Blues and the Poetic Spirit

Essential reading. One of the top five blues books, unique in the field. This is easily the best analysis of blues lyrics, treating black music as black power (beware pale imitations). To say it lacks feeling is to miss the point by a solid mile.

Recently, while working on editing a soon to be published Autonomedia anthology under the title "Surrealist Subversion," I had the opportunity to revisit Paul Garon's classic American surrealist volume, "Blues and the Poetic Spirit," now in a second (1996) edition thanks to City Lights Publishers. This latest edition includes a new Introduction by Garon updating and expanding upon his original 1975 blues treatise and an always insightful Afterward by fellow surrealist Franklin Rosemont. As Rosemont puts it in the course of his discussion of the inherently subversive core of the blues, "Notwithstanding the whimpering objections of a few tired skeptics, this revolt cannot be 'assimilated' into the abject mainstream of American bourgeois/Christian culture except by way of dilution and/or outright falsification. The 'dark truth' of Afro American music remains unquestionably 'oppositional'." Lately, a leader in the ever growing call and response chorus of praise for the book has been African American cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelley, author of "Yo' Mama's DisFUNKtional" (Beacon Press), who calls the Garon work, "absolutely the best book on blues music." And in her new volume, "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism" (Pantheon), noted black scholar and activist Angela Davis singles out Garon's tome for favorable mention while freely dissing the bulk of the blues literary canon. These two plaudits must be particularly gratifying to Garon since he has always insisted that the blues must be discussed first and foremost as a black poetry of resistance to racist oppression and Eurocentric notions of white supremacy. As Garon says in his book, "Poetry, kindled by desire, is the light that can dispel the pallor of bourgeois civilization. It does this through its use of 'images', 'convulsive' images, images of the fantastic and the marvelous, images of 'desire'." In exploring the fertile crossroads between art and the politics of desire that has shaped the popular cultural form known as the blues, no other book even comes close.