Turn Arounds, Rituals & Incantation: On the Illusive Epistrophe at The Nation

In his review of Brent Hayes Edwards's latest book, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, The Nation's David B. Hobbs highlights a conversation between Ornette Coleman and Jacques Derrida to illustrate a particular strength in Edwards's writing: his attention to interplay across art forms. Hobbs explains that an "epistrophe" is a "poetic maneuver": "Borrowed from the ancient Greek, it literally means 'turn around,' and denotes a repetition at the end of a line or stanza. Often encountered in religious call-and-response, in poetry it gives a sense of ritual or incantation, establishing a refrain that can hold other statements in relief or become troubled by shifts in context. Think of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock repeatedly asking what he should 'presume' after descriptions that become unnervingly abstract. This uneasiness is, perhaps, what Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke had in mind when they came to call their most famous composition 'Epistrophy.'"   Let's pick up with Hobbs's article from there: 

In the introduction to Epistrophies, Edwards explains that the song title’s “turning about” might refer to its rotating melody as well as to Monk’s movements onstage, an “unusual little dance…that Monk would often do during his concerts, standing up and leaving the piano while his sidemen soloed.” This is a context that would likely elude even devoted listeners, unless they’d caught Monk at Minton’s Playhouse. But, Edwards implies, it wasn’t missed by the poet Amiri Baraka, who wrote a 1964 poem called “Epistrophe” (which, curiously, doesn’t employ its namesake device). Edwards sees Monk’s tromping chords as the tonal counterpoint for Baraka’s awkward conclusion—“I wish some weird looking animal / would come along”—demonstrating that “a resonant figure of musical immanence can be the impetus behind an innovative poetics.” Edwards is more interested in Baraka’s exchange with Monk, and the passage of an idea from poetry to jazz and back again, than he is with the poetic device itself.

Epistrophies spends only a few pages on this artistic exchange, and neither Baraka nor Monk receives a chapter-length treatment, but we can discern a methodology from Edwards’s choice of title. A remarkable intellectual with many affiliations, Edwards is above all an archivist, excavating art and its history to make arguments about the innovation and complexity of black avant-gardes. 

Read on at The Nation.