The late Cecil Taylor’s music has been a prominent example for poets: from Harold Carrington to Clark Coolidge, Thulani Davis to Ntozake Shange, Tracie Morris to Fred Moten. Less well known is Taylor’s own quixotic, unclassifiable, inspiring, brilliant poetry. During the early 1960s, he participated in New York’s thriving artistic scene, collaborating with theater-maker Jack Gelber and dancer Freddie Herko, and associating with poets Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). Taylor operated the mimeograph machine for legendary little magazine The Floating Bear in di Prima’s East Village apartment, and, in turn, would practice all day in his apartment while she wrote in the next room. Particularly formative were his encounters with the great African American surrealist Bob Kaufman: as he recalls, after he’d finished a late-night gig at the Five Spot Cafe, Taylor went over to Kaufman’s apartment, where Kaufman read poems until the following afternoon. Most notably, Taylor was part of the Umbra Poets’ Workshop, alongside bandmate Archie Shepp, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, Calvin Hernton, David Henderson, N. H. Pritchard, and many others. Despite this, his work never appeared in Umbra, the group’s magazine, and is absent from most Black Arts Movement (BAM) publications. The early sixties were a difficult time for Taylor. Releasing not a single album between 1962 and 1966, he grew increasingly frustrated with the exploitative American jazz circuit and departed for Europe for several years.
Taylor’s sexuality may also have been at issue. Despite the presence of figures like Billy Strayhorn and Dudley Randall, both the jazz world and the poetic currents that coalesced into the Black Arts were frequently homophobic. As a gay man, Taylor remained (at least officially) in the closet until outed by Stanley Crouch in the 1980s. For Kevin Lynch, “Taylor’s strong private side reflected his generation’s struggle with sexual politics”; his life “was lived uphill most of the way, outperforming white men and virtually everyone, to finally gain, as an old man, honors with financial rewards.” Like Strayhorn and Randall, Taylor had to keep his sexuality under wraps. That said, it was a love affair that spurred him to poetry. Taylor later recalled, “I began to write poems when I was corresponding with a French poet whom I was in love with in 1962.” One of his first published poems, the short lyric “Rain,” obliquely addresses sexuality.
Rain
Now and then I let it touch me.
Rain.
Sweets not tasted in front
Roast memories exaggerate aromas.
In youth improbable meetings
Every six months or so.
Lilt of flesh beckoned sigh
and runaway corner.
Seasons far off, come and go
and soon Michelangelo me and
Others,
don tweeds, stitched
cane
Where’d that relic gotten
from
No answer.
Rain.
Here, spaces of fugitive encounter blur life and art, high culture and the street, reverberating through memory; the poem tilts away from biographical placement while speaking from a marginalized subject position. Sexuality turns up only obliquely: the “sweets not tasted in front,” the fleeting touch with which the poem begins, youthful, “improbable” meetings, and the reference to Michelangelo, nodding both to Eliot’s Prufrock and to a famous queer artist. When later asked if he was gay, Taylor responded, “Do you think a three-letter word defines the complexity of my humanity? I avoid the trap of easy definition.” Likewise his poetry. Along with fellow musicians Joseph Jarman and Henry Threadgill, Taylor’s work shares some affinities with Surrealism. His poem “The Musician” was reprinted in the Chicago Surrealist Group’s journal Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion in 1976, and he enthusiastically attended the group’s World Surrealist Exhibition that year, calling musician friends all over the city and urging them to visit the show. But his poetry is much more than this—combining musicological essay, autobiographical flashes, open field poetics, and mythological study, this is no more “jazz poetry” than Taylor’s music is the conventional idea of “jazz.” Rather, it is a unique hybrid of influences which can’t be tied to any one form, subject matter, or style.
While poet-critics like Baraka and A. B. Spellman experimented with the form of jazz liner notes, Taylor went much further. In 1966, his prose poem “Sound Structure of Subculture Becoming Major Breath/ Naked Fire Gesture” appeared on the LP sleeve of Unit Structures. Subverting the expected liner note format (dry technical analysis, spiced with anecdotes and interviews), this is at once a statement of ethics, aesthetics, and musicology—and a poem. Metaphors describing musical structures become metaphors describing other art forms, as Taylor opposes the Western division and measurement of time, its body-mind enclosure “robed in fever pitch”:
Rhythm is life the space of time danced thru.
As gesture Jazz became: Billie’s right arm bent at breast moving
as light touch. Last moments, late father no use to sit and sigh the
pastors have left us gone home to die. End to slave trade in sweet
meats and rum […]
Where are you Bud?…Lightning…now a lone rain falling thru
doors empty of room-Jazz Naked Fire Gesture, Dancing protoplasm
Absorbs.
Embodying both the musical ensemble and the wider social body, Taylor’s poetry manifests what Fred Moten calls “a politics that improvises resistance.”9 Chattel slavery’s theft of bodies continues into the cultural theft of African American artistic forms: the “sound structure of subculture” that becomes “major breath,” exploited for profit while being demeaned, mocked, and misunderstood. Yet bodies forced to perform and conform to the rhythms of labor subvert and challenge them through their “Naked Fire Gesture”: a stratum of resistant “black energy.”10 In “Garden,” Taylor moves from the Middle Passage to the Black bourgeoisie and from turn-of-the-century imperialism to celebrations of Stevie Wonder, Don Cherry, Muhammad Ali, and Jack Johnson, culminating in a kind of field holler linking Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” to West African ritual:
Witness, witness across field heritage spoke
alliances conquer’d. Respect Respect
there is the ritual witness respect […]
Respect Respect
Aretha aires
absolute absolum
Aretha absolute
Witness sweet inspiration
Witness
absolute gentleness
Aretha
Picking up on the Black Power slogan “Right On,” the poem’s rites become a call for “black / rights” and the defiance of commodification as living death:
Right on, Right on
how stances continue
defy exterior commerce
deaths, to mountain exhalt
Right, then, initiate going on,
Right, Right, Right on
“Aqoueh R-Oyo” (1973) moves even further, embracing a universalism that places human alongside animal and plant life, anticipating today’s ecopoetics.
to then become forces moving
as part of the Universe: recognizant
of earth (ground) animal, plant, sky
as energy factors within our
touch
“Aqoueh” was part of a book-length manuscript titled “Mysteries,” which Taylor later told Chris Funkhouser “had a lot to do with voodoo,” George Balanchine’s “conception of movement,” “the emergence of the Kabuki,” Bunraku and Azuma kabuki, and the battle between New Thing and bebop musicians. “Mysteries” was never published, and though piles of poetry manuscripts filled Taylor’s apartment, occasionally appearing in anthologies and as liner notes, he was not interested in carving out a conventional literary career. Rather, he always conceived of his poetry as just one element of his overall artistic practice. As he put it in 1981, “It seems to me what music is, is…everything that you do […]. You see all of art as a potential harvesting area, and you busy yourself about getting as much of it as you can, and using it whenever the situation allows you to do so.” Later he noted, “I currently view the presentation of music from a very ritualistic point of view…. The voice, the chanting, the poems and the movement are all things I’ve been working up to throughout my whole career.” And: “I sing inside me, and I sing out loud. I write poems and I recite them in the middle of my pieces.” As this final quotation suggests, “sing[ing]” is identified with the writing and reciting of poems, as something that might happen both “inside” the body and “out loud,” both on the page and in the sounded voice. As with the Unit Structures liner notes, descriptions of one art form become metaphors used to describe another: instrumental music is song, song is poetry. Taylor can at once claim “I’ve always tried to be a poet more than anything else,” and that music is “everything that you do”—including poetry. What this ultimately goes to show is that, for Taylor, poetry, music, and movement are inseparable parts of a holistic practice: the distinction between disciplines or parts is essentially meaningless.
From the early 1970s on, Taylor’s performance frequently included poetry and dance. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of world religions, from West Africa to Haiti, ancient Egypt to Mesoamerica, he would pirouette, crouch, stalk, and swivel onto the stage, holding looseleaf sheaves of musical and poetic notation, reciting the names of deities in a kind of sprechstimme—a squawking, scratching, rasping, parodic, moving, hilarious utterance. These recitations often deployed cut-ups of scientific textbooks and works on mythology, ritualistic accounts of ritual that rejected the distancing gaze of Western anthropology. Taylor would also distribute texts among his ensembles, which the musicians chant and sing on albums like Winged Serpent (1984) and Legba Crossing (1988). De-emphasizing the poem as singular unit, the authority of poet-reciter is spread out across the entire ensemble: poetry becomes one of many textures within a ritualized performance environment.
On Chinampas (1987), Taylor’s one record devoted to poetry alone, he recites, speaks, whispers, growls his way through descriptions of Aztec and voodoo ritual practices, with additional overdubs of voice, shakers, and tympani, his unforgettable enunciation hanging on the border between speech and song. “Angle of incidence / being matter ignited”; Taylor can make even mathematical equations zing with a disarming caress. Though the tympani vaguely recall Ezra Pound’s 1939 recording of the Cantos, there’s none of Pound’s orotund grandiosity. Words are staggered in instances of what Nathaniel Mackey calls “telling ‘inarticulacy’ ”: divided up, extended, syllables stretched out; lines repeated, suspended, turned into lyric, mutable mantras.
Chinampas opens in the voodoo hounfour, the temple where ritual possession takes place. These are poems of waiting—“watching across silence,” a “whole people […] at water’s edge.”16 In Haitian voodoo, participants are possessed or “ridden” by loa (spirits) who speak through them with the phrase “tell my horse,” which, as Zora Neale Hurston notes, has passed into Haitian slang as a kind of subversive nod to ways of expressing the socially, politically, spiritually inexpressible.17 On the album’s fifth track, the “ever-observant” snake loa, Damballah is invoked through “oracle bells”:
incarnate theyselves in the heads of their horses rolling against the
cylindrical wood […]
winged sun in the act of shedding all as forces of the invisible obliging
those out of tongue to incarnate theyselves
damballah damballah damballah
This dislodging of ego, equivalent to the Christian practice of “speaking in tongues,” is known in voodoo as “langage,” the title of an earlier Taylor poem. Through it, hidden histories are accessed:
forces of the air
angles of blackness
concealed
The ceremonies also take on a mournful aspect:
o wind o wind o wind
hearts stand in margins
darkness moveable screens
very ancient thing horses ridden
Describing participants in voodoo ceremonies, Maya Deren notes, “There was something in their regard which stilled everyone. One had seen it in the faces of those who prepare to leave and wish to remember that to which they will no longer return.” Voodoo states of possession and temporal suspension, often connected to water and the sea, bridge the West African past with the Middle Passage and the horrors of Caribbean and American slavery. On an untitled poem from his 1991 collaboration with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Taylor simultaneously alludes to voodoo and to the spiritual “Wade in the Water,” a song he recalls his father, “a store of knowledge about black folklore,” singing around the house. Historically, this spiritual masked, within the Christian notion of baptism, a West African ceremony in which the priest drives a cross into the river bed as a bridge facilitating communication between the realms of the living and the dead; it also served as advice to fugitive slaves to throw bloodhounds off their scent. Here is Taylor:
deliverance is then of determining
weight weight in the waters weight in the waters wade in the water, wade,
wade
weight, weight
These staggered puns between the visual and the verbal tap into a resistant history, a history of survival, from the encoded fugitivity of runaway slaves to Afro-Christian baptism, voodoo water rituals, and the oceanic distance of the Middle Passage. Likewise, Taylor’s “Aqoueh R-Oyo” refers to the voodoo spirit of the waters, captain of the ship that carries the dead to the afterlife, crying tears for the departed and assisting the souls of those who suffered in the transatlantic slave trade.
In ceremonies for Aqoueh (Agwé), the possessed initiate sails to the city of Ife, referenced in Taylor’s “Garden” (“Ifé—house of life, centre / of the world”), a spiritual return to West Africa reversing the Middle Passage. The houng’an (priest) strikes the vèvès, ceremonial diagrams containing ancestral power, with an asson (a calabash rattle), while the hounsi (congregants) roll on the ground to simulate the movement of waves on the voyage from west to east, the ceremony closing with a prayer.21 Taylor describes this ritual in “Da”:
vertabraes seam’d atolling
meteor pa-zzanin a hissing
asson adorn bells past
Likewise, in a typically dizzying pun from “The Musician,” he links Duke Ellington’s “Ring dem Bells” to the “oracle bells” of voodoo; and, in “Aqoueh R-Oyo,” he likens the Agwé ritual to the interactions of the improvising musical ensemble. Both voodoo initiate and ensemble performer must renounce ego: neither voodoo nor improvised performance are “system[s] imposed from above,” but push “out from below.” Houng’ans and musicians are “servers and interpreters” of ceremonies: their role is as transmitter, as link, rather than sole source of creation. As voodoo itself was fused from a disparate series of West African ritual practices—Ibo, Yoruba, Mahi, from Dahomey, the Congo River basin, Togo, and Nigeria—so Taylor’s disparate influences (West African, Haitian, Japanese, Russian, Native, and Mesoamerican) coalesce into a mutable system which emphasizes change, but also involves practice, learning, and discipline.
Throughout his career, Taylor fused a modern urban sensibility with ancient ritual and a diasporic internationalism that knew no boundaries. “We are the transitory poems,” he told Chris Funkhouser in 1994, rejecting existing binary conceptions of sexual, racial, species, and temporal being for a more fluid conception of identity. In a late poem from the 2016 Whitney Museum retrospective of his work, Taylor writes:
to exist is
the most graceful
non sequitor of a bare
trans-
gender
His work is full of such queered non sequiturs, gracefully crossing discourses and registers and the boundaries that break down life and art into compartmentalized boxes of racialized, sexualized, and gendered separation. It is part of a total way of living, devotional and expansive. As he writes in the same poem:
I went to linger
To ex
press the grandest.