Youth: careful touch of keys
Age: bold, joyful dynamics
Best way to ripen.
Category: Poetry About Music
A new poem draft: The Atheist Confronts A LOVE SUPREME
The Atheist Confronts A Love Supreme
It’s just vibrations:
Reeds
Skins
Metal
Catgut
Wood
Wires
Set in motion by
Lips
Tongues
Lungs
Hands
Feet,
In turn, set in motion by
Minds that are not free,
That are run on chemicals
and electricity—
And there is no heart;
The heart is an organ—
And it’s all molecules anyhow.
It may seem spirit-sound
In its volume
movement
dynamics
repetitions
In its prayer-coherence
but
God’s not in it.
No god hears it.
That’s what he thinks.
But in a half-century of
Proselytizing on its merits,
It is not what he says.
This is not subterfuge.
It is stubborn impulse,
Some synapse snap,
That makes him whisper,
“It is spiritual.”
Paul Blackburn, “Listening to Sonny Rollins at The Five Spot”: When Jazz Poetry Works
No one should be surprised to learn that an attempt to parallel the rhythms, inventions, and effects of jazz has fueled a raft of poetry over the years. Just as great jazz is difficult, so is great jazz poetry. Here’s a stellar one that, to my eye and ear, is a spectacular success. It’s called “Listening to Sonny Rollins at The Five Spot,” and it’s written by Paul Blackburn:
THERE WILL be many other nights like
be standing here with someone, some
one
someone
some-one
some
some
some
some
some
some
one
there will be other songs
a-nother fall, another spring, but
there will never be a-noth, noth
anoth
noth
anoth-er
noth-er
noth-er
Other lips that I may kiss,
but they won’t thrill me like
thrill me like
like yours
used to
dream a million dreams
but how can they come
when there
never be
a-noth
Just for fun, play this clip of Rollins playing–what else?–“There Will Never Be Another You.” The venue isn’t The Five Spot, and Rollins is incapable, I think, of duplicating an improvisation, but I think it might go a long way towards proving Blackburn’s triumph in the above poem.
Note: The song “There Will Never Be Another You” was written in 1942 by Harry Warren (music) and Mack Gordon (lyrics) for the Sonja Henie musical Iceland. I believe I am right in saying that jazz musicians have put the song to more lasting use (try Chet Baker’s, too).
The Wrong Notes (A poem Thelonious Monk caused)
My truck cab is compact
But built for euphony.
I squeeze in for a ride,
Disc in hand
To fit my feeling,
Slide it in the player:
No place for sound to go
But to besiege me beautifully.
I don’t even know I am driving
Sometimes.
A splendid day.
Sun’s rays,
Monk’s notes,
And a healthy engine
Turn me
Half my age as I
Cruise the main drag.
No beer between my legs
But my fellows are using their
Turn signals
And eschewing phones
Out there.
Hardly does this bliss
Settle when a crabbed image
From our sick spirit
Troubles my sight:
Four rumpled men
With signs and staves
Shouting at girl
Ducking in a clinic door.
I want to blast my horn as I pass.
Backs to the road,
They stand a yard from the curb.
Heart attack, perhaps?
They could be ministering
To the poor
Instead of fouling this child’s day
And mine.
As I ball my fist
Another sound intrudes.
The cab is tight.
It’s Monk,
Hammering out
A dissonant smear
(Like that picket gang)
To break the ear’s ease
In half.
Like the porter’s knock,
To break the spell,
But of pleasure,
Not horror.
Either spell is
Chicanery in our
Quest for truth.
Monk, those notes
Were right.
I drove past
Silent
As one you suspended.
“Texas Playboy”: The Only Poem I’ve Written in the Last 15 Years
…and it’s no surprise it’s about Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. This comes from maybe 6-7 years ago. I was teaching seniors at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, and trying to persuade them to shoot high in preparing for our class poetry slam. Nothing was seeming to work (strategies, videos, models, exercises, live readings), and, mildly crestfallen at my failure, I was surfing YouTube when I came to this video:
As usual, contact with Wills’ music banished the blues, then it occurred to me, “Hey, I’ll write my own poem for the slam, and surreptitiously introduce them to one of my all-time idols. If you know anything about The Youth of the ‘Oughts, you know any hope of them welcoming music like Western Swing with open arms was going to be dashed on the rocks. Still, I plunged blindly ahead. Here are the results, and after almost a decade, I guess I like them, because I am posting it:
“Texas Playboy”
After class one day,
Kid asks me about Howlin’ Wolf.
I submerge into pure joy for ten minutes
Channeling some Delta griot’s ghost that
Mastered me when I was the kid’s age.
When I surface, flushed but conscious,
The kid gapes at me with worried eyes.
Stutters, “So who’s your favorite?”
Speechless, I lie.
“That’s a parlor game, kid, shows
Free enterprise won’t even let you
Think about art without having to
Declare a winner. Good Lord.”
Kid shrugs, looks at his shoes.
“What a dick,” he thinks.
Fact is, I know all about such games.
Play them myself all the time.
Playing one now.
Have a favorite.
Looking at him now
On You Tube,
This portal for dead musicians
And hoarded cathode memories.
He is fat,
His belt sitting atop his navel
like a rough uncle.
Blatant toup wraps a head
Split by cophragous grin.
Squat, he struts the stage
Like a doctored chicken
In white cowboy boots.
White.
His axe?
A fiddle.
He is everything I know
Of cool.
This explains the lie, kid.
Old black and white short
From the Forties.
Crowded by a sextet,
Crouching as if to make,
He points fiddle bow at pianist,
And looses two euphoric syllables:
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh-ha!”
Bouncing saloon tinkles
Trigger steel
Trigger guit
Trigger trumpet
Trigger drums
Trigger fiddles.
Swing emerges,
Magic, ecumenical,
Impossibly joyous.
Wine tasters raise my hackles.
But permit me this:
If you could drink this sound
You would taste
Africa
Germany
Scotland
Our own maligned Texas.
Two choruses in,
He whirls and stabs bow
at the other fiddler.
“Ahhhhhhhhh, Joe D.”
By tune’s end,
All have shone.
Foreground:
Couples shelve grievances,
Embrance and spin,
Imagine, believe in,
Harmony.
He takes it home,
Raises fiddle to chin,
Graces band with a
Smiling, peripheral gaze.
So, kid—Bob Wills.
In my fantasy, I both
Point the bow
And wait my turn.
It flowed out if me in about 15 minutes, then I took about an hour to hammer at it. I read it to the kids the next day–of course, I showed the above video, and had to do a verbal version of footnotes, but they did not throw anything at me. And…every student wrote a poem and participated. The class elected its own judges, and I held myself out from the competition, obviously, but guess what won?
A poem that read like the lyrics to an Usher song, but, as its punchline revealed, was about washing and waxing…a car.
You can’t win ’em all. Or maybe you can.
Living To Listen 