Read Tobi Haslett's Intro to Thulani Davis's Nothing but the Music

The Nation has posted Tobi Haslett's introduction to Nothing but the Music, the collection of poems by Thulani Davis recently published by Blank Forms Editions. "These are backstage poems. By which I mean that they issue from a place of sophisticated doubleness, slung between intimate complication and the blast of political life," writes Haslett. More:

…The realms clash and melt in music, and especially in Black music—which is not the subject of this book so much as its ultimate horizon. Jazz, punk, R&B: Black performance here figures as an intricate, varied practice as well as a thrumming psychic rhythm, something
 that both collapses and expands the subjectivity that consumes it. “Working in new / forms, stepping / outside tradition is / like taking a solo,” opens “For Ishmael Houston-Jones.” Most of these pieces were directly inspired by shows—by Henry Threadgill, Cecil Taylor, Art Ensemble of Chicago, or a horn-player on the street—and are followed by a date and place. This little annotation slits the poem open; the world comes trickling in. It’s a reminder, too, that this particular poet for many years composed write-ups and conducted interviews while on staff at the Village Voice, such that the Black music was not just a private pleasure but planted at the front of her life, its breaking news. 1980, 122nd Street, New York; December 16, 1987—the latitude and longitude of a critical sensibility.

Read on at The Nation.