Map of the Soothsayer: Reading “Here Where Coltrane Is”

Herman Beavers University of Pennsylvania

Map of the Soothsayer: Reading “Here Where Coltrane Is”

After you initiate the solo, one phrase determines what the next is going to be. From the first note that you hear, you are responding to what you’ve just played; you just said this

on your instrument, and now that’s a constant. What follows from that? And then the next phrase is a constant. What follows from that? And so on and so forth. And finally, let’s wrap it up so that everybody understands that that’s what you’re doing. Its like a language; you’retalking, you’re speaking, you’re responding to yourself. When I play its like having a conversation with myself.

--Max Roach

I believe that one of my strong points in writing poetry is my illusiveness

--Michael S. Harper

In his essay, “Ode to John Coltrane: A Jazz Musician’s

Influence on African American Culture,” critic Gerald Early

expresses curiosity regarding Coltrane’s importance to African

American poets. “The immediate question that arises,” he asks,

“is why this particular jazzman should have become such an

iconographic figure”(Early, 371). Recalling Eugene Redmond’s

description of Coltrane “as a ‘limitless [source] of inspiration’

for black poets in the 1960s and 1970s, and as a ‘major

influence’ on the current generation of poets,” Early notes that

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in this regard, Coltrane “exceeds even Charlie Parker as a

charismatic personality, who is written about or evoked as a

source of inspiration for many black writers since his death”

(371). Examining the volume of musical compositions produced in

honor of John Coltrane, Early concludes that part of the

musician’s appeal lies in its timing; his career bloomed in the

post-World War II era “as jazz became more of an art music”

reflecting the effort “to make [jazz] more creator-centered

rather than audience-centered, to make the creator’s urges and

inclinations of paramount importance—in short, to make it a high-

culture music” (374). Coltrane’s music, with its incorporation

of musical influences from Japan, China, and India, was also the

embodiment of an Afro-Asian aesthetic that was anticipated in

African American literature as early as 192?, the year W.E.B.

DuBois published his novel, Dark Princess. But Early concludes

that jazz “took on a political nature as it suggested or even

preached racial regeneration and group solidarity. The white

world was corrupt spiritually—racist, materialistic,

colonialistic, obsessed with machines—so blacks had to turn to

the East, turn to Africa, turn to their Edenic, natural roots,

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turn away from whites to generate their own spiritual purity”

(374). Hence, Early writes, Coltrane

became the patron saint of what was essentially a black

anti-intellectual movement…The quest for spiritual purity and

solidarity became a quest for orthodoxy and the reinvention

of alienation, a reaction to the ideology of integration or

assimilation, this time on the victim’s terms rather than the

perpetrator’s, but nonetheless real and, in its way, damaging.

(Early, 374)

But Early characterizes Coltrane as “a brilliant but limited and,

for some knowledgeable listeners like Whitney Balliett and Martin

Williams, highly flawed artist.” “He seemed,” Early observes,

“a rather dull man, certainly a shy and reticent one, who, after

he managed to throw off his addictions to alcohol and heroin in

1957 or thereabouts, seemed to do nothing but practice his

instruments when he was not playing in performance.” For Early,

Coltrane’s drive for perfection constituted an obsessiveness that

finally “does not suggest a very balanced or integrated

personality.”

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Early’s assessment is compelling, especially as an act of

locating Coltrane in the cultural history of the 1960s in

general, and the Black Arts Movement in particular. To be sure,

Early’s assessment of a number of poems about Coltrane is correct

in its sense that a number of them are heavily melodramatic, the

products of sensibilities that “mistake…value judgments about

jazz for critical assessments of it, and who see the emergence of

an authentic black art as contingent on the ‘weaker’ or

corrupting white form.’” But I want to take this moment to

insist that there is yet another way to contextualize the

musician’s impact, which has to do with how his music

participates in, serves as a catalyst for, the development of a

critique of the various forms of blindness and forgetfulness

plaguing the American body politic. It could be that what

Coltrane’s music occasioned was a way to challenge America’s

overreliance on mythic structures of feeling, in which American

exceptionalism was used to obscure the nation’s violations of

human freedom both on a geopolitical plane and an historical one.

The question, then, is not simply one of why Coltrane is so

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iconographic, but rather in what ways can his musical presence be

understood as cartographic or historiographic?

The answer may be available to us in Michael S. Harper’s

“Here Where Coltrane Is,” which can be found in his second volume

of poems, History is Your Own Heartbeat. Harper’s socially engaged

lyric presents readers with a form of labor that places

Coltrane’s music into conversation with the vagaries of racism

and colonialism. Harper uses Coltrane’s “Alabama” as a means to

depict what it is like to experience racism—and the relief from

racism that Coltrane’s music can bring—in the context of everyday

experience. The poem is at once a rumination on power and an

equally compelling reflection on the value of yielding oneself to

modalities of healing, no matter where they originate or how long

they persist.

Perhaps the first thing to remember upon encountering “Here

Where Coltrane Is,” is that it is a lyric poem. As such, it can

be said, as Mark Strand and Eavan Boland propose, to “manifest

musical properties,” in addition to having “a degree of emotional

intensity, or an urgency”; they “represent the shadowy, often

ephemeral motions of thought and feeling,” often working to “fix

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in language what is most elusive about our experience” (xxii).

For our purposes, we need to consider the kind of work that the

lyric, as Michael S. Harper utilizes it, is able to perform.

The lyric, as David Orr suggests, is a poetic mode that is

“employed in the causes of self-expression, feminism, and racial

and social equality”; a “device for making the invisible

visible,” but I would submit that for Harper, the lyric is like a

time machine, a way to sing across temporal and spatial

boundaries, creating a means by which to suture disparate moments

in time to ruminations about the act of history-making itself.

A Harper lyric poem is likewise a vehicle through which he

performs his duties as a U.S. citizen by forcing us to confront

the amnestic present. So that when Harper turns to the lyric, he

does so not simply to isolate one moment in time, but rather to

eschew the practice characteristic of American mythography in

which myth supplants history in a fog of forgetfulness. What

this means is that Harper’s lyricism as a poet, which he often

describes as his “phrasing,” has little to do with what happens

in a specific volume of poems. Rather, as Max Roach suggests in

the first epigraph, Harper is often in a conversation with

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himself that transcends textual boundaries. As I hope to

demonstrate, the ability to recognize when Harper is in dialogue

with himself, either by recapitulating ideas from earlier poems

or engaging in wholesale acts of re-conceptualizing, is key to

being able to navigate an individual poem. And “Here Where

Coltrane Is” is an excellent case study in the “Harper method”;

an opportunity to understand how one poet has attempted to

address the question of loss as we encounter moments of

acquisition.

Harper’s poem rewards the reader willing to persist in the

face of its various temporal, syntactical, and conceptual shifts.

The poem is akin to a jazz solo, with a chorus structure linked

together by two bridges. “Here Where Coltrane Is” is built around

seven intricately constructed choruses, which range from six

words and two lines to twenty-nine words spread over six lines

and two bridges that function as “joints” allowing the poem to

flex in multiple directions. Harper’s effort to manage how the

reader moves through the poem is difficult to miss. The poem

resists settling into a syntactical and rhetorical flow, which

begs the question as to why Harper went to such great lengths to

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communicate the poem’s complicated message through an act of such

self-conscious structuring. This is an especially engaging

question when we consider that the poem consists of five

sentences, some of which are models of poetic directness, others

which require extreme diligence on the part of the reader if they

are to avoid getting lost in the poem’s sudden syntactical

shifts, where the antecedent of a modifying phrase ceases to be

clear.

Consider, then, Harper’s opening gambit in the poem’s first

chorus, the “chord” upon which the remainder of the poem will

seek to build a viable and sustainable progression. It reads:

Soul and raceare private dominions,

Six words, played out over two lines. The opening line is a

compound subject, the words “soul” and “race”, sitting atop a

predicate phrase. At the time “Here Where Coltrane Is” appears,

“soul” and “race” are words fraught with substantial cultural and

historical baggage that issues from arbitrary systems of meaning.

Because they present the illusion of being fixed concepts, words

signaling rituals of public display, Harper’s opening would seem

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to have little to do with either Coltrane or jazz, playing the

role of conceptual scaffolding. Scanning lines one and two, we

find line one to be a cretic foot (two stressed syllables

enclosing an unstressed syllable) which reverses at the start of

line two to become an amphibrach foot (two unstressed syllables

enclosing a stressed syllable), and reverses back to a cretic

foot. Harper’s prosodic approach anticipates at the structural

level the chiasmus that will figure heavily into the poem’s

closing moments.

However, when we turn back to the poem’s site of egress,

the word “dominion” proposes that soul, a word whose meanings

range across a series of conceptual realms, from the metaphysical

to the commercial, is a “chord” structuring the songform of

empire. Likewise, race, is a word connoting social categories

based on skin color, verifiable in the visual field. Both words

achieve their most charged meaning within the context of power

relationships. And by “power relationships,” I do not mean to

limit my focus solely to power relationships arising out of

racial inequity, though “race” performs this kind of ideological

labor. Rather, Harper’s first two lines as the poem’s opening

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“attack,” propose that he wishes to situate these words at the

point where arbitrary conduct intersects with acts of social

design. This is a useful gesture for several reasons, perhaps

most important is that it forces the reader to quickly dispense

with the notion that what makes Coltrane’s horn distinctive,

memorable, is his display of racially essential characteristics.

Though it is certainly true that Coltrane produced a number of

recordings in which the word “soul” was used (need fn), Harper

seeks to challenge the assumption that a musician of Coltrane’s

talents, able to use such a wide range of techniques, was simply

the product of nature, a belief that finds its roots in the

racial stereotypes that link blackness to “natural” musicality

and rhythm. But in an ironic turn, the first two lines just as

quickly reinforce the sense that the private exercise of

authority lends credence to ethereal constructs that do cultural

work in the public sphere. The two words in line one signify

the ways that racial difference is synonymous with racial

hierarchy fixed in the public mind just as firmly as the notion

that humans reside at the apex of biological development.

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But it does not take much prodding at either “soul” or

“race,” to ascertain that Harper’s opening gambit is not only

social in its pronouncements, but also transhistorical. The so-

called Age of Discovery is nearly simultaneous to the African

Slave (or Triangle) Trade. Further, the requirement that

African bodies be transformed from the racial Other into a

commodity circulating through what Ian Baucom has called the

Atlantic Credit Accumulation Cycle, often pivoted on the notion

that enslavement was ultimately an effort to improve—to salvage—

the spiritual possibilities of Africans whose beliefs were

thought to be pagan. If enslavement was believed to be an act of

saving a soul, then the poem’s opening lines represent Harper

interrogating the roots of a tremendous financial endeavor—the

accumulation of private capital—that resulted in the inner lives

of West African captives being devalued in direct proportion to

their body travel westward on a slave ship headed to the New

World.

The notion of racial categories is, at least in part, a

product of this financial and colonial endeavor. Funded by the

Slave Trade, African bodies are the lubricant that will

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eventually allow the machines of the Industrial Revolution to

move with as little friction as possible. Hence, for Harper to

say that soul and race are “private dominions,” intimates that he

seeks to locate events chronicled in the poem in an historical

frame that does not ignore the ways language can be linked to the

economic philosophy that emerges when human beings placed in

bondage are rationalized on a grid of supply and demand whose

efficacy is concealed behind the altruistic project of spiritual

salvation.

But the reader must take heed to the fact that line two of

the poem is not end-stopped with a period, rather, it ends with a

comma, linking it to lines three and four:

memories and modal songs, a tenor blossoming,

Here, the structure in line three mimics line one’s yoking

together of concepts, but instead of the pairing of two social

constructs, the word “memories” is paired with “modal,” the word

used to describe the style of playing pioneered by Miles Davis

and Bill Evans just prior to the recording of the classic Kind of

Blue, a style which Coltrane incorporated into his playing and

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subsequently improved upon (Ratleff, 149). In an interview

with Nat Hentoff, Miles Davis described modal playing thus:

When you go this way, you can go on forever. You don’t have

to worry about changes

and you can do more with the line. It becomes a challenge

to see how melodically

inventive you can be. When you’re based on chords, you know

at the end of 32 bars

that the chords have run out and there’s nothing to do but

repeat what you’ve just

done—with variations. (Ratleff, p. 46)

For both Davis and Coltrane, modal playing generated a freedom of

expression (Ratleff, 149) that created a sound that was “ancient

and folklike,” and which rested on the use of the pentatonic

scale to sustain a static harmonic sense while superimposing

changes over it (150). Hence, the “tenor blossoming,” in line

four, has everything to do with that moment when Coltrane comes

into his own musically, a time when he discovers a way to bring a

nearly infinite amount of melodic ideas to bear on his solos as

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it also signals the end of his sojourn with Miles Davis.1 With

regard to the syntactical shift in lines three and four, we

should take note of the impression Harper leaves, that lines

three and four are meant to be modifying clauses, an

amplification of the constructs generated in lines one and two.

But in fact they turn out to work in service to the third chord

1 Coltrane arrived at modal playing in 1959; his “sheets of sound” period, which begins in approximately 1957, reaches its peak in September, 1958 and begins to transmute into modal playing not long after Coltrane returned to Davis’s sextet and the group began recording Kind of Blue. Ben Ratliff describes Coltrane’s “overall sound,” by observing “first how it feels in the ear and later how it feels in the memory, as mass and metaphor” (Ratleff, xi). Ratleff’s observation is suggestive ofthe thinking behind the placement of the two words on either sideof the word “and,” because it points to the fact that Coltrane’s memories of growing up in the South, with its very strictly enforced racial codes and the near-total circumscription of the black musical subject, while subordinate to his memories of arriving in the city of Philadelphia to begin his musical education, are nonetheless powerful influences. Further, it is meant to establish a conceptual counter-pull against the conceptsunderlying modal players’ shift from the convention of changing scales once a measure to staying on a scale for as long as sixteen measures, which is akin to extending the present beyond its usual parameters, all resulting from modal playing’s oscillation between the Dorian and Aeolian or Dorian and Phrygianmodes. Hence, Harper juxtaposes the persistence of unpleasant memories (and here, we might also consider Coltrane’s memories ofhis heroin addiction, which led to his being fired from Davis’s sextet) against the musical equivalent of holding the future at bay.

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progression in the poem, which runs from line five to nine. I

will attend to this relationship momentarily, but just now I want

to puzzle a bit further on why Harper would place “memories” and

“modal” together and break the line before the noun (“songs”) by

calling our attention back to the circumstance produced through

the private dominions of soul and race.

Readers of Harper’s poetry will remember that amnesia is a

key concept running through his poems seeking to confront the

contradictions inherent in the American body politic. According

to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders (DSM),

amnesia—or amnestic disorder—is the term used to describe what

are actually a group of disorders that “involve loss of memories,

loss of the ability to create new memories, or loss of the

ability to learn new information.” Because amnesia often results

in the aftermath of either physical or psychological trauma, it

serves as a useful trope in Harper’s oeuvre because it signifies

the trauma the American body politic inflicted upon itself

through its sponsorship of over two hundred years of slavery.

Moreover, when we consider amnesia’s symptoms, they clearly

suggest why amnesia has proven to be such a durable subject in

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Harper’s work. Along with the problem of recollection and short-

term memory, people suffering from amnesia “are often disoriented

with respect to time and space, which means they are unable to

tell an examiner where they are or what the day of the week is.

Most patients with disorders lack insight into their loss of

memory, which means that they will deny that there is anything

wrong with their memory despite evidence to the contrary.”2

In a 2000 interview with Harper, critic Michael Antonucci

asks if the poet’s “verse [offers] a critique of specific

traditions of American historiography,” and later asks the poet

to comment on the “engagements between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ in

Harper’s work. By way of answer, Harper relates, “What I strive

for is a unique blend of eloquence and original phrasing as

practiced by the best musicians, and equivalence of interior

speech and historical wakefulness as a person alive in a dynamic

reality.” Harper’s affirmative response is confirmed when we

harken back to “American History” which appears in Dear John, Dear

Coltrane, and reads:

2 Cf. the website for the Encylopedia of Mental Disorders (http://www.minddisorders.com/A-Br/Amnestic-disorders.html#b), which draws its commentary from the DSM-IV-TR, 4th edition.

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http://www.minddisorders.com/A-Br/Amnestic-disorders.html#b


Those four black girls blown upin that Alabama church remind me of five hundredmiddle passage blacks,in a net, under waterin Charleston harborso redcoats wouldn’t find them.Can’t find what you can’t see can you?

Seen in relation to “Here Where Coltrane Is,” “American History”

provides the reader with a methodology that reveals Harper’s

effort to shift history from linear chronology to an

associational mode that ranges across history in search of

correspondences. The four girls murdered in the bombing of the

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church are mnemonically linked to the

intentional drowning of five hundred recently arrived Africans

during the Revolutionary War, a move meant to reveal how the

destruction of black bodies has historically been a rhetorical

means to an ideological end and perhaps more directly, how

American constructions of “freedom” involved the murder and

enslavement of countless numbers of black slaves which in its

turn has led to a master narrative of white supremacy. The

statement the KKK sought to make in the former is conceptually

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aligned with the silence that inheres in the latter. The speaker

in “American History” articulates the manner in which the

assumption of veracity that is ostensibly synonymous with the

narrative of an exceptional American body politic is obliterated.

Just as both of the historical events Harper references in the

earlier poem have to do with the violent erasure of black bodies,

“Here Where Coltrane Is” involves the effort to suture the past

and present into a dynamic relation. Harper’s poetics is

dramatized in his love of great jazz musicians like Coltrane,

along with Elvin Jones, Charlie Parker, and Coleman Hawkins, each

of whom impacted his poetics through their “ability to improvise

upon thematic texts and make them new…Composition is structuring

and orchestrating, revealing the hidden texts implicit in human

experience” (Randall, 19). What I would submit is that its

title notwithstanding, “Here Where Coltrane Is” embodies a host

of concerns that range across personal, historical, cultural and

political registers.

In an interview with James Randall, Harper declared that

Americans bear “the psychic weight of discovery and colonization

as murder and enslavement, the sacred documents such as the Bill

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of Rights and the reality and tensions of self and national

definition” (Randall, 23). Hence, in placing “memories”

alongside “modal” Harper was seeking a way to position a new

approach to sound- and song-making alongside the process of

becoming that he sees as the “legacy and responsibility” of all

Americans (Randall, 23). What Harper is suggesting is that the

“difficulty” to be found in his poems is not only meant to take

the form of interpretive labor, but as well the enactment of the

kind of struggle with meaning a healthy democracy demands of its

citizens. Hence, the syntactical shifts in “Here Where Coltrane

Is” must be understood as essential to the task of equating

[musical] performance with the act of banishing Americans’s love

for and adherence to a particularly durable form of amnesia.

When we arrive at “a tenor blossoming” after the word

“songs,” we find that the phrase once again enacts the logic of

“both/and” by allowing the reader to consider “blossoming” as

verb, which means situating the impact of Coltrane’s discovery of

a new way of playing in relation to what arises if we consider

“blossoming” to be a noun, with “tenor” serving as an adjective.

The chord progressions begun in lines one through four moves

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forward in the next unit of the poem, in lines 5 through 9, which

read:

which would paint sufferinga clear color that is not inthis Victorian housewithout oil in zero degreeweather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;

This section of the poem consists of five lines, totaling 26

words, a multiple of the number 13, the exact number of words to

be found in lines one through four. Harper’s conscious act of

linguistic doubling suggests that the momentum generated in lines

one through four of the poem takes an important turn, putting the

potentially false knowledge bound up in “soul” and “race,” as

well as the tension created between acts of remembering and

musical theory that seeks to expound ways to extend the present,

into the service of the blues, a musical form that does just what

lines five and six describe, namely, the act of making suffering

visible through a commitment to transparent expression. The

problem, however, is that the often profane qualities to be found

in the blues, its dedication to clarity and truth

notwithstanding, are in direct contradiction with the Victorian

period’s impulse toward social advancement and propriety. Once

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again, the reader must take care to acknowledge the syntactical

move Harper makes here. The conceptual overload created in lines

one through four has the power to induce the reader to view

everything that has come before line five as the antecedent, when

in fact, only “a tenor blossoming” is the absence Harper

describes “in/this Victorian house//.” A “blossoming” of any

sort would be difficult in the harsh weather the poem describes.

Here, it might be worthwhile to see the poem as it has unfolded

up to this point:

Soul and raceare private dominions,memories and modalsongs, a tenor blossoming,which would paint sufferinga clear color but is not inthis Victorian housewithout oil in zero degreeweather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;

I believe that this portion of the poem restates and

recontextualizes a moment that appears midway through “Dear John,

Dear Coltrane,” when Harper writes:

You plod up into the electric city—your song now crystal andthe blues. You pick up the hornwith some will and blowinto the freezing night:

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a love supreme, a love supreme— (my emphasis in lines 2-3 of quotation)

Harper’s description of Coltrane’s song as “crystal and/the

blues” approximates the state he seeks to describe in “Here

Where Coltrane Is,” where the clarity and transparency of crystal

is linked to the autobiographical clarity we associate with the

blues.3 The connection between these passages, the harsh

conditions “Here Where Coltrane Is” describes, is created by the

absence of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme album, a record containing

Coltrane’s “Acknowledgement,” which the musician intended as an

anthem signaling the “blossoming” of a new form of spiritual and

religious coherence in his life. These conditions are

juxtaposed against an instance in “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,”

where Harper’s poem features a moment when Coltrane himself is

able to “pick up the horn/with some will and blow/into the

freezing night://” the phrase we associate most closely with both

3 And note, Harper does not say, “your song now a crystal/blues,”nor does he make reference to a “crystalline blues,” which would be a more syntactically resonant phrase and which would anticipate nicely Harper’s 1984 volume Healing Song for the Inner Ear, which features “Narrative of the Life and Times of John Coltrane,Played by Himself,” which features the lines, “I broke loose fromcrystalline habits/I thought would bring me that sound.”

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Coltrane and [ultimately as well] with Harper; who structures

“Dear John, Dear Coltrane” around the famous refrain.

What makes the house in the poem “Victorian,” and why would

the absence of a particular Coltrane composition be equated with

such difficult circumstances? The expansion of British

colonialism in the mid-19th Century, when it extended its empire

to encompass parts of Africa, India, the Middle East, and Asia,

is a product of the Victorian age. On a material plane, a house

built in the Victorian architectural style featured an ornate

façade, enhanced by the use of pillars and arches supporting

overhangs that juxtaposed symmetrical shapes against Gothic

woodworking, developments made possible by the new tools of the

Industrial Revolution which, as Eric Williams reminds us, was

financed in large part by the slave trade (need fn here).

Harper’s use of the house constitutes a way to situate the

fetishizing of “soul” and “race” in a metaphorical relation to

the British Empire’s reassertion of its dominance on a global

scale. Further, a Victorian house signals a civic space that

eschews the physical and emotional engagement that might lead one

to equate the intensity of jazz (especially as it is embodied in

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Coltrane’s work) with the cultural work necessary to get out from

under racial archetypes. But the cold weather assaulting the

walls of the house calls attention to the lack of cultural

resources necessary to withstand the roar of the wind and

subsequent freezing temperatures, which is suggestive of how we

could just as easily interpret “zero-degree weather” as a phrase

signaling the Victorian era’s distrust of moments characterized

by heat and expenditure, its ambivalence regarding carnal or

corporeal display. As music whose very name can be said to

invoke the expenditure of sexual energy, jazz by Harper’s

estimation calls for a level of emotional and intellectual

commitment able to withstand extremes, either in the form of

weather or ideology.

But Harper’s next move seeks to bring closure to the poem’s

first sentence and perhaps more importantly to the poem’s opening

conceptual unit. Noting that line nine ends with a semi-colon,

we find that line ten and subsequently, line eleven, are used to

bring the politics of racial essentialism, Coltrane’s new found

mastery of the tenor sax, his spiritual awakening, and the

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cultural politics of avoidance into a seamless relation. Lines

ten and eleven, taken together, read:

it is all a well-knit family:a love supreme

The “well-knit family” to which Harper refers speaks to how

everyday life compromises our ability to understand how amnesia

and innovation can both occupy the same space and be mutually

nullifying. The conceit of the Victorian house, its ornate

edifice and gothic touches highlighting the act of metaphorical

concealment of colonialism’s transgressions, is also the staging

area where the concept of the nuclear family comes into being,

and along with it, the imperative that the family’s “dirty

laundry” be concealed behind the illusion of propriety and moral

purity. The colon that appears at the end of line ten, however,

places these complicated acts of obfuscation on par with the

familiar refrain from Harper’s poem and Coltrane’s

“Acknowledgement,” which are meant to signal the musician’s

spiritual awakening, alongside the assertion in Harper’s poem

that it is a political awakening as well.

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This moment in the poem represents what I see as the

“bridge” connecting the opening chord progressions with those

soon to follow. It is here, with the next chord progression,

that the poem takes an unexpected turn. Where the poem has been

markedly absent of references to the speaker’s personal

circumstance, it now places that circumstance in the foreground:

Oak leaves pile up on walkwayand steps, catholic as applesin a special mist of clear whitechildren who love my children.

We quickly note that this sentence, save for a single comma

between “steps” and “catholic,” is bereft of punctuation. Where

the previous lines in the poem are marked by a kind of conceptual

“stacking” that often unsettles the transition from subject to

predicate, lines twelve through fifteen offer one of the few

moments in the poem when the reader encounters the speaker in the

poem in a conventional circumstance. Its straightforward mode

of address notwithstanding, this section of the poem is

performing very important work. The oak leaves piled upon the

walkway and steps, ostensibly outside the speaker’s home, are

described as being “catholic as apples,” evidence that there are

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instances where the effort to establish notions of difference are

revealed to be arbitrary and capricious in the face of nature’s

inclusiveness, its unwillingness to conform to a system of value

through which to distinguish one leaf as being better than the

others. This would be an incredibly important assertion in and

of itself, but note the way that the phrase is enjambed,

connecting to the phrases in lines fourteen and fifteen:

…catholic as applesin a special mist of clear whitechildren who love my children.

Equating the leaves with apples indicates the fact that nature

does not . But the next two lines shift the poem out of its

historical mode and into a personal mode where the words

“special” and “clear” assume great importance. The “special

mist” invokes the act of spraying apples on a fruit stand with

water to keep them fresh, but it could also be thought of in

relation to a racially charged atmosphere, with the “special

mist” becoming the remedy (or sustenance) furnished by the

unconditional love children extended to Harper’s children.

Describing the white children as “clear,” intimates that they are

free of the hatred and prejudice that plague white adults.

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This is an important development in the poem because the

speaker needs to carry this realization into the poem’s next

chorus. Having just seen the satisfying form love across racial

lines can assume, the speaker plays Coltrane’s “Alabama,”

ostensibly on his turntable. If there is a point where events

in the poem coincide with the title, lines sixteen through

twenty-one constitute that moment; playing the song brings the

saxophonist directly into the speaker’s aural field. However,

unlike the previous chorus, which took place in a specific

location, the fifth chordal unit begins in a physical location

but swiftly moves beyond it:

I play “Alabama”on a warped record playerskipping the scratches on your faces over the fibrousconical hairs of plasticunder the wooden floors

If “Here Where Coltrane Is,” can be thought of as consisting of a

series of difficult moments, I would say, speaking personally,

that lines 16-21 are the most difficult because we have little in

the way of preparation for the drastic conceptual shift that

occurs at this point in the poem. In the first of a series of

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shifts in mode of address, Harper addresses himself directly to

the four little girls who died in the bomb blast in the church.4

The “warped record player” is not a literal reference, rather

Harper is confronting the medium through which inaccurate

historical narratives are delivered. Which is to say, as

“American History” proposes, that any history that does not

incorporate acts of atrocity into the American originary

narrative is “warped.” Playing the record, the composition of

which was based on Coltrane’s interpretation of Martin Luther

King’s eulogy for the four little girls into musical phrasing,

transports the dead girls to the speaker’s physical location.

Hence, when lines eighteen and nineteen state, “skipping the

scratches/on your faces…” it is a reference to the marred

countenances of the dead girls, permanently inscribed with the

violent act mounted against them. To play “Alabama” is to

revisit the site of the tragedy and thus the last portion of line

nineteen along with lines twenty and twenty-one, “…over the 4 For what has seemed an eternity, I have assumed that the “you” Harper references are the children from line 14. But after trying to reconcile this use of a personal pronoun with the previous lines, I find that they are not temporally linked; the act of playing the record shifts the speaker from the personal mode into an historical mode.

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fibrous/conical hairs of plastic/under the wooden floors” is once

again a physical description of the bomb’s aftermath, a reference

perhaps to the bomb’s fragments or the remains of a doll found in

the church ruins.

Though it would seem to be a radical digression in the poem,

the fifth chorus is a necessary move, a way for Harper to move

from addressing the dead girls, to addressing Coltrane himself.

The sixth chorus, then, imagines Coltrane, ostensibly returning

to his home in Philadelphia from a gig in New York City. Still

listening to the record, the speaker is addressing himself

directly to Coltrane. He asserts that the six notes in

“Alabama” that recur several times over the course of the

recording came to Coltrane in a dream, and in turn serve as an

“anthem” that attests to several important aspects of Coltrane’s

legacy. First, they recall the capaciousness of Coltrane’s

political consciousness and the way “Alabama” is both an addendum

to King’s eulogy and an improvisation (or an improvement?) on the

eulogy that foregrounds the blues. Coltrane’s effort to give

voice to the tremendous sadness created by the explosion (and the

racial hatred that motivated it), squares nicely with Sherley

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Anne Williams’s observation that “blues deals with a world where

the inability to solve a problem does not necessarily mean that

one can, or ought to, transcend it. The internal strategy of the

blues is action, rather than contemplation, for the song itself

is the creation of reflection” (Chant, 125). Here, we find

Coltrane using the blues, “paint[ing] suffering/a clear color”

and the speaker finds himself in the midst of the saxophonist’s

ability to improvise, not only on Martin Luther King, but also on

Ralph Ellison’s assertion that the blues “is an autobiographical

chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (S&A,

125). The move Harper makes in lines twenty-six and twenty-

seven, which follow the colon that end-stops line twenty-five,

seems, once again, to have little to do with listening to

Coltrane’s music. Recalling his earlier characterization of the

Victorian era as a moment when the blues were of little

consequence, Harper intensifies his critique of the colonial

project that unfolded during the Victorian period in which, “oak,

birch, maple,/apple, cocoa, rubber.” are all natural resources

coveted either by Americans who claimed ownership of the trees on

land occupied by Native Americans or by Europeans who sought

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foodstuffs to satiate their cravings and rubber tires for their

automobiles.

The second bridge, lines twenty-eight to thirty, constitutes

a logical progression from the unit that came before. It reads:

For this reason Martin is dead.For this reason Malcolm is dead.For this reason Coltrane is dead.

Whereas earlier moments in the poem have kept us off-balance,

shifting across a number of tonal registers by resisting the

establishment of a consistent logic, the six notes in the fifth

chorus, having transmuted into the material items that have

precipitated man’s inhumanity to man (as it assumes the form of

slavery, colonialism, or Southern racist violence) are now

understood as the key to understanding why Martin Luther King,

Malcolm X, and even John Coltrane are no longer alive. The lack

of comprehension that met each of these men’s all-too-brief

sojourn among the living is perhaps a greater tragedy than the

violence—in the case of MLK and Malcolm X—that befell them.

Noting that each line is end-stopped with a period it is clear

that Harper is trying to equate the life of John Coltrane with

that of two men who made their reputations by speaking out

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against injustice.5 But Harper’s use of assonantal phrasing

(“For this reason…”) imposes a formal elegance onto the poem that

on one level articulates the ways rituals of violence often

silence political visionaries and on another dramatizes the kind

of associative thinking that leads the astute observer to see the

patterns history assumes when they avoid falling victim to

amnesia. Locating each of the deaths in proximity to acts of

imperialism and capitalist greed, Harper challenges us to

understand “Alabama” as political discourse, an instance where

Coltrane uses his saxophone to reassert Dr. King’s effort to

recontextualize the four dead girls, to move them from the 5 I do not think, however, that Harper is seeking to place Coltrane’s death on par with that of King or Malcolm; that is, aspolitical assassination. But he is suggesting that it may finally be time to understand that tragedy comes in threes and that it does not matter if these men fought for the same things (clearly King and Malcolm represent different sides of the political and rhetorical coin), their deaths have diminished us because in each instance an important voice was silenced. When juxtaposed against the different iterations imperialism can assume, their deaths call us to move beyond the impulse to identify conspiracies in order to do the more important work of re-charting human history through an instance of interventionist mapping that seeks to place inclusiveness, be it through King’s posture of non-violence; Malcolm’s enlightened posture after his trip to Mecca and his interrogation of American global perfidy, or Coltrane’s inclusive musicality which sought to create world music that could transcend national points of origin, at the center of human discourse.

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utilitarian and opportunistic space of martyrdom to the more

capacious space of Christian agency placed in the service of

hopefulness.

Hence, the final unit of the poem, in which Harper shifts

from the political mode back to the personal mode reads:

In the eyes of my first son are the brownsof these men and their music.

Just as the deaths of the four little girls were framed by King

as a source of comfort that should issue, not from the quantity

of life, but from its quality, Harper seeks to locate the

different iterations of brownness (and here, not in the racial

sense) embodied by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. and John

Coltrane in the eyes of his first-born son. If the poem began

with the assertion that “soul” and “race” are the product of

capriciousness and narrow thinking, it ends with the insistence

that the concept of brown cannot be isolated within the realm of

color, of racial essentialism, but rather in a project that seeks

to enlarge the human spirit. And just as Harper placed

Coltrane’s death on par with Dr. King and Malcolm, to see it as a

political circumstance, he uses chiasmus to invert this logic, to

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place them and their respective “songs” on the same plane as

Coltrane’s musical expressivity. Their legacy can be seen

whenever Harper looks into the eyes of his son and thus becomes

an enduring legacy. I wish to underscore this by turning from

“Here Where Coltrane Is” to “Deathwatch,” which can be found in

Dear John, Dear Coltrane, and most notably the assertion that occurs

at the end of the poem:

America needs a killing.America needs a killing.Survivors will be human.

In essence, “Here Where Coltrane Is” seeks to dramatize, by

inverting the conceptual logic in the earlier poem, what it means

to experience loss on a symbolic scale. If the death of a child

could lead Harper to ponder, in “Deathwatch,” what would be

required to precipitate a transformation in America’s corrupted

ability to manifest empathy across racial lines, “Here Where

Coltrane Is” asserts that the lives of children—both living and

dead—represent the material response to acts of violence,

symbolic and real. The “browns” that Harper describes at the

end of the poem, then, suggest that the metaphorical and the

ancestral must meet in recognizable ways. The eyes of his son

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are thus meant to serve as an archive of black political endeavor

but, in keeping with the eye’s function as window or mirror in

the metaphysical tradition, also as a method of discriminating

that which is real from that which is inauthentic, a malady that

plagues social relations when we privilege interpretive protocols

most often associated with the visual sphere. Making both Martin

Luther King and Malcolm X into singers means that Harper can

assimilate them into his own poetic practice (and the fashioning

of his own personal myth) as kin. If the clarity of children

operating in a space of unconditional love is a sight (site?) for

sore eyes, Harper means for us to see how the ancestral “look”

operationalizes itself into a metaphor attuned to collapsing the

chasm between brownness and humanness, a look that is finally

imbued with the ability to see past, present, and future as

mutually constitutive events.

A Kind of Credenza

In thinking about “Here Where Coltrane Is” in relation to

the act of jazz composition, jazz musicians’s effort to

“improvise upon thematic texts and make them new,” I would

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submit, along with Robert Stepto, that Harper’s efforts can be

thought of as an assertion of a postmodern sensibility. His

effort to mimic musicians’s efforts to “make [it] new,” suggests

that while Harper’s thematic influences (Auden and Yeats most

notably) are located squarely within literary modernism, his

structural influences may have originated in the realm of music.

The evidence of that is to be found in Harper’s approach to

phrasing in the poem, which I sought to understand at a metrical

level. Though the poem cannot be said to be metrical in the

conventional sense, it is clear that throughout “Here Where

Coltrane Is,” Harper is making very conscious choices with

regards to prosody that demonstrate that the poem is as much a

product of Harper’s vast understanding of how to bring prosody

into conversation with Coltrane’s musical technique.

As the metrical phrasing chart below demonstrates, I have

divided “Here Where Coltrane Is” into its constitutive parts,

nine sections (seven choruses, two bridges), each of which I have

scanned in order to discern the role rhythm and stress play in

the construction of the poem.6

6 I am profoundly aware that much of what happens in the scansionof a poem is highly subjective. But I am basing my assertions on

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Here Where Coltrane Is: Metrical Phrasing Chart

soul and race cretic, 3 syllablesare private dominions, amphibrach, cretic, 6 syllables

memories and modal cretic, amphibrach, 6 syllablessongs a tenor blossoming, 2 trochees, cretic, 7 syllables

which would paint suffering bacchic, cretic, 6 syllablesa clear color but is not in iamb, cretic, amphibrach, 8 syllablesthis Victorian house antibacchic, cretic, 6 syllableswithout oil in zero degree amphibrach, iamb, anapest, 8 syllablesweather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind; 4 trochees, cretic, 11 syllables

it is all a well-knit family 2 bacchics, cretic, 9 syllablesa love supreme. 2 iambs, 4 syllables

Oak leaves pile up on walkway trochee, amphibrach, trochee, 7 syllablesand steps, catholic as apples iamb, 2 amphibrachs, 8 syllablesin a special mist of clear white anapest, iamb, bacchic, 8 syllableschildren who love my children. trochee, amphibrach, trochee, 7 syllables

I play “Alabama” iamb, 2 trochees, 6 syllableson a warped record player anapest, 2 trochees, 7 syllablesskipping the scratches dactyl, trochee, 5 syllables

what I believe to be Harper’s deep understanding of Coltrane’s musical technique, particularly the musician’s use of triplets, and his conscious effort to incorporate aspects of that techniqueinto his poetics. It could well be the case that Harper himself would reject the assertion that he would build his concept of poetic phrasing to align so closely with one musician. But I submit that the appearance of so many tripled feet suggest that something conscious was at work in the composition of “Here WhereColtrane Is” and proposes, yet again, why Harper is one of our most important poets when it comes to the aesthetic and politicalemphasis he places on acts of composition.

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on your faces over the fibrous anapest, 2 bacchics, 9 syllablesconical hairs of plastic cretic, 2 trochees, 7 syllablesunder the wooden floors amphibrach, cretic, 6 syllables

Dreaming on a train from New York trochee, anapest, dactyl, 8 syllablesto Philly, you hand out six 2 iambs, amphibrach, 7 syllablesnotes which be come an anthem iamb, trochee, amphibrach, 7 syllablesto our memories of you: 2 iambs, cretic, 7 syllablesoak, birch, maple, spondee, trochee, 4 syllablesapple, cocoa, rubber. trochaic trimeter, 6 syllables

For this reason Martin is dead; anapest, amphibrach, iamb, 8 syllablesfor this reason Malcolm is dead; anapest, amphibrach, iamb, 8 syllablesfor this reason Coltrane is dead; anapest, amphibrach, iamb, 8 syllables

in the eyes of my first son are the browns 2 anapests, trochee, iamb, 10 syllablesof these men and their music. bacchic, 2 iambs, 7 syllables

Space does not allow me to range through the entire poem,

line by line. But I do wish to call attention to several

important elements of Harper’s prosodic approach. In what I have

referred to as the poem’s second bridge, Harper is using anaphora

to reinforce our sense that King, Malcolm X, and Coltrane can be

considered on the same conceptual plane, we see that each line is

8 syllables and each features an anapestic foot followed by

amphibrach foot, and closing with an iambic foot.

And in the fifth chorus, we find that Harper has structured

a key moment in the poem, when it turns away from the bridge

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constituted by lines ten and eleven, around a four line sequence

which begins and ends with lines featuring a trochaic foot

located on either side of an amphibrach foot. Hence, when the

poem makes a radical turn from, say, the meta-commentary found in

lines 1-11 on the vagaries of race and history to the personal

observations in lines 12-15, Harper imposes a very pronounced

pattern, where the prosodic variety in lines 13 and 14 becomes

much less predictable. Those lines feature an iambic foot

followed by two amphibrach feet in the former and an anapestic

foot followed by an iambic foot, closing with a bacchic foot in

the latter.

I mentioned above that the poem features two “bridges” that

serve as “joints” Harper uses to introduce thematic flexibility

into the poem. But one could just as easily argue that they

serve the purpose of rigidifying the poem so that it can support

the weight of its political claims. In lines 10-11, which

features two bacchic feet followed by a cretic foot, with the

next line featuring two conventional iambic feet, is the vehicle

Harper used to insist that the politics of race, Coltrane’s

musical innovation, and its inability to render the erasures of a

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white supremacist past visible are so discursively bound, that

the only protection available is the spiritual grounding borne

out of recognizing that a greater power prevails. This also

means that the move the poem makes into fourth chorus was

anticipated in lines 10-11. The chorus amplifies—by locating it

in quotidian experience—the political agency afforded by love

that embraces transcendence (a love supreme).

It is well-documented the tremendous amount of importance

Michael S. Harper has placed on the music and vision of John

Coltrane. What “Here Where Coltrane Is” provides us with is a

lyric moment in which we ruminate on the quality of consciousness

Coltrane’s music—in this instance, in one song—can generate.

That Harper sought to incorporate the prosodic equivalent of

Coltrane’s musical technique into this poem, while not being

integral to discerning its meaning, is nonetheless essential to

our understanding of how poets internalize influence and how

those influences can issue from a variety of locations. And

perhaps there is something more: that Coltrane’s technique

offered Harper a window into how history could echo through all

that we do and see, a condition that demanded an innovative

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posture, demanded that the poet eschew the role of troubadour to

become a soothsayer of the highest rank.

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Works Cited

Antonucci, Michael. “The Map and the Territory: An Interview withMichael S. Harper. African American Review. Volume 34, no. 3. Autumn,2000. pp. 501-508.

Baker, David. Meter in English: A Critical Engagement. Fayetteville, AR: Uof Arkansas Press. 1996.

Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.

Berliner, Paul. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1994.

Early, Gerald. “Ode to John Coltrane: A Jazz Musician’s Influenceon African American Culture.” The Antioch Review. Vol. 57. no. 3; Jazz (Summer, 1999). pp. 371-385.

Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” Shadow and Act. New York:Vintage Books, 1964, rpt. 1982. pp.

Harper, Michael S. Dear John, Dear Coltrane. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1970.

_______________. History Is Your Own Heartbeat. Urbana: U of IllinoisPress, 1971.

Orr, David. Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. New York: Harper Perennial Books, 2011.

Porter, Lewis. John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1999.

Randle, James. “An Interview with Michael S. Harper. Ploughshares.Vol. 7, no. 1, 1981. pp. 10-27.

Ratleff, Ben. Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. New York: Farrar, Strauss,Giroux. 2007.

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Strand, Mark and Eavan Bolan, eds. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New York: Norton, 2000.

Williams, Sherley Anne. “The Blues Roots of Afro-American Poetry.” Chant of Saints. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1979.

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Appendix 1: Here Where Coltrane Is: Structural Chart

Content/Location Chorus Exegesis Tonal Register Poetic Referent Soul and raceare private dominions 1st Concepts equated with differnce are arbitrary Cultural/Historical

“Dear John, Dear Coltrane”(lines 1-2) in their application; racial essentialism is

the product of capricious action.memories and modalsongs, a tenor blossoming, 2nd The past is integral to Coltrane’s adoption Musicological/Historical

“Narrative of the Life of(lines 3-4) of a new style of playing, he confronts his personal John Coltrane: Played by Himself

history and comes into his own as a musicianwhich would paint sufferinga clear color but is not inthis Victorian house (lines 5-9) 3rd Coltrane’s horn plays a blues that iswithout oil in zero degree absent from a body politic that refuses Social/Historical

“Song: I Want a Witness”weather and a forty-mile-an-hour-wind; to expend the energy to understand how “Dear John, Dear Coltrane”

the blues relates to American history

it is all a well-knit family, Bridge #1 All of these concerns are bound upa love supreme. in everyday discourse; the “nuclear” Sociological

“Dear John, Dear Coltrane”(lines 10-11) family symbolizes the avoidance of

airing “dirty laundry”on a national scale

Oak leaves pile up on walkwayand steps, catholic as apples 4th The speaker in the poem looks out onin a special mist of clear white a scene where unconditional love is Personal/Kinship

“Sabbatical”children who love my children. directed toward his children by white

(lines 12-15) children who eschew racial bias andhierarchy

I play “Alabama” 5th The history of the bombing comes to on warped record player the speaker via “warped” historical media; Personal/Historical

“American History”skipping the scratches The speaker is addressing the dead girlson your faces over the fibrous and referencing the scene of the blastconical hairs of plastic (lines 16-21)under the wooden floors.

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Dreaming on a train from New Yorkto Philly, you hand out sixnotes which become an anthem 6th Speaker addresses Coltrane directly; histo our memories of you: act of composition accomplished in a dreamoak, birch, maple state that issues from a state of political awareness Personal/Social Historical

“Dear John, Dear Coltrane”apple, cocoa, rubber. (lines 22-27) that links racial violence and exploitation to

colonialism and Manifest DestinyFor this reason Martin is dead.For this reason Malcolm is dead. Bridge #2 Speaker links the deaths of MLK, Malcolm XFor this reason Coltrane is dead. and Coltrane to failures of political imagination Political/Historical

“Deathwatch”(lines 28-30) and racial mistrust.

in the eyes of my first son are the brownsof these men and their music. 7th (Cadenza) Speaker is not referencing race but social consciousness

(lines 31-32) If Coltrane was on par with King and Malcolmas a political thinker, they are on par with him Historical/Kinship

“New Season”as makers of responsible art

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Map of the Soothsayer: Reading “Here Where Coltrane Is”

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Transcript of Map of the Soothsayer: Reading “Here Where Coltrane Is”