as if its guiding principle were merely to eschew pretensions toward perfection. As if, with mastery in abeyance, they could achieve the primitivist communion with pre-civilized nature they believed their heroes on the bandstand at the Five Spot achieved. For this reason, and because of the negative associations it would conjure, it would be neither productive nor accurate to think of improvisation as an “irrational” aesthetic.

       Interestingly enough, my search for representations of black male literary authenticity (admittedly a questionable project) leads me also to consider the anti-rhetorical projects of white women: those of Gertrude Stein, H.D., Laura Riding, Loraine Niedecker, and Lynn Hejinian, among others. So not only is my conception of improvisation not defined by race, but gender holds no key either. By a-rational, then, I mean to suggest that the aesthetics of improvisation constitutes in the ideal an epistemology that is, because of its being alienated, hyper-entropic and becomes decadent (I do not use the term pejoratively) to the point of being divested from the logic of cause and effect. I also realize the way I’ve put it may bear a resemblance to Surrealism. But Surrealism differs in that it represents an inversion, a series of calculated gestures that are nonetheless rational despite being designed to evade rational conclusions.
 
      There are two primary characteristics of improvisation I’d like to investigate: irreverence and disposition. For example, I first refer to the effect produced by Manet’s painting, “Olympia” (bear with me, here). One of the reasons this painting was so controversial in its time and cultural context is that its subject, a nude prostitute, disregards the established hierarchy between subject and object. She looks directly at the viewer (it would be a mistake to say she returns the viewer’s gaze); she looks directly at the viewer shamelessly self-possessed. She is irreverent. I see this gesture as cognate to Miles Davis’s turning his back on his audience because both gestures claim the power to assert their own subjectivity at the same time that they participate in the objectifying discourses of commodification. Neither is carrying out any program of social redemption or uplift. Neither acknowledges such a need. In 1867, Zola wrote about Manet: “he has not set himself the task of representing some abstract idea or some historical episode.” Following Zola’s assessment, I argue both the gestures of Olympia and Miles are almost purely aesthetic, decadent, and thus irreverent. The gestures don’t make sense. But neither are they irrational.

       As for the more abstract notion of disposition, the other model I look to is the folktale of Br’er Rabbit, in which I see an archetype of the impulse toward improvisation. In order to keep Br’er Rabbit from using his well, a farmer constructs a dummy made of tar. When Br’er Rabbit tries to use the well, he is confronted by the “Tar Baby” and, frustrated by its refusal to respond to his greetings, attacks the thing and becomes glued fast to it. The farmer finds Br’er Rabbit entwined with the Tar Baby and threatens to throw him into the briar patch. Br’er Rabbit tells the farmer, “Throw me in the river. Don’t throw me in the briar patch.” Now, if the farmer has threatened to throw Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch, unaware that this would only return Br’er Rabbit to his birthplace, why doesn’t Br’er Rabbit simply allow the farmer to do so? Furthermore, why does he suggest the river as an alternative? At this moment in the narrative, offhand, I can think of at least three rational responses that might produce the result Br’er Rabbit desires. But given any of these alternatives the performative moment would have been lost. “Throw me in the river.” It is not enough simply to achieve a desired end. Br’er Rabbit must demonstrate an almost reckless wit similar to a matador’s handling of a bull. Br’er Rabbit’s response circumvents all expectations of character motivation, but/ and it is purely aesthetic. The result is a complex of possibilities in which no game theory can obtain, in which the notion of results, let alone win or lose, is held in abeyance. Indeed, in a social context in which Cartesian logic is contrived to alienate the self as Other, where agency and subjectivity are denied, it is only with an a-rational disposition that one can imagine the possibility of agency and self-possession.

       In his book, “From Trickster to Badman,” John W. Roberts offers, “The trickster tales may not have offered patterns of behavior capable of annihilating real-life antagonists, but they did provide a conception of behaviors which prevented physical and cultural annihilation.” Discussing the practice of signifying, Henry Louis Gates argues, “The Afro-American rhetorical strategy of signifying is a rhetorical practice unengaged in information giving. Signifying turns on the play and chain of signifiers, and not on some supposedly transcendent signified.” I argue that improvisation is similarly unengaged in information giving and that neither have a specific cultural agenda other than the assertion of agency. But as a response to social conditions under which one can find no agreeable solutions to crises, improvisation provides the actor with an alternative epistemology that foregoes hierarchical notions of cause and effect and allows for the maintenance of a sense of self-possession. Improvisation provides the means, as Hurston says, of making “a way of no way.”