Blues and the Poetic Spirit

By Paul Garon

Book Overview

While much has been written about the sociological significance of the blues, this is a unique inquiry into the blues and the mind, a study of the blues as thought. Here, the subconscious power of the blues is examined from a poetic and psychological perspective, illuminating the blues' deepest creative sources and exploring its far-reaching influence and appeal.

Like Surrealist poetry in particular, blues communicate through highly charged symbols of aggression and desire--eros, crime, magic, night, and drugs, among others. A close analysis of classic blues lyrics, along with a wealth of source material from Freud and James Frazer, to Breton and Marcuse, conveys the blues' major poetic function of spiritual revolt against repression.

First published in 1975, Blues and the Poetic Spirit is a blues literature classic. This long-awaited new edition assesses developments in the blues since that time and outlines the social and political forces that continue to shape its evolution.

"Paul Garon's study of the blues represents a new and important approach to the analysis of the blues as a psychopoetic phenomenon ... this work is an important starting place for researchers who want to investigate the essence of the blues."--Samuel Floyd

"Absolutely the best book on the blues."--Robin D.G. Kelley

Paul Garon has written about the blues for nearly fifty years. A co-founder of Living Blues, he is also the author of The Devil's Son-in-Law: The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw and His Songs, Blues and the Poetic Spirit and What's the Use of Walking if a Freight Train's Going Your Way, as well as a small collection of prose poems, Rana Mozelle. He and his wife, co-author Beth Garon, own and operate Beasley Books, a used and rare book business in Chicago.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872863158
• ISBN13: 9780872863156
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Great book from Living Blues co-founder

Essential reading. One of the top five blues books, unique in the field. This is easily the best analysis of blues lyrics, treating black music as black power (beware pale imitations). To say it lacks feeling is to miss the point by a solid mile.

Blues and the Poetic Spirit by Paul Garon

Recently, while working on editing a soon to be published Autonomedia anthology under the title "Surrealist Subversion," I had the opportunity to revisit Paul Garon's classic American surrealist volume, "Blues and the Poetic Spirit," now in a second (1996) edition thanks to City Lights Publishers. This latest edition includes a new Introduction by Garon updating and expanding upon his original 1975 blues treatise and an always insightful Afterward by fellow surrealist Franklin Rosemont. As Rosemont puts it in the course of his discussion of the inherently subversive core of the blues, "Notwithstanding the whimpering objections of a few tired skeptics, this revolt cannot be 'assimilated' into the abject mainstream of American bourgeois/Christian culture except by way of dilution and/or outright falsification. The 'dark truth' of Afro American music remains unquestionably 'oppositional'." Lately, a leader in the ever growing call and response chorus of praise for the book has been African American cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelley, author of "Yo' Mama's DisFUNKtional" (Beacon Press), who calls the Garon work, "absolutely the best book on blues music." And in her new volume, "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism" (Pantheon), noted black scholar and activist Angela Davis singles out Garon's tome for favorable mention while freely dissing the bulk of the blues literary canon. These two plaudits must be particularly gratifying to Garon since he has always insisted that the blues must be discussed first and foremost as a black poetry of resistance to racist oppression and Eurocentric notions of white supremacy. As Garon says in his book, "Poetry, kindled by desire, is the light that can dispel the pallor of bourgeois civilization. It does this through its use of 'images', 'convulsive' images, images of the fantastic and the marvelous, images of 'desire'." In exploring the fertile crossroads between art and the politics of desire that has shaped the popular cultural form known as the blues, no other book even comes close.