High school almost ruined poetry for me. Between counting syllables and trying to understand the point of trochees and dactyls, the whole thing seemed needlessly fussy. When we got to modern poetry, I threw my hands up in the face of words scattered higgledy-piggledy around the page. I couldn’t even figure out how to read the poems at that point and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Since then, I’ve made my peace with poetry, but more importantly, I’ve also realized that poems don’t always find their natural home on the page. African-American poetry has a long tradition of writing that is meant to be heard and on Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Poets Read Their Work, Rhino Records has assembled an excellent two-disc set that is an introduction to the pleasure of performed poetry.

Wanda Coleman’s “I Live For My Car,” shows the value of performed poetry. Recorded live in 1985, the audience can be heard rallying around Coleman’s lament for the way her car has become the center of her life. Her performance of the poem takes it from the solitude of the page and puts it in a social situation where the audience can laugh and find common ground with everybody present that has experienced car hell. When a poem is read, it and poet become part of a community in a way that doesn’t happen with printed poetry.

It is in performance where the audience also discovers just how thoroughly jazz and blues influence African-American poetry. The repetition of lines in Ishmael Reed’s “Betty’s Ball Blues” and Sonia Sanchez’ “Wounded in the House of a Friend (Set. No. 2)” suggests the blues and satisfies in a way that the written versions don’t. After all, looking at the same line twice doesn’t have the same effect as hearing it twice. Similarly, you expect to hear jazz’s influence in Amiri Baraka’s “Bang Bang Outishly”—a poem for Thelonious Monk—and Michael S. Harper’s “Dear John, Dear Coltrane;” after all, both are about jazz figures. Regardless of the subject though, poets can be heard phrasing words at one point slowly, then in quick, clipped syllables to play around the ghost of a beat that can often be found at the heart of these poems. A few poems actually feature musical backing. Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” is performed as part of his “Dream Montage” with Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather supporting him, and Jayne Cortez, Ornette Coleman’s wife, performs “Endangered Species List Blues” in front of a blues band. In a slightly controversial move, editors Zoe Anglesey, Deep Red and D Knowledge followed the lead of the editors of The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature and included musical tracks from Gil Scott-Heron and Public Enemy. Clearly a line can be drawn from poetry to their lyrics, but there is something reminiscent of English teachers treating lyrics as poems in the decision.

Perhaps the most important function of performed poetry is that the reading humanizes poetry. In high school and college, I thought of poetry as something made by other people, something separate and different from our lives. In the recording of W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Atlanta Years,” his speech impediment makes him sound like a real person, and when he reads “Dark Symphony,” Melvin B. Tolson sounds like the hellfire and brimstone preacher we recognize. Ishmael Reed’s sense of fun is clear in his tall tale, “Flight to Canada,” and the reading of “Freedom Suite (For Sonny Rollins and Franz Kline)” features a young Amiri Baraka obviously enjoying the feeling that he has found a voice as an artist. In short, we recognize the emotions and voices we hear in performed poetry and that diminishes the alienness and intellectual class distinctions we associate with the literature we read in school.

Critics of performed poetry charge that poets “sell” inferior poems with powerful readings, but that complaint hardly holds water in this case. Our Souls Have Grown Deep Like the Rivers features recorded versions of classic poems by Sterling A. Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Wole Soyinka and Nikki Giovanni among others. In fact, 23 of the poems recorded appear in The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, and all but the most modern poets are represented there as well. The material more than stands up on the page, though many pieces find their true home on tape or in front of an audience. By collecting it, Rhino has taken the first step to undoing the damage done by high school.

A book on Ellis Marsalis seems like a good idea. After all, anyone with as many talented offspring as he has must have a story worth telling. What happened to him to make him the parent he became? To make him the teacher he became? And what did he feed those boys growing up? D. Antoinette Handy, former director of the Music Program for the National Endowment for the Arts took up the challenge and wrote Jazz Man’s Journey, a biography of Marsalis. Unfortunately, Handy’s well-intentioned biography doesn’t answer the questions people want to know, and as a read, will likely disappoint more than it will satisfy.

Remarkably, Handy dedicates a scant 19 pages to Marsalis’ life. Everyone’s life requires more than 19 pages to tell, so it seems like someone who has made a living as a part of New Orleans’ music community will require a few hundred pages at least. Rather than interview Wynton and Branford, Handy sent them blank tapes asking them to record reminiscences about their father. On one hand, such a method is respectful in the extreme, but it is unlikely to get useful answers and in fact, she confesses she didn’t get much in the way of responses. Later she includes four pages of “Marsalis Profundities,” quotes from Marsalis about jazz and teaching that, taken out of context, seem less profound than they probably seemed in context. In short, Handy’s admiration for Marsalis is obvious—she titles the first chapter “The Making of New Orleans’ Resident Genius, Ellis Marsalis Jr.”—and understandable, but the journalistic skills required for such a project do not appear to be hers.