performance and the poem 105tradition centred in a single stream of art and literature in the West
to a greater tradition that includes, sometimes as its central fact,
preliterate and oral cultures throughout the world’.^14 Rothenberg
adds that he views this adaptation as creating a sense of continuity
within human arts, and maintains that a ‘drive toward performance
goes back to our pre-human biological inheritance – that perform-
ance and culture, even language, precede the actual emergence of
the species: hence an ethnological continuity as well’.^15 This call to
an earlier tradition is made evident in ‘Ka’Ba’ in the appeal made
to create ‘sacred words’ and a need for magic: ‘we need the spells,
to raise up / return, destroy and create’ (p. 263 ). Nowhere possibly
is the intersection of a preliterate oral culture of performance and
music made more evident in Baraka’s poetry than his long poem
AM/TRAK ( 1979 ), written in memory of jazz musician John
Coltrane. Critic Meta DuEwa Jones contends that: ‘through the
arena of performance, a dimension of Baraka’s poetics emerges that
counters a one-dimensional interpretation of his poetry as appall-
ingly fl attened by his political motivations.’^16 Baraka borrows from
the idioms of jazz performance and – as Jones contends – the poet’s
use of anaphora and repetition indicates that ‘a jazz aesthetic struc-
turally infl uences the poem’s form.’^17 The ethnomusicologist Ingrid
Monson suggests that in a jazz performance ‘an exchange will begin
with the repetition of a particular musical passage or a response
with a complimentary musical interjection’.^18 This sense of call
and response, constant syncopation and transition, is exhibited in
Baraka’s poem as an ongoing imaginary dialogue with Coltrane –
poetic form is adapted to transcribe jazz sounds. The poet himself
states that ‘the recent concern in the West for the found object and
chance composition is an attempt to get closer to the non-Western
concept of natural expression of an Art object.’^19
The opening of AM/TRAK with its emphatic vocals ‘Trane. /
Trane / History Love Scream, Oh / Trane, Oh’ (p. 267 ) plays on
the title’s use of the name for the US rail network, which it then
proceeds to phonically link with Coltrane. This implied linkage
creates a hurtling movement through the poem where syncopation,
or contradictions of rhythms in the lines, are asserted throughout
the work. Set against the Newark race riots of 1967 and Baraka’s
own imprisonment for resisting arrest in possession of an illegal