Black music, Black poetry: blues and jazz's impact on African American versification

Authenticity in Black music and poetry

Original rags: African-American secular music and the cultural legacy of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetry / Ray Sapirstein

Paul Laurence Dunbar and the spirituals / Lauri Ramey

"Greatest is the song": blues as poetic communication in early Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown / John Edgar Tidwell

"A real, solid, sane, racial something": Langston Hughes's blues poetry / David Chinitz

Part 2. Jazz: its spiritual lyricism

The funk aesthetic in African-American poetry / Tony Bolden

"Go in the wilderness": the missionary impulse of Michael Harper's poetry / Joseph Brown

Part 3. Lyricism and the sonic aesthetic

Amiri Baraka: phenomenologist of jazz spirit / Christopher Winks

Nathaniel Mackey's "Song of the andoumboulou": making different music / Scarlett Higgins

Hearing a new musical instrument: Harryette Mullen's critical lyricism / Lisa Mansell

Part 4. Transformational lyricism

"Taking it out!": Jayne Cortez's collaborations with the firespitters / Renee M. Kingan

Pops, pygmies, and pentecostal fire: Sanders and Thomas's "The creator has a master plan" / Michael Coyle.