“There it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE”: A Review of Joseph Pizza’s Dissonant Voices

Abstract: In Dissonant Voices: Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Midcentury America , Joseph Pizza steps ambitiously into the compositional landscape of the “open field,” exploring anew the poetic commitments and aspirations of its projectivist practitioners. In mapping the knotty terrain of a range of interracial relationships between Black Mountain, Beat, and Black Arts Movement poets—and with jazz as a compass—the book urges a reconsideration of some of the most prominent interventions within twentieth-century American poetry.