Jayne Cortez was born on a US military base in 1934. That wasn’t her name then, but what matters is who we are when we’re making art, so Jayne Cortez she is. She grew up in Los Angeles, steeped in music and art, particularly jazz; she said in an interview, “When a new Charlie Parker record came out, I had it before most people in my neighborhood. I took piano lessons and harmony, played bass in the orchestra in junior high, and hung out at the record shop after school. I knew who Fats Navarro was when he was alive. I was a serious jazz fanatic. I met Charlie Parker, heard Billie Holiday and Clifford Brown in person, and had a conversation with Duke Ellington.”

At 20 she married Ornette Coleman; they had a son, Denardo, two years later. She began writing in the early ’60s, while registering voters with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi. She and Coleman divorced in 1964 and she helped start the Watts Repertory Theater company, serving as its artistic director. She later moved to New York, where she became involved with the Black Arts Movement.

Her first chapbook, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares, was published in 1969. Two years later, she set up Bola Press to release her own work: Festivals and Funerals arrived in 1971, Scarifications in 1973, Mouth on Paper in 1977, and Firespitter in 1982. She had been performing with musicians since the ’60s, and released an album, Celebrations and Solitudes, on Strata-East in 1974, on which bassist Richard Davis accompanied her. In 1980, she formed the band Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters with Denardo Coleman on drums and other players from the loft jazz scene and the jazz underground. They made several albums on Bola, and in 1996, when Ornette Coleman had a partnership with Verve Records, creating the short-lived Harmolodic imprint, they released Taking the Blues Back Home.

In 1991, Cortez co-founded the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) with Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo, Cortez co-founded the Organization of Women, which in 1997 established the first major international conference celebrating literature from around the world by women of African descent. Later in life, Cortez split her time between New York and Dakar. She died in 2012.

Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez has just been published by Nightboat Books, or will be out soon. It gathers poems from each of her previous books and presents them in chronological order, for almost 700 pages. (Buy it.)

I am a bad reader of poetry; I know I should read just one or two at a time, pause, think about them, savor images the poet labored over… but I don’t. I swallow them like fistfuls of trail mix, diving into the pages and swimming in the language until it’s not so much about absorbing a line or an idea as it is coming to an understanding of the writer as a human being.

But Jayne Cortez’s poetry forces me to slow down, to consume it in small doses. Because these are wrathful poems. They are not beautiful. They are hard to take.

Some are ugly, deliberately so. “Suite” and “Race”, from Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares, are written not to be read so much as spat in someone’s face. The former is a tribute to Charlie Parker that swerves into condemnation of white people, specifically Jews, for exploiting his recorded legacy; the latter is simply one of the most venomously anti-gay things I’ve ever read.

A lot of Cortez’s poems are tributes to jazz musicians: Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Dinah Washington, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Miles Davis, and more. But unlike Thulani Davis’s evocations of live performances by Cecil Taylor or the Art Ensemble of Chicago, these are meditations on the meaning of these artists in their entirety and have a gravity that allows you to imagine someone sitting down at a desk and thinking I Am Going To Write A Poem About Sonny Rollins. Cortez often seems inspired less by the music these artists made than by the injustices they suffered, and she rages on their behalf.

Her imagery is frequently physical, even visceral. Cortez writes of blood, tears, piss, shit, sex as a thing that involves touching another person’s body. She writes about food and trash and sweat and love as hunger. You can smell her words. In poems from Festivals and Funerals and Scarification, she sometimes delivers just three or four lines at a time, and these poems have the form of an aphorism but arrive like a curse. Later, especially in Mouth on Paper, the poems get longer, sometimes four or five pages, and they become repetitive, incantatory. Less angry but never less intense.

I have not read all the poems in this book. I don’t know if I ever will. But I know I will come back to it again and again, pulling out one or two or as many as I can stand, then dropping the book again with a long exhalation. Jayne Cortez takes it out of you. She takes it out on you. If you think you’re up to the challenge, buy this book.

— Phil Freeman