Jazz Forward!

A book I'm currently reading, "Playing Changes" by Nate Chinen, is a fascinating argument that we are currently in an age of amazing new jazz artists and an equal amount of amazing innovation and new ways for jazz composers and soloists to further this resilient art of musical improvisation. The premise is not one I'd bicker with--ours is a time when the "jazz is dead" club needs to just be silent for a very long time and listen to the creativity that abounds. But, as the review points out, author Chinen, a critic with a forward-thinking preference for new and temperamentally sounds, writes in a such a way that he makes you think of the guy who must have been the least interesting student in a seminar on post-modernism. He does not, as the reviewer suggests, at times sound like Derrida; rather, he seems more like a person who thinks he sounds like Derrida. Which is a shame, because although Chinen writes about important artists and at times makes crucial distinctions in what is happening in the ever-evolving jazz timeline, it seems that the premise of the book is that the music exists only to be co-opted and made to dance between inscrutable phrases and descriptions that don't really intrigue a reader to actually go out and purchase some of this fine new music. Tellingly, Nate Chinen chides the older critical establishment, those who would have jazz become a formalized canon, set in place, with boundaries and inflexible boundaries, yet he seems to be working to construct his own fiefdom of critical imperative. Meet the new boss...In any case, all this begs the question to be asked, which is why can't there be a working idea of jazz that doesn't require anyone going to war against other schools of thoughts on the music, or specific ways of playing. A jazz fan can enjoy both and not be betraying whatever "true spirit" of jazz the critical camps think. Seriously, one occasionally feels that some critics, whether Leonard Feather , Amiri Baraka or Nate Chinen, despite his protest to the contrary, wish they could be in the studio, instructing the musicians in what their note selections and points of creating tension and release should be.

54 year old lunch break.

It's been fifty-four years since the publication of Frank O'Hara's seminal book "Lunch Poems:, which means that I was twelve when it first appeared. It was a small book, part of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Pocket Poets series on his City Lights imprint, and it was one of those books you saw everywhere you went as a young person in search of experience, ideas, and kicks  of a sort; it was on bookshelves and stuffed  in back pockets all over the map, especially the city map. Reading Frank O'Hara was one of those authors you had to read in order to feel current with the alternative culture. Despite the book's ubiquity when I was a teen and a young poet/musician/critic looking to make a mark, I didn't read the volume until I was in my late twenties, after a couple of other poets I'd made friends with strongly suggested that my own work resembled O'Hara's. Curious, of course, I dug up the copy of "Lunch Poems" I bought a couple of years earlier, along with a stack of other assorted texts and which I had also left in said stack.  How much my work resembles O'Hara is something for others to suss out, but I will say that I had made a new friend ; the poet's ebullient breeziness, his disdain for the formal conception of profundity, his ability to write a poem that seems wonderfully to capture the sense of an alert mind noticing the city and its citizens and the work and play they do simultaneously is, I think, one of the miracles of modern poetry. With its abrupt beginnings, swooning affection for the tacky, the tarnished and frayed, with its emotions obviously and playfully at the surface of all things engaged, O'Hara transformed the lyric poem; he brought the lone voice speaking of its adventures closer to the thriving verve of accelerated jazz.

Frank O’Hara published a poem he wrote in 1964 about where he was and what he was doing when he heard that fabled jazz and blues singer Billie Holiday passed away. There is temptation to scratch your head after you read and offer a dumbfounded groan, wondering what the hell this babbling prattle might be. I had the same response, but repeat readings of the poem gave me a blue, as second and third readings of verse that reveal themselves like opened Christmas gifts often do. The poem isn’t about Holiday, it does sing her praises or moon over the soul and genius that is no longer hours to witness live and suffering for our entertainment. What had been remarked about her was already said, what she had done was well known fact and the stuff of legend; her music was the kind that seeped into the soul and played the over tuned strings of your heart, as was the case with O’Hara. The city poet was going about his business scurrying New York City getting things done, crowding his hours with chats, errands, music, a drink, more chatter, a day like another, indistinguishable until the the latest of worst possible things that could happen , happens:

THE DAY LADY DIED        

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                                        I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

A perfect monologue of someone's hurried, distracted trek through a bustling city scape , attempting to get things done and then prepare themselves for later pleasure or duties performed , an accounting of inane events, a list of stupid rituals and stop overs that merge suddenly with news of incredible sadness, a deep sharp wound that is made that brings  on the ironic counter effect, a recollection of joy. Frank O'Hara's tribute to Lady Day makes sense and it is one of the very few that people remember from poetry because, I think, you have a sense that he is a friend who was standing next to you when first heard of the tragic passing of someone close to your heart. It's a poem that you re-read, over and over, through the decades. Frank O'Hara wrote more than a few poems like that.

It's been fifty years since the publication of Frank O'Hara's seminal book "Lunch Poems":, which means that I was twelve when it first appeared. It was a small book, part of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Pocket Poets series on his City Lights imprint, and it was one of those books you saw everywhere you went as a young person in search of experience, ideas, and kicks of a sort; it was on bookshelves and stuffed in back pockets all over the map, especially the city map. Reading Frank O'Hara was one of those authors you had to read in order to feel current with the alternative culture.  Despite the book's ubiquity when I was a teen and a young poet/musician/critic looking to make a mark, I didn't read the volume until I was in my late twenties, after a couple of other poets I'd made friends with strongly suggested that my own work resembled O'Hara's. Curious, of course, I dug up the copy of "Lunch Poems" I bought a couple of years earlier, along with a stack of other assorted texts and which I had also left in said stack. How much my work resembles O'Hara is something for others to suss out, but I will say that I had made a new friend ; the poet's ebullient breeziness, his disdain for the formal conception of profundity, his ability to write a poem that seems wonderfully to capture the sense of an alert mind noticing the city and its citizens and the work and play they do simultaneously is, I think, one of the miracles of modern poetry. With its abrupt beginnings, swooning affection for the tacky, the tarnished and frayed, with its emotions obviously and playfully at the surface of all things engaged, O'Hara transformed the lyric poem; he brought the lone voice back from its time in the wilderness of  the deepest part of downtown and gave it the swing and brackish grit of fast, rapid played  bebop.

THE NATION POETRY EDITORS ARE COWARDS

The Nation published a poem by a white poet, Anders Carlson-Wee, written in an idiom likely influenced by black American speech, and the result was a loud and sustained clamor of discontent, protest and other varieties of outrage from some readers. The Nation did a horrible thing; they allowed the poetry editors to apologize for a provocative poem obviously intended to provoke a discussion. The poem that riled so many:

HOW TO

If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,

say you’re pregnant––nobody gonna lower

themselves to listen for the kick. People

passing fast. Splay your legs, cock a knee

funny. It’s the littlest shames they’re likely

to comprehend. Don’t say homeless, they know

you is. What they don’t know is what opens

a wallet, what stops em from counting

what they drop. If you’re young say younger.

Old say older. If you’re crippled don’t

flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough

Christians to notice. Don’t say you pray,

say you sin. It’s about who they believe

they is. You hardly even there.

                                          --Anders Carlson-Wee

Progressives get upset when they are called snowflakes, but the poetry editor's knee-jerk reaction to the critical reception to this poem is nothing less than a spineless surrender to the encroaching tyranny of politically approved language. The editors, in their apology, tell us that their first reading of a poem was that it addressed, in idiomatic language, the problematic circumstances of disenfranchised Americans and the privileged elite that either ineffectively tries to help them or ignores them outright, about how the oppressed would advise others in the same circumstances to work around the obstacles that impede them. Their first assessment was the right one, and consider the poet's effort to compose the poem the way he did, a brave and purposefully provocative one. Sadly, those looking to be offended dragged out their bullhorns and vehemently announced their hurt feelings, to which poetry editors Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith sheepishly said:” We can no longer read the poem in that way.” Bear in mind, this reversal was not the result of a critical reexamination of first impressions or a philosophical discussion as to why they believe their first view was in error. The strong implication is that they didn't want to be yelled at anymore, This would have been a great moment to turn this poem into a fruitful discussion of the many perceptions might engender, about the role of voice in political poetry, about the validity or vapidity of negative capability, about how the author's persona in the poem advances the invisible cruel ironies of daily life for the marginalized or how it fails. It might have been the discussion this poem was meant to provoke. The editors write that they “…recognize that we must now earn your trust back. “ 

As poetry is an art meant to compel the reader to think about the world in different ways and to consider that matters between human beings are much more than mere sentiment, and given the editor's cowardly about-face on this issue destroys what trust I might have placed in these two. Worse, far worse, is that they've destroyed their creditability as poetry editors. They are afraid of poems that might disturb readers. This is careerist ass-saving at its most loathsome. Burt and Smith should resign their position and seek less stressful work. Shame on them and shame on the Nation for allowing this flight from free expression.

SASSY WITH STYLE

THAT'LL NEVER BE ME-
-Nathan and Jessie

A wonderfully exotic bit here, That’ll Never Be Me, by the trio Nathan and Jessie. Yes, a trio despite the problematic moniker, based in Temecula and composed of guitarist-vocalist Nathan Rivera, guitarist-vocalist Jessie Smith, and Trevor Mulvey on upright bass. Performing all original songs, Nathan and Jessie have their roots in a variety of old-timey styles; a jazzy mélange of blues, folk, gypsy swing; and hints of klezmer and country lurking around the edges of their sound. None of this is second hand, as the writing is fully realized, tuneful, alternately sweet and tart, joyous and melancholic, poetic and plaintive, the melodies and buoyant instrumentation keeps you wondering what odd, effective twist might come at you next. 

A country song wanders gleefully through the imagined fields and streams that make a simple love call a righteous surrender to joy itself, only to be followed by a soaring, resonating clarinet solo on the upswing of the next song, the tempo swaying with confirmed confidence. Nathan and Jessie (and Trevor, we should mention as well) mix, match, and merge their influences; the baroque richness of gypsy swing segues into a samba groove, mandolins, clarinets, and jazz guitars are brought together without an exposed seam. 

This made me think of nothing else so much as the Band’s eponymous second album, a masterpiece in bringing together a good many musical styles and transcending the quality of mere eclecticism and instead creating something altogether new. Nathan and Jessie come near that same quality, seeming to find aspects of the old music that’s influenced them collectively and rather naturally allowing the distinctiveness of their own experience shape the music they wrote and arranged for themselves. 

Making That’ll Never Be Me ever more attractive is the elan of their vocals, which sparkle, soar, both in harmony and as soloists. The voices are clear, flexible, with jazzman’s sense of being able to sense a mood, a rhythm, a pitch. The singing makes for witty readings of the lyrics. Nathan, Jessie, and Phil are remarkable musicians who create and keep this fine web of tones going and growing, and they are aided with guest turns by equally remarkable musicians, including jazz guitarist Ryan Dart doing some fleet work on “This Could Be Love” and Kale Stiles multi-tasking on clarinet, lap steel guitar, mandolin, and bass clarinet through the tracks. The trio proves this: that the styles may be old-timey, but the music is not. That’ll Never Be Me is the sound.

(This originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission).

Some thoughts on a Michael Drayton poem

• HOW MANY PALTRY, FOOLISH, PAINTED THINGS

  (Michael Drayton, 1563-1631)

  How many paltry foolish painted things,

  That now in coaches trouble every street,

  Shall be forgotten, whom no poet sings,

  Ere they be well wrapped in their winding-sheet!

  Where I to thee eternity shall give,

  When nothing else remaineth of these days,

  And queens hereafter shall be glad to live

  Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.

  Virgins and matrons, reading these my rhymes,

  Shall be so much delighted with thy story

  That they shall grieve they lived not in these times,

  To have seen thee, their sex’s only glory:

  So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng,

  Still to survive in my immortal song.

  Michael Drayton’s ode speaks to posterity, speaking to what he believes is the likelihood that this fair woman will be remembered, gloried and virtually worshipped as womanly perfection in ages yet to come by virtue of his poem. The ladies who now clutter the streets “shall be forgotten” by poets and this miss will be the envy of women of future elegant pretense because Drayton’s directly addressed ideal is “their sex’s only glory”. A harsh judgment, but it plays to vanity and a person’s feeling of being unjustly ignored. There is resentment here to be exploited and Drayton’s technique, effective or not, is a masterful piece of exploitation. It takes a man, after all, to make the world aware of the genius of the woman who has taken his arm in companionship, in romance, in matrimony. The woman is anonymous, a cipher without the right man to make the powers that are innate in her bosom radiate fiercely, proudly, for the world to praise and to cater to. “So shalt thou fly above the vulgar throng,/Still to survive in my immortal song.” This is to cleverly say that the woman will be remembered forever because of the man’s immortal song, which is also to say that only a man, this man, could have written. Without the man’s words, his voice, the woman being seduced is unknown, without the power he extols in the lyric, which is to say that she is without her own voice, bereft of even a language to command. rather classically, both these quick-witted sonnets display less the feeling of spontaneity, of genuine play, than they do the feeling of a well-constructed presentation, an argument mulled over, finessed and converted into a poeticized template intended for the means of endearing oneself to women by appealing to their perceived vanity. This makes you consider the old cartoon line when Olive Oyle says to Popeye and Bluto, as they try to woo her, “I bet you say that to all the girls.” The speakers, the wooers, the orators that profess the unqualified beauty, brilliance, charm, grace, and sublimity of their objects of affection, deliver their testimonies with it in mind to present themselves in an exceptional light; the sonnets are, in essence, sales pitches, imbuing the speakers with qualities compatible with the ones they’ve ascribed to their ladies dearest without so much as one self-glorified personal pronoun being used in either of these artfully cantilevered proclamations. It’s a subtle argument to be made that requires the most skillful of tongues, that the qualities , the talents that are being attached to the would be betrothed have not been noticed by the the rabble, the masses, those who live a generic existence, and that only the men who have broached and spoke to the subject of the ladies beauty are intelligent, sensitive, caring, dynamic enough to speak these truths. It is artful indeed, requiring a fine a balance, of knowing when to let one’s voice trail off, to end on a soft syllable, awaiting a response. This is bragging through the flattering of another.I rather like the wit and spare and adroit verbal sharpness that mark both of these poems; graceful, preening, softly boasting and flattering the women to whom they are addressed in terms that bestow qualities exceptional, unique, miraculous to behold, these are the testimonies of horn dogs working their way into a woman’s favor. And, perhaps, the respective beds they sleep. in.

  • 

    By chattel, I mean to say that the women of this historical period, even the ones singled out for plain-tho-generous praise in verse, are considered property. From Merriam Webster’s On-Line dictionary ” something (such as a slave, piece of furniture, tool, etc.) that a person owns other than land or buildings.” While I do believe that the real world sensibilities were a saner as regards the treatment of women, but there is the tendency in cultures dominated by the will, wishes, wiles, and whinings of men to treat women as if they were accessories, an extension of a man’s personality and little else. In the grander rhetoric of love poems and protestations of virtues bordering on sheer virtuosity, we realize that that the man who seeks to woo may as well be talking to a car salesman as he describes the vehicle he’d like to drive off the lot and bring home where he keeps his other stuff. On occasion, I am of the mind that love poems of the period were, in essence, projections of fragile egos confronting a Hobbesian universe where life was nasty, brutish and short. Again, this is a seduction that works in two different directions, to an audience that wishes to think well of itself and the ability of their cultivated readings and wit to make disruptive realities remain at bay, or at least out of mind, and , of course, for the women addressed directly, bluntly and yet with a spare poetry that resembles a truth the subject has denied.                
• 

  A woman can indeed sing the verse for a man and have no real confusion as a result if the situation were our current period, the here and right now. It’s a dubious proposition that a woman to man address, at least in what there was of the public sphere, would have done well with a readership, or listenership, as the case may be. Drayton’s verse survives because the word choices travel well through the centuries and the changes in how the culture leans. So yes, a woman may serenade a male with few changes to this lyric, but such was not always the case. I have my doubts Drayton had adaptability on his mind when he wrote his song; the constraints of songwriting likely had more to do with its genderless brevity. And yes, all seductions need willing partners for there to any kind of dominant/submissive relationship, but we must remember all the same that it is men writing these verses, not women and that it is a world of moral, aesthetic and philosophical imperatives that are created by generations of male poets. We may turn all of this on its head all we may care to and say a is really y, but that is really knee-jerk deconstruction at best.

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Louise Bogan burns down the barn

Women by Louise Bogan: The Poetry Foundation:

I was glad to read that  Louise Bogan remark that her poem, ‘Women”, was written when she was in her twenties and revealed what, she infers, is a not-unusual bitterness of intelligent young women feeling frustrated, restricted, defined and contained by her gender. Reading the poem, and listening to the audio kindly provided, it was a relief knowing in advance that her views of her sex “had improved”. What Bogan provides is a sure and slashing blade of metaphor against women in general, for their willingness to participate in their oppression.

“Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread. … ”

This is as an acute damnation as I’ve read, wickedly sharp, delivered in a masterfully sure stroke; there is an anger here that has sharpened her swing, The spare, cleanly delivered lines and uncluttered imagery reflect an irritation that has been mulled over and considered, pros and cons measured, the complaint reduced to a neatly consolidated statement to which response is difficult. Women have no fields in them, no inner sense of the world outside them, nor a curiosity of the lives that are outside their sphere of self-reference and gratification. They are, rather, provident, little else but skeletal abstractions of consciousness unto which the ideas of others, by implication the doings of men of industry, political where with all and sexual domination, are grafted upon, seeded upon, constantly turned over as the musings and distractions of Masters change at the slightest whim. Bogan’s judgment is severe and short-sighted as to the extent women allow men to define, contain and direct their lives, but this is an account of someone who, though perhaps too close to the contentiously emotional heart of the issue has, ironically, learned her lesson from Master Hemingway, delivering with relish a superbly honed rhetoric that condemns a self-induced stultification of her gender. Rather than take the plow and use the field for their desires and pursuits, she finds her sisters

“They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaningless…”

They wait for the muse not to come them, like their idea, hunch or inspiration, but instead to be given to them, like school uniforms and a script to follow. They are consumed with fear, the fear of a loss of security and someone else’s idea of their worth, creating a collective anxiety that converts the collective anger about the oppression into self-hatred, self-debasement. The poet sees this clearly and what Bogan does is present images that imply nothing else but a serial sacrifice of personal ambition, desire, and potential. 

The inner life of women, in this poem, is barren, there is no wilderness to conquer and define in one’s own image, women exist merely as an adjunct quirk of the collective male psychology, a means to gratify an odious male end. Bogan’s poem, years after the heat and convulsions of the blended Civil Rights movements–blacks, women, gays–has subsided and whose goals and values have lodged, to a degree at least, in the mainstream of the culture, this poem remains a potent polemic. It is political without being didactic, it is philosophical without abstraction. It has a direct language that finds profundity without profound sounding words. It is a poem of a near-perfect craft. This is not craft at the sacrifice of emotional power, though; the ire has the sting of a bad memory as the narrator announces her grievances about the seductive fallacy of women making themselves lesser than men.I was just entertaining the idea of adding more to my post here, emphasizing that what Bogan has done is create craftsmanship without sacrificing the heart of the matter, her heart, her feelings. I find the poem wholly convincing as felt experience; the resentment is palpable.

 So many poems, particularly those of the New Formalists, are flawless in their structure and technique but lacking in emotional resonance or even give any idea that the poet knew what it was he or she wanted to talk about. The points in that kind of poetic origami are minor at best, outlines of an experience otherwise sacrificed on the altar of technique. Bogan does not vanish from the poem, her voice is there–I would that her speech in the poem, her cadence, is that of someone who, while angry, wants to make a declaration that is clear, articulate, and understood, in a spare language that is accurate. It is a fire that continues to burn and still ignites passion, debates, discomfort in the reader, from then to the current day. Her accomplishment is that her craft turned into her irritation into an accurate diagnosis that has not lost its relevance. That is not an easy thing to get across.

A flightless poem

David Tucker's poem "No Flights Until Morning" is an attempt to stuff as much pathos into a cramped space as possible; the effect is not unlike the weary undergraduate who's procrastinated on their paper too long and now writes fast and feverishly hoping the fear of failure might spark some late blooming inspiration. The poem, mind you is, too small setting where there is no convenient dynamic to move, quicken the pace or make the more extreme poetic applications seem less glaring. This poem is a matter of trying to fit a size ten foot into a size seven shoe and reading it was nothing less than watching the pained waddle of a customer denying the shortcomings of their high-heeled foot torture. There are choice details, yes, if one is inclined to excuse snapshot description of unhappy people in crowded places as examples of the author's generous heart.

The runways were covered by late afternoon,

nothing moved out there but the occasional noble

snow plow carrying on with a yellow grimace,

the big jets were barely visible like whale herds

sleeping off the blast. The concourses, so frantic

a few hours ago, were almost still, a few meanderers chatted on their cell phones and looked at watches.

There is nothing in these "humanizing" images that novelists John Cheever or John Updike haven't given us with more grace, sympathy, and with a sense that the observed imperfections were leading to some greater effect. Rhythm and musicality are especially strong in these prose writers as they achieve a graceful ribbon of circumstance and happenstance which brings character tic, facial expressions, commercial products into a focus as being telling elements of a whole world and gestalt from which a sadness or great comedy is about to unfold. In Cheever's masterful "Wapshot Chronicle" and "Wapshot Scandal" and Updike's wonderful quartet of "Rabbit" novels the wealth of details forms a world, a fictional space where tangible emotion and poetic effects are achieved through equal amounts of economy and a tuned ear.

Tucker has the eye but not the ear, and like his glacially paced reading --did anyone else finds themselves leaning into their speakers only to find themselves about to tip over anticipating his next laggardly utterance?-- and his poem turns into a drone. He had a scene that was worth a poem, but rather than find where the poem was among all those strange, private interactions he may or may not have seen from the corner of his eye, rather than select particular evocative scenes and link them somehow with some small, hidden yet quietly profound fact within themselves, he tries to contain the entire airport and creates dead weight. We get the typical effect of someone who has written themselves into a corner and is forced to overreach to distinguish himself from the other scenes of nameless being:

II stayed quiet and thought of you;

checked my passport, read my ticket again, then again

like a spy with only a name to get me out,

a thousand miles from my life.

I find it incredible that in a moment when he is supposedly feeling vulnerable and less than dynamic because of his separation from his beloved "you" that he addresses his situation as analogous to that of a spy. Tucker here is valorizing his current despair and ennui and makes himself seem heroic because others are accepting and playing video games or raging at bemused counter help, he has the deeper wound of true loneliness. The poet as the serial sufferer is loosed upon us, and you wonder what Tucker was going for other than to prove that he could out-mope a room full of the earnestly self-conscious. is loosed upon us, and you wonder what Tucker was going for other than to prove that he could out-mope a room full of the earnestly self-conscious.