ABSTRACT
This chapter explores about the "Taking it Out" poems. Jayne Cortez's use of jazz music as a medium for corroborating the impact of her activist poetry is significant because of jazz music's role in the propagation of Black American civil rights. On the page, Cortez's poems contain short lines lacking punctuation and teeming with repetition. The poem "Maintain Control" begins with a quatrain of repeated lines broken by caesurae. Cortez sets up a musical, rhythmic backbone as the poem's refrain, and these rhetorical questions challenge the speaker to a level of self-awareness she lacks as a result of the crushing realities of her socioeconomic status. Cortez's work argues for the dignity of the black diasporic experience through her refusal to compromise her choice of language. Thus, "Maintain Control" is primarily a poem that illuminates the particular human condition of someone suppressed by the engines of capitalism.
