ABSTRACT
To the African-American elegist, the death of Goltrane is not experienced merely as a withdrawal of Coltrane from the sphere of the living; it is an event that threatens what is left behind. It is an enforced rupture in the fabric of collective being, a ruin in the time of growing communal consciousness — and, hence, it is both metonymic instance of an alienated Afro-America and synecdochic type of the modern black poet's crisis of expression. The stilling of Coltrane's horn is taken as a representative assault on black voice as a shared instrument of perception and inspiration, its capacity for memory and its readiness for efficacious action. Coltrane's death registers a disturbance at the core of modern black culture's claim to performative power sufficient to exceed a history of containment, to transgress the systematic codes that have sought to reduce African-American culture to a vacant sign of futility. Does black expression, the poets wonder in the face of Coltrane's loss, meet its vanishing point exactly where it seemed (to cite Spellman's "Did John's Music Kill Him?") most "brilliant"?
