Understanding the New Black Poetry as “one of the
most inventive of contemporary poets.... [H]is
work is on the growing edge of the poetry/Jazz
synthesis” (388). Joans earned a degree in painting
from Indiana University in 1951. Moving to New
York to pursue studies at the New School for Social
Research, he became involved, like BOB KAUFMAN
and AMIRI BARAKA (LeRoi Jones) with the Green-
wich Village beat movement and its founders Jack
Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, although he remains
the least known of the group.
His well-known claim that “Jazz is my religion”
and “surrealism is my point of view” is readily con-
firmed in his more than 35 books of poems, pub-
lished mostly by small American and European
presses. The most recent ones include drawings
by his wife, Laura Corsiglia. His collected work
includes Beat Poems (1957), Funky Jazz Poems,
Beat (1961), All of Ted Joans (1961), The Hipsters
(1961), The Truth (1970), Afrodisia: New Poems
by Ted Jones (1970), Double Trouble (1992), Black
Pow Wow: Jazz Poems (1969), A Black Pow Wow of
Jazz Poem (1974), Okapi Passion (1999), Teduca-
tion: Selected Poems 1949–1999 (1999), and Our
Thang: Selected Poems by Ted Joans with Drawings
by Laura Corsiglia (2001). Associating himself with
Baraka and the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, his richly
surrealistic, jazz-driven poems are often national-
istic, offering social and political critiques of what
it means to be black in white America, but they are
also filled with humor, wit, sensuality (he is pic-
tured in the nude on the back of Afrodisia), cre-
ative wordplay (evident in the spelling of his last
name, “Joans” for Jones), and a jazzlike, improvi-
sational sensibility.
He explained that he “developed a method of
reading his pomes [sic] that was similar to the
way [he] blew trumpet.” Joans is most interested
in validating with his work the role of the poet as
speaker of the truth, as he does in “The Truth”:
If you should see
a man walking
down a crowded street
talking aloud
to himself
don’t runin the opposite direction
but run toward him
for he is a POET!... You have NOTHING to fear
from the poet
but the TRUTH. (Black Pow Wow, 1)
It is not surprising that he would identify and
celebrate MALCOLM X in his poem “MY ACE OF
SPADES” as a truth teller: “Malcolm X freed me
and frightened you / Malcolm X told it like it damn
shor is! / He said I gotta fight to be really FREE /
Malcolm X told both of us / the truth, now didn’t
he?” Thus, although a beat poet, Joans also placed
himself firmly in the philosophical camp of the
Black Arts Movement and its artists who empha-
sized the revolutionary and functional character of
art, as in “LETS GET VIOLENT”:LETS GET... VIOLENT... AND... ATTACH THE
WHITESASH
.. .ICING CAKED...
ON OUR BLACK MINDS
... LETS GET SO VIOLENT
... THAT WE LEAVE that white way
of thinking
... IN THE TOILET BENEATH OUR...
BLACK BEHINDS...
LETS/ GET VIOLENT! (Black Pow Wow,
13)
Black music, particularly jazz and BLUES, remain
for Joans the embodiment of life, in fact, as the
speaker says in “JAZZ ANATOMY”: “... and my
souls is where the music lies” (Afrodisia, 131). His
signature poem, “JAZZ IS MY RELIGION,” begins
with this mantra: “JAZZ is my religion... and it
alone do I dig... the jazz clubs are my houses of
worship,” where jazz greats preside:I know and feel the message [jazz] brings
like Reverend Dizzy Gillespie
Brother... Bird and Basie
Uncle Armstrong
Minister Monk
and Deacon Miles Davis276 Joans, Ted