LOW-COUP POEMS IN FIVE BOOKS BY and ON AMIRI BARAKA
Reading by Rev. Dr. T. C Marshall
The low-coup poems in these publications:
Funk Lore by Amiri Baraka, Ed. Paul Vangelisti
(Littoral, LA, 1996)
Un Poco Low Coup by Amiri Baraka
(Ishmael Reed Pub., Berkeley, 2004, reproduced online at Terebess Asia Online)
The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader, Ed. William J. Harris
(Thunder’s Mouth Press, NY, 1991. 2nd Printing 1995)
Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones
(William Morrow, NY, 1979)
SOS: Poems 1961-2013, Selected by Paul Vangelisti
(Grove,, New York, 2014).
Laughs Last: Bakhtin and Baraka’s “low-coup” Poems
In a big backyard in Oakland one Sunday, a healthy crowd gathered to support local arts. One non-local there was visiting from Newark, and he was part of the draw. Amiri Baraka, the teacher and poet and righteous rouser, was chatting with Oakland residents about their work in the arts as we listened to and watched locals present their efforts. Encouragement was the word of the day, and to have some from one of the Black diaspora’s most energetic and emphatic arts and political organizers was really something.
Amiri Baraka was a teacher with a focus on society, an imam with a bent more political than simply spiritual, a tireless worker because he never stepped out of his role. That day in Oakland, I saw him take this role to new levels by “stepping down” from being the featured speaker brought in from Newark to being a promoter of the local artists who were raising funds for an art center that day. He put the focus on them in addressing the assembled artists and arts supporters present and in the conversations he had around the yard with all kinds of folks. He wanted to know what you were doing for the arts so that he could help you do it. Of course, it was Black Arts mostly—with equal emphasis on both terms. Baraka was on home turf that day though 3000 miles from Jersey, and he had fun among Black activist artists as he showed them how heavy thinking could have a light heart while making its sharp points.
I’m pretty sure it was on that day, or maybe it was down at Cowell College at UC Santa Cruz around that same time, that I heard Baraka read or recite a few of his “low coups.” He explained the form simply as Afro-American, like haiku is Japanese (SOS 348). These poems had a way of coming across at first like a stand-up joke, but they actually were often perfect examples for reading critically because they were based in dialectical analysis. Audiences tended to love them, but they had more of the poems’ meanings develop upon further reflection as they read them in the chapbooks the teacher sold at readings or in Funk Lore or eventually in SOS: Poems 1961-2013.
I’d like to offer a little further help with those poems and with poems in general by applying a simple version of a theory called “Dialogism” put forward by Mikhail Bakhtin in the early 20th century. Bakhtin was a Marxist who, like so many over the decades, worked to correct a misinterpretation; he made the concept of social determination flow both ways instead of just top down. He showed us how anything expressed can be seen as having been ordained or limited by the socio-economic and ideological background AND how any work speaks to these factors in a kind of dialog. The name “Dialogism” has confused many folks into focusing on the use of dialogue within creative written works. The theory, though, extends to all expression—artistic and otherwise.
Mikhail Bakhtin himself worked from the idea that any “word is a two-sided act, determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee.” The audience represents the larger social picture as each of us carries the ideological sphere with us. “Each and every word expresses the ‘one’ in relation to the ‘other’. … A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor …” (Volosinov qtd in Bakhtin Reader 58).
This focus on dialog expands to “a broader sense” of “verbal communication” in this analysis, and even further in the full concept of Dialogism to include “the boundless sea of inner speech” and its “extraverbal” elements that help form the “sociological phenomenon” of expression and understanding (60). How this involves further “extraverbal” elements is explained by the larger picture of Dialogism.
Understanding of utterances, like the basis of them in “inner speech,” depends upon the frameworks that they ineluctably bring forward. These include the socio-economic base, the ideological structures, the Historical moments engaging them (present and past), as well as the immediate environment. Each of these forces influences what is expressed and how. Bakhtin acknowledges this, but by putting it in dialog with any expression he takes away the idea of simple determinism. It is this doubleness that Dialogism exposes and all Art uses to makes its points. It emphasizes the concrete and its contexts, whether in words or in other meaningful forms. This structure “refracts the reflections and refractions of other ideological spheres, … the whole of the ideological horizon of which it is itself a part” (128).
Dialogism incorporates Bakhtin’s concept of “Heteroglossia,” insisting upon contexts as the key to meanings brought out by viewing material from both high and low vantages. The fresh element in Dialogism is a structure that allows influence to flow both ways: from the determining conditions of the social background and speaking to those—though they may be forces “impossible to recoup.” In the Glossary to The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin’s editors boil down this concept of “the heteroglot” that is not resolvable into one simple influence:
The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. (428)
In their entry on “Dialogism,” this structure is re-emphasized:
Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic imperative … insures that there can be no actual monologue. (426)
Pam Morris, editing The Bakhtin Reader and looking at a book on Lit Crit that Bakhtin wrote with P.N. Medvedev puts it like this:
In the most immediate sense, any particular literary work will be directly dependent on the literary environment of a given epoch and social group.
But in turn that literary environment will be determined by the larger ideological environment of which it is a part, and the totality of the ideological environment is equally determined by the socio-economic environment. Literary history will be adequate only if it proceeds from an understanding of that complex system of reversible interconnections and mutual influences. (123-124).
So, the idea is that there is a background environment of socio-economic relations and ideology behind or within any work, which has a determining influence but may also be put into dialogue by the work. This is Bakhtin’s clever basic move to avoid simplistic social determinism by opening those “reversible interconnections and mutual influences.” You don’t need the fancy language to know that this is how writing gets its meanings. I’m sure Baraka could take that language or leave it. Mostly, he seems to have enjoyed putting it into action, and its action is very visible in the low-coup poems.
I’d like to read our way through one of those “low-coup” poems as an example of this approach to finding meanings. Baraka used it in a variety of ways over the decades, aware or not of its origins or its temporary popularity in the academies. Does this show how hip he was to the underlying concepts in Marxist literary criticism and what he liked to call “Marxist-Leninist-MaoTseTung-thought”? Not necessarily. He may have read Bakhtin, or maybe not, but Dialogism showed up in Baraka’s thought through his attention to social dialectics—how things influence each other through contradiction and negation.
This poem teaches by flipping the script. Its effect comes from what it says to the standard social script. That, in turn, comes from the dialog that Bakhtin recognized between the “environments” at the local and personal level all the way back through the socio-economic base as their broadest fundament and background. The interplay between these frameworks is where the artist’s effect really shows up through assertions or negations that speak to the standard ideological structures and thoughts. This is basic Dialogism.
These poems appeared with illustrations in some contexts, sometimes b&w and sometimes color, and sometimes just as lines of words. The one we’ll look at appeared without the painting and with “Buddha Asked Monk” as the title when it was collected into a book. I will reproduce the earlier fullest version of this one, with a color drawing that also presents its words in both handwriting and all-caps type. Using illustration multiplies possibilities for the poem’s meaning here. The wordplay already doubles some things, and references to standardized thinking deepen those doublings critically. This little poem packs in a lot of serious thinking along with laughter. The poem plays on a tricky question, as so often in Buddhist anecdotes, and has “Monk” answering it with one even trickier yet.
Here is the poem, sometimes printed with the first two lines as a title:
BUDDHA
ASKED MONK,
“IF YOU WERE
ALWAYS RIGHT…
WOULD IT BE EASIER
OR MORE DIFFICULT
LIVING IN THE WORLD?”
“I KNEW YOU’D ASK THAT!”
SAID MONK, BLUE
AND INVISIBLE.
And here is the full version from a reproduction at Terebess Asia Online (TAO):
Not “the Monk” but “Monk,” this is not a lower-order Buddhist (or an autistic tv detective) but Thelonious, jazzman supreme. The illustration shows this clearly enough, but the poem uses both senses of “monk” to make its meanings. It does so in a both/and way instead of either/or. This is the first of the ways that it plays out an implied dialog with standard understandings and expectations, by reversing hierarchical oppositions and creating new blends: “Buddha / asked Monk…”. There are a few Monk poems in SOS: Poems 1961-2013 that play on the name, but none that so sharply play down the Buddha’s authority.
“If you were / always right,” Monk is asked. That’s a dig at the Buddhists and anyone else who likes to think they have the answers without socio-historical analysis. It is more than ironic to have the Buddha ask his question with this set up. And the question itself is “would it be easier / or more difficult / living in the world?” As far as I can tell, easier or more difficult is not what it’s all about at all. Though, again, this may be a dig at the Buddhists and their many versions of avoiding the suffering that the Buddha himself called inevitable. It also sets up Thelonious’ answer.
The answer he gives is the non-answer, “I knew you’d ask that.” This flips the story right there within the story, Monk taking the upper hand of knowing. And making fun of know-it-all-isms, while putting the Buddha in his place. This poem is all ideas so far, interplay of concepts and expectations, but at the end it adds imagery to support its main figure (this monk who is Monk). He is said to be “blue / and invisible.” The conundrum here is that it would seem that to have color is to be visible in some way at least. For Monk to be blue, well, that’s all too true in too many ways to tell: down, downtrodden, downright speaking out, or simply playing a tune like his “Blue Monk,” the most-recorded of the many Monk compositions. But “invisible,” that goes further, maybe even putting the gist of the poem in a word. Monk, one of the great American artists of all time, was and is put among the unseen elements of our culture. A Black man, an artist, a convicted drug-user, a whacko, a genius, most obviously “seen” in a number of ways, he was made un-see-able for some by the cultural and socio-economic frameworks of his time. The poem speaks to those through the last phrase, “blue / and invisible.”
To get this, you need the dialog between those times and this poem in its time. By following poetry’s dictum to “show; don’t just tell,” Baraka moves to a slightly vague but suggestive imagery that echoes hugely off of the ideological environments of his time and ours—as well as that of the historically very real Thelonious Monk. One part of the larger picture here is that Monk played his music with occasional tongue-in-cheek humor, turning a tune with hesitation—as in thinking something over. Even original compositions, not quoting from the songbook, may quote from expected song forms like the blues—as in “Blue Monk.”
“Blue / and invisible” could be merely a “poetic” way of edging the poem out to its end with a mood or an atmosphere. But if we take into account those aspects by which the poem reaches out to history and to the social environments surrounding the poem’s elements, the words become more than just ethereal evocation of the star performer. They become ways of amplifying echoes of the socio-economic, ideological, and literary settings from which they come. Why is the blues called the “blues”? Some say the devils did it, that the blue devils seen in tremens gave their electric lightning color to name the feeling. That feeling of alienation and depression is given a personal basis in laments about particular situations, but it ties back directly from de-pression to op-pression when race and class come into consideration. The form of the blues also includes a twist, especially in its 12-bar shape, on an image or idea stated twice and then given a turn in a third line to each verse. The turn from “blue” to “invisible” here reminds us of that. The aesthetic moody reading loses all that social history. Analytic reading, critical thinking, works dialogistically with what’s out there already and what this poem would put out there in contrast or variation or even correction. This is what Bakhtin wanted us to not miss. This is what so much in Baraka depends upon.
This poem bounces off of several prejudices:
The Buddha being higher than the monk;
The idea that being right all the time is the goal, or even possible;
------------------ having things easier-----------------------------------------;
The idea that “living in the world” is the test;
The idea that foreknowledge is wisdom;
The idea being blue is personal only;
The idea that what’s invisible is not real;
And the idea that wisdom circulates among genius souls.
Each of these draws in dialogues with social standards, ideological concepts and images, and literary forms. The term “low-coup” is a punning on “haiku” and the form is a practice that strikes “low blows” at prejudices of all kinds. In this poem, each of those on the list above is contradicted simply and subtly to bring out the dialog that Bakhtin found essential to meaning-making. A reading that analyzes the contrasts and contradictions involved raises all of this into fuller consideration and consciousness.
The Buddha here is NOT ranked above Monk; his asking wisdom from the composer is one sign of that.
Being right all the time is probably NOT possible, though many in Baraka’s day and even among his colleagues seemed to think the Buddha’s way would get you there.
Monk’s ambivalent NON-answer steps away from claims to rightness and from binary choices about it as a measure or test.
Monk’s claim to foreknowledge mocks it and the whole question of ethereal wisdom by NOT answering.
Monk’s blues has a history way beyond him, and he knows it as what is NOT seen when you look myopically at him alone.
This invisibility, again an ethereal quality that has actual material reality, is historical—maybe even the essence of History in terms of its erasures: what some do NOT see when we look at so-called history.
And these two mythical figures do NOT solve our problems and challenges no matter which mudra their hands shape.
Baraka’s very serious poetry, like “Leadbelly Gives an Autograph” (Reader 213-214) or “A New Reality is Better than a New Movie” (254-255), uses the same technique to help us see through our times to the larger background. The very reference to Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter 1888-1949) in that title and nowhere else in the poem uses him and his life work to contextualize the thoughts in the piece. Its ending with an image to call out history is a fierce version of the dialogical technique.
(And what is history then? An old deaf lady)
burned to death
in South Carolina (214)
This reference to lynchings and murders in our national history of racism is blunt though not graphic in its imagery. It follows many broader statements in this poem, like
But it is rite that the world’s ills
erupt as our own. Right that we take
our own specific look into the shapely
blood of the heart. (213)
Such observations on history can be incisive, especially given specific imagery to evoke particular suffering. The wordplay that turns “right” to “rite” makes reference to the rituals of racism and the way they turn blaming into bloodsport. The overall tone of the poem is philosophical not “bluesy” as we might have been made to expect with Leadbelly speaking. The poem speaks of the “possibilities of music” to get the “fit you need, / the throes” and of the “delay of language,” of finding words and choosing to use them or not. This is called a “strength to be handled by giants” but it brings us to the mention of a father who “could not remember / to say” the right things and a grandfather “killed / for believing.” The speaker demands
Pay me off, savages.
Build me an equitable human assertion. (214)
This is noble language worthy of the composer/performer and all who have understood him, an “autograph” of his thinking. And then it comes to that “old deaf lady,” another figure that is both figural and very very real, hinging together a History of not hearing and that of lynchings.
We are not chuckling at Buddhists here. We are inside the struggle to handle language and music and History that isn’t listening or looking at all that is in it. The totality of this social and ideological background is the weight to be handled with giants’ strength and suffered in finding “an equitable human assertion.” Whether that is “Goodnight, Irene” or “The Midnight Special,” it rises within a totality that would like to skew it toward individual emotion in the aesthetic mode. Its assertion against that pull is what makes its dialog with this totality, its refusal to speak only for itself. Ledbetter is made in Baraka’s poem into a figure who contradicts the standard image of the blues singer. History is made to cough up stories it doesn’t want to tell. Music and language are given roles that incorporate expression beyond the personal. That “delay” of hesitation speaks out, itself, about the “possibilities of statement”—what can or can’t be said or expressed as told by the stories of the father and the grandfather. And the social community role of music and song is itself a figure of strength. All Leadbelly did was to “pick it up and cut / away what does not singularly express.” He did the writer’s work. He expressed what from the angle of his life exposed the totality he lived in by echoing off of its contradictions and occlusions. He is a figure for the Black Arts Artist before the fact.
This serious use of dialogism might seem to put the humorous uses back in their place, trivium to the quadrivium. However, as the professors like to say, however, if you look at humor and what makes it work (maybe with the help of Freud’s Der Witz), you’ll see that it comes from a dialog between a larger background and a contradictory particular: humor is a dialogism. The low-coup poems make this clearer than clear and sharp as the proverbial tack that pins up a picture of the usual suspects.
Is Baraka “always right”? No. Dialogism can also be analyzed in negative critique of some of Baraka’s efforts. “A Poem for Black Hearts,” his moving call at the murder of Malcolm, ends on a sour note:
let us never breathe a pure breath if
we fail, and white men call us faggots till the end of
the earth. (218)
That derogatory use of “faggots” joins insults elsewhere in Baraka’s work, and is probably the most gratuitous among them. If we take that flip term back to the ideological environment, we find that it is unfortunately actually a way of siding with the oppressive culture. A dialogical analysis shows that Baraka fails to contradict the dictating norm that would associate gayness with weakness. When we look at the dialog with the norm behind the “Leadbelly” poem or this Malcolm one (other than at that weak point), we can see that each poem contradicts the denigration of those men’s character by raising diction to the level of high praise-talk about them or thinking in them. It is this effort that brings the poems some of their strongest meaning. The poems speak to the falsifying standards and their self-contradiction in declaring equality but denying equity.
Baraka may never have read or thought about Bakhtin. The timing was right with the philosopher’s re-discovery in the Sixties, but the fit was not exact. The poet could easily be imagined tossing him aside by saying something like “Bactine—that means “Don’t fear the boo boo, baby!” He might make a punning joke of it like this to keep the focus on Black life as he did with Frank O’Hara and Franco Harris’ names on at least one occasion. He might let the cultural background suggest that fears and scrapes suffered by the people are more important than Russian linguistic philosophers. And he might be right. But he would not be caught dead seriously discussing how meaning is derived—without presenting some. And humor is exemplary in showing how meaning is generated. Contradiction of the self-contradictory is a set-up for serious understanding and laughter. These poems play across seriousness and humor both, going beyond mere irony into what the classical Greeks called “spoudaiogeloion”: serious laughter, making all these serious points while being funny.
The ideological background/environment says Buddha is holy and all-wise.
The poem says the Buddha needed to ask one Monk at least one question.
The ideological background/environment you can make life easier with wisdom.
The poem says this may not do the trick.
The ideological background/environment says wisdom > jazz.
The poem says this one jazzman may have a point.
The ideological background/environment says the blues is personal.
The poem says there may be something more to it.
The ideological background/environment says what you see is what you get.
The poem says some things & people have been invisiblized.
The ideological background/environment says what’s invisible can’t be seen.
The poem says look, look again.
It’s as though the poem talks to the background, correcting it or offering alternatives. This is the kind of dialogue happening all the time everywhere all at once. The ideological totality is brought forward by any utterance or act, immediately speaking in it and to it and with it. The new utterance makes that totality sense-able, and that totality provides the utterance or act with its way of making a difference in how we make sense of all this. Contrary and contradictory elements in ideologies are exposed as they undo themselves like old-time myths brought to the surface of the utterance’s moment by its challenges.
Monk has the last word, and the last laugh.
_______________
Bibliography
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov.
Ed. Pam Morris. Edward Arnold, London 1994.
---. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist.
UT Press, Austin 1981.
Baraka, Amiri. Funk Lore. Ed. Paul Vangelisti. Littoral, LA 1996.
---. Un Poco Low Coup. Ishmael Reed Pub., Berkeley 2004.
Reproduced online at Terebess Asia Online
https://terebess.hu/english/haiku/baraka.html
---. The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. Thunder’s Mouth Press, NY
1991. 2nd Printing 1995.
---. Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones. William Morrow, NY 1979.
---. SOS: Poems 1961-2013. Selected by Paul Vangelisti. Grove, NY 2014.
Freud, Sigmund. Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten / The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Trans. Joyce Crick. Penguin, NY 2003.
Volosinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 1973.
*****
Rev. Dr. T. C Marshall is retired from community college English teaching. He now works as a critic, poet, performance artist, literary scholar, Alzheimer's caregiver, and fritillary farmer in San Diego. This piece is from one of his big projects—Serious Laughter: Roots of Critical Thinking.
Comments
Post a Comment