Keith Jones's Fugue Meadow Explores the Musicality of Don Cherry

Patrick Pritchett reviews poet Keith Jones's newest book of poems, Fugue Meadow (Ricochet Editions, 2016), at Journal of Poetics Research, a peer-reviewed magazine of literary discourse hosted by Australian Literary Management. The book comes with a soundtrack, mostly because it's oriented around and inspired by trumpeter Don Cherry and his Mu recordings, Part One and Part Two (Actuel, 1969). "The book is dedicated to recent victims of racial violence in America, Mike Brown and Eric Garner among them, making a direct link between the cruel inequities still visited upon black Americans and Cherry’s vision of a polyracial musical paradise," writes Pritchett. More:

Like Cherry, Jones is concerned with the weave and fold of sounds and words. How folding and refolding generates new sounds, new connections, a set of new possibilities for the poem. Or as Jones puts it elsewhere, in what might be a statement of the book’s defining principle:

We are a new theft
at the limit
of the borrowed

 

Poetic imagination thrives on theft. So the limit of the borrowed is also the threshold of the utopian still-to-come. The utopianism of Cherry’s music is announced in the album’s title — ‘Mu,’ for music (and Fugue Meadow rhymes and echoes that with its first syllable); but also ‘Mu,’ the legendary lost continent in the Pacific whose prehistoric destruction by geological cataclysm led to a vast global diaspora, a seeding of peoples and customs from India and Peru to Greece and Egypt.

Mu, like OM, might also be thought of as an attempt to represent the ultimate phoneme, the original sound which gave rise to all other sounds. Indeed, as Nathaniel Mackey, whose own ‘Mu’ series derives loosely from Cherry’s music, notes in his preface to Splay Anthem, ‘any longingly imagined, mourned or remembered place, time, or condition can be called ‘Mu.’’

’Mu’ in this sense is less a piecing back together of lost fragments from some original whole, than a vision of a utopia-to-come. ‘Mu’ represents a new global potentiality — the belated emergence of a world sound that is also, in Hegel’s term, world-historical, signaling through music Spirit’s coming into a new awareness of itself.

But where Mackey takes ‘Mu’ as the basis for an ongoing mythopoetic series investigating the afterlives of diaspora, Jones’ focus is narrower; resolutely historical, a tapline into personal echoes and resonances evoked by Cherry’s powerful and haunting music.

Check out the full review at JPR.