The following is excerpted from Margaret Busby’s introduction to Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez.
Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez emanates passion, rhythm, musicality, energy, authenticity, and surrealism. It could hardly be otherwise. From her earliest engagement with creativity, such were the dynamic hallmarks of her work as a poet, performer and activist. Indeed, the multi-faceted career of Jayne Cortez, spanning more than half a century, encompassed an ever-expanding inventiveness, shaped from the start by vibrant childhood experiences.
This volume offers readers the unique opportunity to reappraise her work, highlighting how critical her melding of poetry, jazz, and politics remains in the present day. Jayne Cortez set an example of how to champion independent cultural production, whether recording or publishing, always with community at the heart, tirelessly serving to support and encourage others.
Jayne Cortez’s death on December 28, 2012, prompted an outpouring of appreciation for her life and her poetry. Writing for the New York Times, Margalit Fox praised her work’s “visceral power, its political outrage and above all its sheer, propulsive musicality,” saying it “was beyond category by virtue of embodying so many categories simultaneously: written verse, African and African-American oral tradition, the discourse of political protest, and jazz and blues. Meant for the ear even more than for the eye, her words combine a hurtling immediacy with an incantatory orality.”
In an obituary I wrote for The Guardian, I quoted Jayne’s unambiguous understanding of her craft: “Words are musical—there’s nothing more to say about it. That’s it . . . there is the sound of the voice . . . and your attitude you put on top of it.” The conviction with which she imbued her work revealed her as a passionate cultural activist, both on page and stage, transforming elements of her personal history and that of the African diaspora into cutting-edge blues poetry. As Maya Angelou had recognized upon the publication of Coagulations, “No ravine is too perilous, no abyss too threatening for Jayne Cortez.”
In her music, as in her poetry, she spoke compellingly of social and environmental issues in a global context, fought injustice wherever she found it manifested, was in the frontline struggle for racial and gender equality, and celebrated the all-pervading power of music. Her band The Firespitters—featuring Denardo Coleman on drums, of whom Jayne said, “he is bold, knows no boundaries, and spits in all directions,” alongside reed player T.K. Blue, saxophonist Alex Harding, guitarist Bern Nix, bassist Al MacDowell—provided a jazz-funk-blues response to her often mantric delivery.
Something of what she stood for is embodied in the closing lines of her poem “There It Is:”
And if we don’t fight
if we don’t resist
if we don’t organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression forever and ever and ever
And there it is
Gathered within these pages are not only countless iconic poems, linguistic joy, and wisdom aplenty, but above all a timeless reminder of the principled and uplifting spirit that is the legacy of Jayne Cortez.
Accra, Ghana/London, UK January 2024