Integral Music

Book excerpt: An important study of African American contributions to contemporary American poetry. Aldon Nielsen's book Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1997) was a ground-breaking work of scholarship that examined modern and postmodern developments in the work of African American poets since the Second World War and their contributions to both African American culture and American modernism. Integral Music extends the terms of the studies begun in Black Chant through a more in-depth look at the work of key writers and poets in the decades following the Second World War. While Nielsen examines anew such key figures as Amiri Baraka, he also provides the first extended studies of significant but often overlooked figures in African American poetry, such as Russell Atkins and Stephen Jonas. His essay on Bob Kaufman points toward the critical intersection of poetry and jazz in African American letters, as does his essay on performance poet Jayne Cortez. Nielsen's studies in this volume affirm the importance and centrality of African American poets to American intellectual life and international, modernist, and postmodernist poetry today.