One of Dr. Guy’s special guests for his upcoming The Poets & A Song is Hettie Jones. Ms. Jones is a hugely influential figure and prolific writer whose memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, is a seminal text for understanding the complexities of the Civil Rights Era. Her latest, a collection of letters between her and the painter Helene Dorn, is due out soon on Duke University Press. For more info on that book, titled Love, H, click HERE.
Hettie is a renowned poet who will take the stage with her son-in-law, Dr. Guy himself, at the Blue Note on Monday, May 16. We asked her in advance of Monday’s show to talk a little bit about the connections between poetry and music.
Those of us who write are always conscious of rhythm. Having a band behind you is like a glory to God in the highest…It’s like everything you always had imagined — the orchestra is with you filling in all of the gaps. Also it allows you as an individual performer to contribute to something bigger. Singers add the ambience of the whole song, and they do so in a way that deepens the music and allows you to use the spaces between the lines that you always imagined in your head. As a poet, when you’re facing an audience by yourself, you can’t just sort of drop out; you’re on your own. Here, this allows you this wonderful freedom, and I think it enhances the words that you’re saying. Music elevates everything.
The history of poets performing with music goes back quite a way. You can definitely connect it to DJs who rapped over music that they were playing in New York and Philadelphia and in the Caribbean. It goes really back way, way back to that, so the whole process is not unfamiliar. And of course, my husband liked to do that, too. Jazz and poetry work so well together specifically because, like a jazz performance, it’s always different when you recite a poem. If you compare recordings of people reciting their poems, the emphases will never be exactly the same. And with a band, you can play with things in the same way that jazz plays with the tune and always slightly alters its own emphasis on everything. Some people write in iambic pentameter, let’s face it. But I don’t. And I think the human voice and the way people write work well with the music. It feels as though everyone is improvising.
Tickets for Dr. Guy Presents The Poets & A Song are available HERE. Doors open on Monday evening at 9:45 PM, with the show beginning at 10:30 PM.
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