Photo Credit: Marcia Wilson
Jayne Cortez -
“Womanist Warrior Poet”
Jayne Cortez (May 10, 1936 - December 28, 2012) was a poet, and performance artist. Cortez authored of eleven books of poetry and performer of her poems with music on nine recordings. Her voice is celebrated for its political, surrealistic, dynamic innovations in lyricism, and visceral sound. Cortez has presented her work and ideas at universities, museums, and festivals around the world. Her poems have been translated into many languages and widely published in anthologies, journals, and magazines. She is a recipient of several awards including: Arts International, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International African Festival Award. The Langston Hughes Medal, The American Book Award, and the Thelma McAndless Distinguished Professorship Award.
Her most recent books include THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK (Bola Press) and JAZZ FAN LOOKS BACK (Hanging Loose Press). Her latest CDs with the Firespitter Band are FIND YOUR OWN VOICE, BORDERS OF DISORDERLY TIME (Bola Press), TAKING THE BLUES BACK HOME, produced by Harmolodic and by Verve Records. Cortez is organizer of the international symposium "Slave Routes: Resistance, Abolition & Creative Progress" (NYU) and director of the film Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writers Dissecting Globalization. She is co-founder and president of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, Inc., and can be seen on screen in the films Women In Jazz and Poetry In Motion.
Cortez reads a selection of her award-winning work, which vividly
reflects the energy, passions, rhythms and tensions of modern urban life
from an African-American femininst perspective.
Series: "Artists on the
Cutting Edge" R RATING - language
Taking
the Blues Back Home (Audio CD)
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Audio CD (August 6, 1996)
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Polygram Records
"Excellent performance by the Jayne & her Firespitters with guitar ace Carl Weathersby providing a guest appearance."
Track Listings
On the
Imperial Highway: New and Selected Poems
Paperback: 131 pages
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press (February 23, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1931236909
ISBN-13: 978-1931236904
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
"Jayne Cortez's poems are filled with images that most of us are afraid to see." —Walter Mosley
New York poet Jayne "Cortez has been and continues to be an explorer, probing the valleys and chasms of human existence. No ravine is too perilous, no abyss too threatening for Jayne Cortez." —Maya Angelou
Jazz Fan
Looks Back
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Paperback: 115 pages
Publisher: Hanging Loose Press (October 23, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1931236097
ISBN-13: 978-1931236096
"Jayne Cortez understands better than most how to make spoken words and images swing and rock." —Gene Seymour, Newsweek
Somewhere
In Advance of Nowhere
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Paperback: 124 pages
Publisher: Serpent's Tail (May 1, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1852424222
ISBN-13: 978-1852424220
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.4 inches
Cortez writes verse that's fiercely frank and urban. These poems range from the overtly political, even didactic, to the streetwise sensuality of Cortez's better rhythmic, percussive efforts which, no less harsh and glaring, provide an unflinching glimpse at life's ugliness. Occasionally, this grim point of view produces a keen, if gritty, kind of insight, and hence a hopefulness arising from clarity, as in "Companera (Ana Mendieta)," in which Cortez writes of a sculptor friend, "a cyclone in blue tennis shoes/ a sequin dress machete," who was thrown out of a window by a drunk lover: "Why not say/ after the exit of two great drummers/ & in between the entrance of/ one monumental earthquake/ a huge volcano eruption/ & reappearance of the tail of Halley's comet/ We lost Ana/ but Ana did not leap/ because Ana knew/ Ana could not fly." Despite much loss, the speaker of these poems manages to survive. This resilience animates Cortez's work and supports the unwavering, and compelling directness with which she confronts the world.
Coagulations: New and Selected Poems
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Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Pr (May 1984)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0938410202
ISBN-13: 978-0938410201
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
Poetry
In fact
poetry
will not
strike
lightning
through
any
convoy of chickens
Today poems are like flags
flying on liquor store roof
poems are like baboons
waiting to be fed by tourists
& does it matter
how many metaphors
reach out to you
when the sun
goes down like
a stuffed bird in
tropical forest
of your solitude
In fact
poetry
will not
sing jazz
through
constricted mouth
of an anteater
no matter how many
symbols survive
to see the moon
dying in saw dust
of your toenail
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