The power of Sun Ra’s poetry

Words for a better world

Sun Ra has a way with words – a strange celestial way. Like the rest of us, he uses them to communicate. But what he communicates can sound outlandish, even alien to human ears. He took deadpan delight, for instance, in telling anyone who would – or wouldn’t – listen that he came from Saturn.

For real?

That’s exactly the question he wants his words and music to communicate. He speaks and composes as a storyteller who challenges prevailing beliefs about what’s real. Keen verbal cunning underwrites his marvelous musical achievement. Words roll off his tongue to twist listeners into cognitive knots, as those who had the courage to talk to him found out.

And Sun Ra talked all the time. The myriad interviews he left behind (print, radio, TV) display his peculiar devotion to words. Soaring beyond questions with answers like long improvised solos, Sun Ra embellishes his talk volubly with the sound of his own voice. In a less inspired storyteller, that might be a bad sign. In Sun Ra it’s good mojo. He uses words the way musicians play instruments, intensely alert to their sounds. “HOW YOU GON’ SOUND, MAN?” he asks in a prose tract, imitating the speech of his South Side Chicago ’hood. His answer comes in a whisper: “i’m going to sound so loud that it will wake up the dead.”

Sun Ra considered himself a poet as much as a musician. He writes poetry by word of mouth, so to speak, testing verbal sounds against their social effects. It’s easy to overlook (or underhear) the role words play in Sun Ra’s music, but it wouldn’t be audible – as Sun Ra’s music – without them. For every tune, he composes a title. He prints his poems on LP sleeves. His “space music” would remain mute without a network of neologisms to cue it: super-sonic jazz, interplanetary music, the spaceways, Rocket Number Nine, Astro-Black, myth-science, alter-destiny, the Omniverse, and most enduringly, the Arkestra.

Words ground his cosmic sounds, words to wake the dead. That’s how they work from the very start. He titled one of his first tunes, recorded in Chicago by the Arkestra in early 1956, “Medicine for a Nightmare.” The notion that music soothes a troubled soul is familiar enough, but Sun Ra composed this tune to treat a specific disease. 1955 saw the shotgun murder of NAACP leader George Wesley Lee in Mississippi, the drive-by killing of John Earl Reese, sixteen and dancing with his sister in a Texas cafe, and the lynching by two whites of fourteen-year-old Emmet Till, his shot and beaten body dumped into the Tallahatchie River. The “nightmare” of American racism needed a big dose of Sun Ra’s “medicine.” Words deliver his sounds into the main vein of a diseased society.

They work together to promote healing. The reason: words are sounds too. Sun Ra approaches language with a musician’s ear, hearing sounds before meanings. Language shares with music a sonic quality that equates them. In a rare discussion of his poetics appearing in the radical Black publication the cricket in 1968, Sun Ra puts it plainly: “my music is words and my words are music.” The reversibility of this maxim illustrates the importance of sound to Sun Ra’s poetry. Words occur as music, producing the same sensations, inspiring the same effects. If “Space music is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity,” then words are too, or can be when perceived as sound. Like music, they augur the infinite.

The fate of the world hangs in the balance. “These are indeed perilous times,” writes Sun Ra, “perilous to every man, woman or child.” The “image of a better world,” however, sleeps in sound, as a poem also published in the cricket suggests: “Sound . . . Cosmic Vibration . . . Life.” Poetry as much as music offers a means to heal an afflicted planet. Sun Ra’s poetry may be some of the most ambitious and least read around, but it provides a user’s manual for the universe. While some of it seems personal beyond words, the private musings of a Jim Crow intellectual, much of it solicits a wisdom implacable as the Sun. Such is the power of poetry that it can transfigure an ailing world. A short poem entitled “To the Peoples of the Earth” provides instructions for effective reading:

Proper evaluation of words and letters

In their phonetic and associated sense

Can bring the peoples of the earth

Into the clear light of pure cosmic wisdom.

Sun Ra answers “a mean world [. . .] poor in spiritual values” with poetry that, read properly, communicates the cosmos.

But how? By careful evaluation of sounds and associations, that’s how. Consider sounds, not meanings. Study association, not significance. Sun Ra’s poetry cultivates a musical rather than literary sensibility. Listen for sonic equivalence to discover unity behind appearances. Let the sounds of words reveal the limitations of significance. In a poem entitled “The Enwrit,” for instance, Sun Ra examines the social effects of “another three R’s,” a curriculum constraining everyday life through three simple words, “right, rite, and write”: three different meanings (entitlement, ritual, and composition) but one sound (| rīt |). Sun Ra decodes the triple homonym:

Those who in ignorance seek rights

From the hand of man

Receive rites.

So that equal rights

Are equal rites

And equal writes.

Rights, rites, and writes impose limitations on all who read by the letter, confining them to the nightmare of now. But the sound of those three words conjures greater possibilities.

Right?

“The alternative to limitation is INFINITY,” Sun Ra writes in the cricket. His words and music make it audible. Only accept his invitation, from a poem called “Enticement,” to travel the spaceways:

I cordially entice you, I diligently tempt you:

Step upon my magic carpet of sound,

And share my adventures . . .

 

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