Margaret Busby on Jazz, Africa, and the Endurance of Jayne Cortez’s Disruptive Poetry

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Margaret Busby.

Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL (Nana Akua Ackon) is a writer, editor, broadcaster, and literary critic. She is the editor of Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent (Pantheon Books, 1992) and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (HarperCollins), in addition to Firespitter: The Collected Poems of Jayne Cortez (Nightboat Books, 2025). Busby’s own collected writings will be published by Hamish Hamilton in 2026.

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Poets.org: What did you learn about Jayne Cortez that you didn’t know before working on Firespitter?

Margaret Busby: How brave and wonderfully disruptive she always was in her work. And how relevant her poetry remains. Not that I didn’t already believe that, but rereading her words was a reminder of how far ahead of the game she always was.

Poets.org: What was your approach to editing this collection, and how did it evolve?

MB: It was a real honor to be asked by Denardo Coleman and Melvin Edwards to edit this collection of Jayne’s writing, and a true privilege to be able to spend time with her work. Of course, I began by sharing my treasure trove of photographic memories in which were captured our mutual interactions over three decades, in the United States, the United Kingdom, and on the African continent.

In 2013, the year after Jayne died, I had been with Mel and Denardo for the international symposium of women writers that Jayne had long been planning—Yari Yari Ntoaso: Continuing the Dialogue—and which was attended by a host of luminary women from around the world, among them Ama Ata Aidoo, Esi Sutherland-Addy, Angela Davis, Natalia Molebatsi, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Sapphire, Véronique Tadjo, and Tess Osonye Onwueme.

My approach to editing Firespitter was, first, to assemble all the available works (luckily PDFs of those that were out-of-print were available) and order them chronologically by publication date, paying attention to authorial changes and variations that were sometimes made in volumes containing both new and selected poems.

It was an altogether fascinating process and, knowing how hands-on Jayne would have been in producing and designing her own publications, made it all the more crucial to honor her intentions. I related totally to her as a publisher in a pre-computer era, so every space came under scrutiny.

Poets.org: What was your “gateway” into the craft of poetry—the poem or poetry collection that made you fall in love with this literary form?

MB: My personal gateway to poetry, beginning with learning to read at the age of four, was a love for words in general—especially the rhythm of long, multisyllabic words—combined with a passion for music (inherited from the maternal line of my family in which singers, musicians and music aficionados feature in abundance).

As a preteen, I began to write poems myself which were printed in my school magazine; and Latin lessons made me aware of poetic innovators such as Catullus (“passer mortuus est meae puellae / passer, deliciae meae puellae, / quem plus illa oculis suis amabat….“).

As an undergraduate in the 1960s, I was drawn to the experimental irreverence of writers of the Beat generation. The poetry and jazz movement loomed large on my horizon, particularly since I became a jazz wife at about the same time that I cofounded a publishing company, straight out of university.

The first three Allison & Busby titles were poetry—by Libby Houston, James Reeves, and James Grady—and we added numerous other poets to the list, including Michelangelo, and my one-time father-in-law Geoffrey Grigson. I also found writing song lyrics irresistible and was captivated by vocalese, sung by the likes of King Pleasure, Oscar Brown Jr., and Annie Ross.

Most of all, I was always strongly drawn to anthologies, where I connected with Black writers with whom I could identify, names completely absent from my formal education. One collection that made a big impact on me was 1962’s Beyond the Blues, edited by Rosey E. Poole, for which an accompanying LP of readings was produced.

Of course, poetry is not the only literary form I enjoy, and being able to edit two anthologies of my own has presented me with the best of all possible worlds. Jayne Cortez’s poems “Consultation,” “Push Back the Catastrophes,” and “Jazz Fan Looks Back” were in my 1992 book Daughters of Africa, as were contributions from more than two hundred other women of African descent, representing every genre.

More recently, I was delighted to edit a sort of reprise, New Daughters of Africa (2019), with a completely different cast of more than two hundred African-heritage women who generously all came on board to enable an award [The Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award] for a woman student from Africa. Poetry was the preferred choice of at least one novelist I invited to be a contributor.

Poets.org: If you could pair one of the poems in Firespitter with a work of art, song, recipe, or some other form of media, which poem would you choose, and with what would you pair it?

MB: The artwork by Jayne’s husband Melvin Edwards was always a perfect fit for Jayne’s books. Some of her compositions—I’m not sure why!—bring to my mind the Ghanaian dish palaver sauce: full of an interesting mix of contrasting ingredients and spices, served with rice, potatoes, garri, fufu, yam, plantain.

But I would settle for her poem “Jazz Fan Looks Back,” and since Ella Fitzgerald is twice mentioned in it, perhaps Ella scatting “How High the Moon” or “Oh, Lady Be Good” would fit the bill.

Poets.org: What do you hope readers discover about Cortez from this collection?

MB: As well as readers discovering her for the first time, others may be thrilled to rediscover the work of Jayne Cortez. Many of her books have been unavailable for too long. To be able to explore the whole range of her oeuvre and see how relevant it is in today’s political and social climate is magical.

On a trip to South Africa last month, I was in Soweto township on June 16, a day marking the anniversary of the 1976 “Soweto uprising,” when demonstrations were led by Black schoolchildren during apartheid in protest of the introduction of Afrikaans, considered the “language of the oppressor,” for teaching. They were met with unrelenting police brutality and hundreds were shot dead.

It was impossible for Jayne’s poem, “For the Brave Young Students in Soweto,” not to be resonating in my head. I hope readers will learn by her example how inextricable, how interdependent are activist politics and culture.

Poets.org: What are you currently reading?

MB: A volume that was a quarter-century in the making: The Inferno, a new translation of Dante by former Poet Laureate of Jamaica Lorna Goodison. I am taking my time to read it. I am uplifted whenever I return to it, savoring canto after canto. To my ears, Goodison is pitch-perfect.

A review by Randy Boyagoda noted, “And just as Dante chose Virgil as his guide, she chooses Louise Bennett-Coverley, a Jamaican poet and folklorist who, like the author, eventually settled in Canada. Led by ‘Miss Lou,’ Goodison’s narrator explores Jamaican culture and history, before and during and after colonization.” Many voices for the price of one!

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

MB: So many! Naming them is as difficult as choosing only eight music tracks to take with you on a desert island—a constantly changing list.

But today’s picks are: Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me” and “the lost women”; Jayne Cortez, “Jazz Fan Looks Back”; Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Aubade to Langston”; Lavinia Greenlaw, “The Spirit of the Staircase”; and Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

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“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.