Poets.org has a webpage that writes, “Jazz poetry is a literary genre defined as poetry necessarily informed by jazz music—that is, poetry in which the poet responds to and writes about jazz. Jazz poetry, like the music itself, encompasses a variety of forms, rhythms, and sounds. Beginning with the birth of blues and jazz at the start of the twentieth century, jazz poetry is can be seen as a thread that runs through the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat movement, and the Black Arts Movement—and it is still vibrant today. From early blues to free jazz to experimental music, jazz poets use their appreciation for the music as poetic inspiration.”
In his book, Jazz Poems, Kevin Young wrote, “One of my first teachers even wrote a book based on recipes using only food from this hemisphere; you haven’t lived till you’ve tried avocado-cranberry ice cream with chocolate sauce. And like that ice cream, sometimes the unlikeliest combinations, made possible by this place, manage to work…To this list of American originals we may add jazz.”
If we take Edward Hirsch’s poem about alto saxophonist Art Pepper as an example of poetry that ascends in hyperbole with tone and phrasing, just like it tumbled out of Pepper’s alto saxophone: “The night is going to burst inside of him/The wind is going to break loose forever/From his lungs. It’s the fury of improvising/of going on alone. It’s the fierce clarity/Of each note coming to an end, distinct/Glistening. The alto’s full-bodied laughter/The white grief-stricken wail.”
Another example of an enchanted pen is Al Young’s poetic prose about modern jazz and bebop pianist Thelonious Monk’s song “Ruby Dear”: “The midwestern night is steamy hot with mosquitoes, the air knotted and thick with gnats like Monk’s graceful gnarled chordal clusters, notes and spiraling nodes, encoded, glistening like Milky Way-encrusted swirls and specks of darkness…You know what you’re hearing is human yearning, and rushes of the Divine calling you home to all the Africanized galaxies in this shimmering island universe.”
This three-hour class for beginning or seasoned poets pushes Moreno to wonder who gave him this tome. He reports finding it on top of some books in his home library and can’t remember where or from whom it came from? Moreno said, “This book is filled with poets’ improvisation, spontaneous creativity that you could dance to or simply be elevated by poetry elements raised to praise by the rhythms of each poet’s muse drum.”
The first 90 minutes of this class poets will explore poems from “The Sheets of Sound” chapter of Jazz Poems. Poets like Cornelius Eady, Haki Madhubuti, & Jean Valentine. The second 90 minutes will begin with Jane Cortez, and followed by Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez, Rita Dove, & C.D. Wright, from the chapter titled “Muting (for Billie Holliday).”
Kevin Young writes, “Mystery, improvisation, modalities, melody, are just some of the ways jazz provides a kind of freedom, not only of a musical but a spiritual sort.”
Disclaimers
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