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    Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems
    Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems
    Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems
    Ebook225 pages1 hour

    Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems

    By A. B. Spellman and Lauri Scheyer

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    A. B. Spellman is an acclaimed American poet, music critic, and arts administrator. He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural and literary movement that emphasized Black identity, pride, and artistic expression. Between the Night and Its Music brings together A. B. Spellman's early work with a collection of powerful new poems. Spellman's literary career took flight in 1965 with his debut poetry collection, The Beautiful Days, which introduced his distinctive voice blending elements of jazz, blues, and African oral traditions. In 1966, Four Lives in the Bebop Business established Spellman as a respected music critic and scholar. It was a groundbreaking work that chronicled the lives and struggles of four influential jazz musicians. Spellman held senior positions at the National Endowment for the Arts for thirty years with lasting impact on arts funding for inner cities and rural and tribal communities. In addition to poems from The Beautiful Days (1965) and Things I Must Have Known (2008), this book contains a trove of new and uncollected poems, confirming Spellman's continued centrality to contemporary American literature. This is an essential volume for readers already familiar with Spellman, and an excellent introduction for new readers. Lauri Scheyer's introduction situates Spellman's work within jazz writing, Black Arts, and American poetry broadly.

    [sample text]

    THE TWIST

    a dancer's world
    is walls, movement
    confined: music

    god's last breath.
    rhythm: the last beating
    of his heart. a dancer

    follows that sound, blind
    to its source, toward walls
    with others. she cannot dance alone

    she thinks of thought
    as windows, as ice around the dance
    can you break it? move

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2024
    ISBN9780819501202
    Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems
    Author

    A. B. Spellman

    ALFRED BENNETT (A. B.) SPELLMAN is both a founding member of the Black Arts Movement and one of the fathers of modern jazz criticism. Before beginning his thirty-year tenure at the National Endowment of the Arts, Spellman was an active poet, radio programmer, and essayist in New York, the poet-in-residence at the Morehouse College in Atlanta, and a visiting lecturer at Emory, Rutgers, and Harvard universities. He has also been a regular jazz commentator for National Public Radio and has published numerous books and articles on the arts, including The Beautiful Days, a chapbook of poems first published by the Poets Press in 1965, Four Lives in the Bebop Business, a classic in the field of jazz criticism that is now available as Four Jazz Lives, and the book of poems, Things I Must Have Known (2008). Poetry selections from Things I Must Have Known form the basis of the musical work, A Passion for Bach & Coltrane by Jeff Scott, whose work as a member of the Imani Winds ensemble is represented in the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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      Between the Night and Its Music - A. B. Spellman

      INTRODUCTION

      This book opens, as it should, with A. B. Spellman himself announcing his arrival into the world and explaining his childhood background:

      When Rosa Belle Bailey Spellman was due to deliver her first child, she moved into her mother’s house in the hamlet of Nixonton, on the outskirts of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. They had a good midwife there. And so, Alfred Bennett Spellman, Jr. was born probably on August 7th, 1935, but officially on August 12th. Family lore has it that the midwife suffered a mental breakdown the next day and failed to get the papers to the courthouse. Such birth day confusion is not unusual to people who were born in the South during that time. From the beginning, Rosa would call the child A. B. and the father Alfred so that there would be no confusion about who should answer.

      Two dominant factors describe Spellman’s early years: the Great Depression and Jim Crow. His parents were frugal strivers who devoutly believed that education was the route to social standing and economic security. They were the first in their families to finish high school. Alfred, Sr. was an untrained painter and as such was considered a community asset. People would bring their children to sit for portraits in a time when very few Black households owned cameras. Rosa, an avid reader, was the brains of the family; it was she to whom the teachers would turn when they needed a formal letter or a paper drafted. They, as teachers (Rosa would complete her degree when A. B. was in high school), knew better than anyone that the Jim Crow education that was available to their son was insufficient for his needs, and they created a community scandal by sending A. B. to a new Catholic elementary school in the 6th grade. The boy was a tireless reader who grew his mind in an environment where the sole bookstore sold few books of any literary value and there was no Black library, etc.

      Otherwise, his only youthful exposure to arts and culture came from radio broadcasts of the Jazzbo Collins Show that he could sometimes pick up from New York, and weekly broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera carried by a station in Norfolk, Virginia.

      Spellman attended Howard University as a political science major and earned his BA degree in 1956. Amiri Baraka (before 1965, known as LeRoi Jones) and Lucille Clifton were among his classmates and his professors included Owen Dodson (Drama), John Hope Franklin (History), and Arthur P. Davis and Sterling A. Brown (English). Never having traveled to the big city, Spellman arrived at Howard wearing an outfit he had spent the whole summer selecting: a wide-collar, powder-blue houndstooth jacket and pegged pants in the style of a zoot suit, only to encounter students whose fashion image was closer to Brooks Brothers. He soon met and became friends with Baraka/Jones, who was recollected by Spellman:

      He knew a great deal about jazz and used to rave about a high school tenor saxophonist who was his friend, Wayne Shorter. Though he was the leader of our group, at that time LeRoi did not exhibit the greatness that we celebrate him for today. I started seeing signs of an elevated mind in his correspondence from his time in the military. While in the Air Force, his letters became more serious than I had ever known him to be. He read hard books and had hard comments and questions about them. Finnegan’s Wake, for example, which I have never been able to get through. He had thoughts and questions about the state of the world that I had never heard from anyone, student or faculty. He was thinking and searching.

      Spellman thought Surely New Jersey must be the coolest place on earth if it produced people like Baraka/Jones. As a student at Howard, Spellman was mainly reading works of philosophy and took few courses in literature: I was reading Kierkegaard and Sartre and existentialists and was just dying to try it out on people. Spellman credits Dodson as his main influence as a professor. In his second year of college, Spellman joined the Howard Players and was cast in the starring role of He in He Who Gets Slapped (the play that was the basis for the 1924 silent film, which contributed to the stardom of Norma Shearer and Lon Chaney). After long philosophical arguments about how to interpret and present the title line (I am he who gets slapped), director Dodson threatened to replace Spellman with a Drama major, and the young actor quickly agreed to deliver the line as instructed. Spellman’s only creative writing class was taught by Dodson, who gave him the advice to write what you know, and Spellman has followed that dictum throughout his literary career.

      Spellman took one drama class with Sterling Brown, and the biggest regret of his college education is that he didn’t take full advantage of the opportunity to benefit from Brown’s knowledge, erudition, and charm, which he came to appreciate with further contact after he had graduated. He especially recalls the extraordinary stories Brown would tell, both folktales and entirely imaginary yarns that Brown called lies. Spellman particularly recalls one long visit to Brown’s house where he felt he truly got to know him for the first time. As Spellman puts it: Damn, I’m sorry that I didn’t make notes on that afternoon at his house (now two blocks from where I live). I recall only fragments of a whopper that he told that ended with, ‘and that’s when that German woman shot Du Bois in the ass with a .22 pistol.’

      According to Spellman, I was very interested in Sterling Brown’s interest in and use of the African American vernacular. I was impressed by the way that he adapted the toast, what are often called ‘jailhouse poems’ in the hood, Shine, Stack O’ Lee, The Signifying Monkey, etc., as models for some of his pieces, ‘The Ballad of Joe Meek,’ for example. He probably was the reason that I wrote ‘The Joel Blues.’

      The Joel Blues first appeared in issue 8 (1961) of The Floating Bear, was reprinted in Spellman’s 1965 collection The Beautiful Days, and is included in this book. Written for Joel Oppenheimer, this poem opens I know your door baby / better than I know my own … It’s been so long since I seen you / I feel like you done up & gone. Explicitly a blues poem, here we can see how Brown’s emphasis on African American folk materials, especially the musical traditions originating in spirituals and related forms, encouraged Spellman to incorporate Black popular music and references in his poetics. This pattern has extended throughout Spellman’s nearly 70-year career both as a poet and as a music critic. Thinking back to Brown’s influence, Spellman muses on 70-year-old memories from an 87-year-old man. As Spellman recollects, I believe that more of us looked to Brown than to any other of our antecedents in poetry as a model. When those of us who had begun our career (if poets can be said to have ‘careers’) with an art for art’s sake orientation and had to find a Black voice and attitude, Brown was essential.

      While Spellman stresses his regret at not taking better advantage of Brown when he was a student, he was able to absorb and decide to use Brown’s example in his later life more fully. Says Spellman, I was very impressed that Sterling Brown remembered me as a student twenty years later, even though I was very trifling in his class. That he was so caring, so accessible, so down-to-earth was a model for the kind of person I wanted to be. Also, that he had such a love for Black people as they are, and not as some intellectual like Du Bois wanted them to be, was inspirational, e.g., Du Bois thought that jazz was socially destructive.

      After graduating from Howard, Spellman thought of the examples of poets like William Carlos Williams, Archibald MacLeish, and Wallace Stevens, who had professional as well as literary careers, and decided he should go to law school, though he had no particular interest or aptitude. Ranked third in his class, he nonetheless was dropped from law school for lack of seriousness of purpose. During that time of finding his path, Spellman moved in for a few months with Baraka/Jones who first got him into jazz writing. As Spellman says, I’m still living off things he taught me then.

      Spellman moved to New York City in the summer of 1957 and became actively involved in the arts scene of Lower Manhattan. He describes himself at the time as largely an acolyte of Baraka/Jones, but then became more independent as he gained confidence and experience:

      I grew out of that status sometime in the mid-’60s. I followed him into jazz writing and, though I had been writing poetry since my sophomore year at Howard, I had to seriously raise my game to hang out with the people who attended his Friday night salons at his apartment in Chelsea. We’re talking Ginsberg, Creeley, Olson, Corso, Wieners, Oppenheimer, di Prima, Selby, Duncan, etc. & whoever else was in town. I had a lot of catching up to do. Can you imagine an argument between Creeley and Corso on structure?

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