JAYNE CORTEZJayne Cortez (May 10, 1936 - December 28, 2012) was a poet, and performance artist. Cortez was born May 10, 1936 in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and grew up in California. She is the author of ten books of poems and performer of her poetry with music on nine recordings. Cortez has presented her work and ideas at universities, museums, and festivals in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, the Caribbean and the United States. Her poems have been translated into many languages and widely published in anthologies, journals and magazines, including Postmodern American Poetry, Daughters of Africa, Poems for the Millennium, Mother Jones, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology. She was organizer of "Slave Routes the Long Memory" and "Yari Yari Pamberi: Black Women Writer Dissecting Globalization", both conferences held at New York University. She is president of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, and appears on screen in the films Women In Jazz and Poetry in Motion. She married Ornette Coleman in 1954 and divorced him in 1964. She is the mother of jazz drummer Denardo Coleman. In 1976 she married sculptor Mel Edwards. She lived in Dakar, Senegal, and New York City where she died.
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WITH SCARIFICATIONS
I first met Jayne Cortez in 1973. We read together at Dingane’s Den located on 18th Street in Washington, D.C. She signed a copy of her chapbook Pisstained Stairs and The Monkey Man’s Wares and gave it to me. This was back in the day when a book was just $2.00. Cortez was one of the established writers at that time who were very supportive of my early work, the others were Eugene Redmond, Lance Jeffers, Haki Madhubuti, Stephen Henderson, Sterling A. Brown and Leon Damas.
What Cortez gave me was poetry ears. Maybe this is why I could listen to Ornette Coleman after listening to her. Cortez made me listen to the music (again). My favorite John Coltrane poem will always be “How Long Has Trane Been Gone.” But who will ever forget how she ended her poem
“Theodore” with that classic Cortez slap against consciousness:
Yes remember
the name was
T. Navarro
they called him
Fats for short
and his life
was snuffed by
inadequate people
whose minds was
Dry as chicken-shit-slime
Jayne Cortez had a fan club consisting of other writers. I’ll always associate her with Quincy Troupe. I suggest we honor Cortez by finding a copy of Yardbird Reader, Volume 5 that was published in 1976. Here one will find Charles Davis, Eugene B. Redmond, Stanley Crouch, Deborah A. Gilliam, Charles C. Thomas, Verta Mae Grosvenor, and Clyde Taylor writing about her. Troupe however is the first to give testimony. His words seem to resonate tonight as I think about Jayne Cortez:
Many times we recoil in horror from what we hear and feel in the poetry of Jayne Cortez; sometimes many of her poems make us want to weep, not for her, but for ourselves, our own transgressions, our own particular weaknesses, as well as the weaknesses of the world; then there are the poems that makes us angry, both at Ms. Cortez, for telling us a particularly, penetrating truth, and at ourselves for committing the acts that the poem is addressing itself to; but at no time in listening to and reading the poetry of Jayne Cortez, are we failed to be moved by the power of her impact.
I hope as we remember Jayne Cortez we also remember the men in her life. When I met her in 1973, I also met her partner Mel Edwards. One thing that should be celebrated more in the African American community are those “cultural love couples.” Edwards designed many of Cortez’s books that she released through her own Bola Press. He took her pictures. He was always there when she came to DC to give a reading. It was several years after 1973 that learned more about the stature of Edwards; he was that humble. It was Jayne Cortez who was always talking about Leon Damas and Christopher Okigbo. She was at the center of all those poets one finds in the landmark anthology Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings compiled and edited by Quincy Troupe & Rainer Schulte. Cortez’s life touched the entire black world. Too often only gravity or a life like Walter Rodney will accomplish this.
I hope we have not seen the last of the Firespitters. I kiss these words by Cortez one more time:
Ask me
Essence of Rose Solitude
chickadee from Arkansas that’s me
i sleep on cotton bones
cotton tails
and mellow myself in empty ballrooms
i’m no fly by night
look at my resume
i walk through the eyes of staring lizards
i throw my neck back to floorshow on bumping goat
skins
in front of my stage fright
i cover the hands of Duke who like Satchmo
like Nat (King) Cole will never die
because love they say
never dies
E-Note by E. Ethelbert Miller