Two Poems by Duke Ellington

In his own voice

Bill Gunn commands Black is nature’s hiding place, where she stores her loot, an unforgettable rigging of ourselves as at-once hidden and urgent, technicians of sacred secret weapons that if revealed would be abused or destroyed by the ones who would misuse them. Our blue utopia lives there, in the nagging feeling that we’re being saved for later, for judgment day, or mediated by the future, between the dilute version of the self the world is ready for and our full potential. The work becomes refusal of the medium that does this, and we are the new media, the ungoverned, the stateless. And we do hide.

One hidden or revoked obsession among so many black musicians is that with poetry, with language becoming literature to access new logic. Sun Ra would always repeat the line in the Bible take words my people and return to me. Here he is saying that in his perfect Birmingham drawl:

He smuggled poems into the sleeves of self-released LPs and warned anyone who would listen that language which cannot arrive at a lyricism that matches the heart’s math is the prison, so that the loot nature is hiding in blackness is a mode of oratory that doubles as self-contained inquiry, speaking one’s way past all perceived limitations to arrive at a source before and beyond them and recreate our lives as sovereign in that otherwise-unattainable image. A little ghetto mysticism is better than all the pseudo-sophistication in the land. It’s often overlooked, that, for overworked musicians, rehearsing incessantly to hear their compositions played back exactly as they intend, touring so frequently it becomes more familiar than stillness, a poem could be a giddy transgression, a liminal yet boundless space to explore a return to innocence and incoherence. Duke Ellington is another extremely serious black composer who seemed to need poems to tell his sound what to do; poems as commands. He believed that poetry was more advanced than music is some cases, more brazen, likely because it’s harder to sell, it’s an easier place to hide the truth.

Within black music there are so many untapped approaches to the restructuring of spoken language that most great musicians speak in idiom and code just to keep their knowledge discrete and close to the spirit. Just look at Thelonious Monk mumbling in complete sentences with a sparkle at the center where what he needed to communicate could be heard, and repeating that gesture as song. Just listen to MF DOOM, churning and beguiling his blues into goofy unfeasible rap bibles on the internet with her curls our/and she’s got a better sales pitch than the girl scouts. What should stop us in our tracks becomes a laugh track, a pattern of infinitely ricocheting momentum. Just say it out loud, just to see how it feels, again.

Sneaking these recitations into his repertoire was Duke Ellington’s gift to writers like me, who feel the urge to break out into song once in a while, and do. He wanted to break in to our fortress too, and these are some tunnels. The Moon Maiden he describes, we’ve become, the master’s and the monster’s muse. I read that during WWII there was a cemetery full of bells, church bells, little toy ones, whatever could be gathered in a large makeshift graveyard, and they were turned into parts of weapons for the war effort. Unacknowledged poetic urges are like that.