Electromagnetic Poetics
“Honor our elders, lift up our young people,” declares poet Aja Monet on a balmy
October night at the Blue Note Jazz Club on Sunset in Hollywood. Backed by
her quartet of drums, standup bass, piano and saxophone, Monet explicates the color
of rain paying homage to Octavia Butler, Wanda Coleman and Jayne Cortez, fellow
sirens of the Black Radical Tradition. Jane Fonda’s in the audience, Aja’s a goddaughter
of one of the Last Poets. Her stage presence shows it. Reminding us that humor is a
political device and while you’re at it, don’t forget to vote with your spine, vote
with the way you love, vote with child care, lend someone your ear. For Monet
revolution is not a spectator sport, silence is a noise too. What’s the insurance policy
of chickens coming home to roost?
In the midst of performing, Monet steps aside briefly calling to the stage, Los Angeles’s
own Will Alexander, a surrealist poet extraordinaire who immediately mentions meeting
Miles Davis across the street decades ago at Shelly’s Manne-Hole, the iconic club that
was on Cahuenga a block north. Alexander then launched into pragmatic epistles
transmitting a telepathic wakefulness from his book Refractive Africa, his 2022
Pulitzer finalist collection published by New Directions. Per usual, Alexander’s
poetry paints a smoldering mental levitational litmus revelling in the realm of osmosis
exorcising the psychic swamps in Babylon.
Aja Monet then comes back again with more electromagnetic poetics. As the first of her two shows comes to a close, Monet tells us that whatever touches your heart you need to say with your chest to feed, fuel, fight for it to let it be luminous.
(Photo by B+)