A Confluence: Poetry and Jazz
April shares her great transformation with poetry and jazz.
Some committee somewhere designated April National Poetry AND National Jazz month. April has to share her pink spears of peonies, plum blossoms and crinkled rhubarb with Carl Sandburg and Oscar Peterson! I like the idea of spring, words, and music caught up in a torrent of streams merging.
Writer, and teacher, Kenneth Koch, in his book, Making Your Own Days, devotes an entire chapter to music. The chapter begins with two quotes: “Music can make us do what it wants.” (Pythagoras) “Poetry searches for music amidst the tumult of the dictionary.” (Boris Pasternak)
Koch begins his chapter with this sentence. It’s hard to say if the music of poetry creates the emotion in a poem, or if it is the poet’s emotion that creates the music. Poets find their own music in the words they write. This music is an essential part of the “translation” a poet makes from ordinary to poetic language.
Poets and musicians use the same tool box. In it we find rhythm, meter, line, form, lyricism, energy, sound and silence.
Robert Wrigley wrote about poetry and music for the Writer’s Chronicle in 2000. He wrote “I envy the musician’s utter abandon to sound. It’s a kind of ache I feel. I wish. I wish. I want to be able to bring forth the very kind of exquisite sadness music proffers.” He says he wishes he could “be a pair of vocal cords scatting across a bandstand somewhere. I want to la-la a capella across the page and move them to tears.”
I listen with a pen in my hand. I could be at a symphony concert, string quartet, or jazz club. I will be found with my tiny journal, and ball point pen. (Pencils make too much noise. Remember to click your pen before the music begins. You don’t want to incur nasty looks.) I can’t not write in the presence of live music, except when I’m playing. I must respond.
“Red” Mitchell is one of my heros. He was a jazz bass player extraordinaire, performing with a large number of top-rank bands in a variety of styles. He was a poet, too, “The Poet Behind the Bass.” Here are three short poems of Red’s.
Jazz
Something less than perfect will do
but it must be perfectly you.
Morningtime
There is something nice with the morningtime
For music and also for verse
The first soft feelings of flowing forward
This mind coming out of reverse.
My Only Home Is My Suitcase
My only home is my suitcase
All the hotels are the same
My oldest love is my old bass
Everything else is a game.
~ “Red” Mitchell
Poets who write in response to jazz are multitude. Consider, Kate Green, Sylvia Plath, Phillip Dacey, Ann Sexton, Ray Gonzalez, Bill Holm, Ralph Ellison, Quincey Troupe, Billy Collins, Keith Flynn, and you probably know twenty more.
One of my favorite lines is from Kate Green’s “Saturday Night at the Emporium of Jazz.” She opens the poem this way:
God, if there be a heaven,
let it be Saturday night
at the Emporium of Jazz in Mendota,
Jay McShann in a shimmering brown suit,
his hands blurred reflections
in perfectly sheened ebony
of the piano. Smoke in air
dusky like half rain
outside November night.
~ Kate Green
Oh, Kate sets the scene! Take me there.
Resources
Kenneth Koch, Making Your Own Days, Scribner, 1998
Keith “Red” Mitchell, Selected Poems, Red Inc. Music Company, 1999
Mixed Voices, Contemporary Poems about Music, edited by Emilie Buchwald, Milkweed Editions, 1991