Jazz Across Movements
While both the jazz poetry from the Harlem Renaissance and the jazz poetry from the Black Arts Movement have some similarities in form and style, they have many major differences in tone and meaning. The style of the Harlem Renaissance embraces the roaring twenties and self pride in their black identity. The tone of reading jazz poetry from this time seems more upbeat, like the poets are attempting to channel jazz and dance into their art. In contrast, the Black Arts Movement provided a new restructuring of jazz poetry as a way to let out frustration from the slow progress of getting equal rights. Forming at the end of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement emphasized putting feelings into poetry and furthering their fight for equality in the art that poets make. Both styles of jazz poetry contain a collage of music, sounds and voices that the poet wanted to include, and occasionally arrange the words on the page in a non-standard manner in order to have a deepe...