performance and the poem 107noted that his own compulsion towards a jazz poetic is the inscrip-
tion of history within the performance of the work. He states: ‘Jazz
incorporates blues – not just as a specifi c form, but as a cultural
insistence, a feeling matrix, a tonal memory. Blues is the national
consciousness of jazz – its truthfulness’, and adds that ‘Just as
blues is, on one level, a verse form, so Black poetry begins as music
running into words.’^21 Key to Baraka’s collaboration of sound with
form is the desire to represent cultural memory through anaphoric
and iterative constructions.
DUB POETRY AND ITS DESCENDANTS: MUTABARUKA,
LINTON KWESI JOHNSON AND BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Baraka’s interest in establishing a jazz poetic as the central tenet to
his writing is mirrored by other contemporary poets’ relationships
to music, and its impact for the performance of poetry. Already we
have considered how performance is inscribed in ideas of spoken
word, and the rhetorical possibilities of addressing an audience.
For Jamaican-born poets such as Mutabaruka and Linton Kwesi
Johnson, reggae music in the seventies offered an alternative tra-
dition to directly express and engage with an audience. Initially
responding to the improvised commentary and narration by sound
DJs speaking aloud over instrumental reggae records (an impro-
vised rapping called ‘toasting’), both Mutabaruka and Johnson’s
work is classifi ed as dub poetry or dub lyricism. The term, coined
by Johnson, appeared initially in two articles published by the poet:
‘Jamaican Rebel Music’ in Race and Class and a review in New
Musical Express 1976. Dub poetry initially covered the perform-
ance of poetry over musical performance and a strong reggae beat.
In an interview Johnson states that dub poetry arose from a need to
fi nd viable tradition in his Jamaican culture:
When I began to write, I had no poetic models to draw from
because I wasn’t much into poetry at school... From the
moment I began to write in the Jamaican language music
entered the poetry. There was always a beat, or a bass line
going on in the back of my head with the words.^22