The bodily pain which speaks of slavery can also be seen: “turn back, and move/ by river through swamps.” The pain of having been slaves, which eventually led to their attempt of escaping through the swamps of the south, is comparable to the pain from which the blues stems. The speaker here shows how genitals failed to connect with the music, with the pain that could have produce both movement and desire. Sex as genitalia can be connected later on through out the poem: “There is no substitute for pain/genitals gone or going,/seed burned out.”

This should be read as both the act and the genitalia to bring into line the body with the sexuality embodied by jazz music. In the line “Sex fingers toes,” the speaker uses the word sex which may be connoted to have a double meaning. The poem focuses on the physical image to bring Coltrane’s jazz to another venue while still squarely within the body. The poem uses bodily and at the same time cultural images of reproduction calls and attention which later leads to the creation and reproduction of jazz. The poem undermines the communication that venerates John Coltrane’s music by making it a big issue whether or not there is a possibility that music of a dead person will serve as an aesthetic to the black’s culture. The elegy focuses on the man’s death and the progress of his music from immediate and alive to reproduced and commodified from the time of his permanent absence. The poem mimics the form of Coltrane’s jazz novelty through depicting his image of bodily death. Harper’s public elegy entitled Dear John, Dear Coltrane serves as an elegy to a jazz musician and the legacy which he was able to share through his music. He furthers his promise of retribution by showing his word of honor as that “if we fail to avenge Malcolm’s death, let us never breathes a pure breath.” At this point, the speaker wanted the black men to look deeper into Malcolm’s eyes, words, heart, and dignity as well as his desire to change the world so that the voices of black men can continue to speak and act within the space Malcolm helped create. In the closing lines, the speaker, challenges the black men to “let nothing in rest” until Malcolm’s death has taken vengeance. Instead of accepting their defeat, black men should raise their heads with dignity and see Malcolm as their greatest example of African American pride, masculinity, and political activism. The speaker incites that he intended his readers particularly the black men to quit “stuttering and shuffling”, “whining and stooping” and to “look up”.

Amiri baraka poems analysis