John Coltrane's Pursuit of Elegance
By the time of his death in 1967, John Coltrane's status as an icon of the civil rights era, and of the burgeoning Black Arts Movement, was already secure.
Following his death, Coltrane, as the public face of the jazz avant-garde, an embodiment of uncompromising African American artistic self-expression, would become an almost obligatory subject for the younger generation of African American poets: works such as A. B. Spellman's "Did John's Music Kill Him?" (1969). Jayne Cortez's "How Long Has Trane Been Gone" (1969), and Michael S. Harper's volume "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" (1970) are only a few of the earliest, best-known, and most frequently anthologized of these elegiac "Coltrane poems" -as Kimberly Benston has termed them-. More and more, Coltrane's legacy is being recognized by critics of contemporary African American literature, and by the turn of the century that legacy was sufficient to earn him an entry in the "Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature", affirming the musician's "major impact on literary artists who came of age in the 1960s". But despite his increasingly acknowledged literary significance, Coltrane's own small corpus of poetry and prose has attracted little attention, either in its own right or for what it has to tell us about the nature of his influence on the generation of artists and authors who celebrated his achievements and mourned his loss. Few have tried to situate Coltrane's writing in specifically literary, or even specifically cultural, contexts -or to examine its involvement with historically specific issues beyond his music and its oft-remarked "spirituality." Nor has there been much definite, historicized discussion of the heritage of aesthetic and cultural values to which the Black Arts generation gained access through their
reverence for him.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24589774
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