Ever since its first flowering, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry; this scintillating anthology offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music that inspired them. From the Harlem Renaissance to the beat movement, from the poets of the New York school to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force—one that Jazz Poems makes palpable. We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, E. E. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, William Matthews, and C. D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz’s great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.
"Jazz is my religion, and surrealism is my point of view." Ted Joans was one of the first Beat poets in the Greenwich Village arts scene, pioneering a movement that often overlooked his profound contributions. His poetry mixes the rhythms of jazz music with “hand grenades” of truth, and his live reading performance style anticipated the spoken word movement. Black Pow-Wow is a collection of the best of Joans’ early poetry, including such well-known poems as “Jazz Is My Religion,” “Passed On Blues: Homage to a Poet,” and “The Nice Colored Man.” Many of his poems speak to his friends and contemporaries--including Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, and particularly Langston Hughes--as well as his extensive travels across the African continent and around the world. His avante-garde poems also reflect his style as a painter and collage artist, call for social protest, and denounce racism, sexual repression, and injustice. This groundbreaking collection, one of only two mainstream publications Joans produced, perfectly captures the pulse of the Beat Generation and the rhythms of blues.
Here one of our best-loved poets gathers his most representative work from twelve collections and adds some new pieces as well. An American original, Miller Williams involves the readers emotions and imagination with an effective illusion of plain talk, continually rediscovering what is vital and musical in the language we speak and imagine by.
"Exuberant music, powerful narration, and image-filled poetry combine to create this extraordinary recording, winner of ALA's first Odyssey Award for excellence in audiobook production." The Horn Book
The study develops a new theoretical approach to the relationship between two media (jazz music and writing) and demonstrates its explanatory power with the help of a rich sampling of jazz poems. Currently, the mimetic approach to intermediality (e.g., the notion that jazz poetry imitates jazz music) still dominates the field of criticism. This book challenges that interpretive approach. It demonstrates that a mimetic view of jazz poetry hinders readers from perceiving the metaphoric ways poets rendered music in writing. Drawing on and extending recent cognitive metaphor theories (Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier), it promotes a conceptual metaphor model that allows readers to discover the innovative ways poets translate “melody,” “dynamics,” “tempo,” “mood,” and other musical elements into literal and figurative expressions that invite readers to imagine the music in their mind’s eye (i.e., their mind’s ear).
The editors have collected the jazz-inspired works of close to sixty writers ranging from Julio Cortazar and Jessica Hagedorn to Langston Hughes and Ishmael Reed."Moment's Notice is the best anthology of jazz literature I've ever seen."--Bart Schneider,Hungry Mind Review ¶"The jazz anthology to end all jazz anthologies."--Booklist
Embracing the entire history of jazz poetry, the work defines this inspired literary genre as poetry necessarily informed by jazz music. It discusses the major figures and various movements from the racist poems of the 1920s to contemporary times when the tone of jazz poetry experienced a dramatic change from elegy to celebration. The jazz music of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane transliterated into poetry by the likes of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown is but a part of this vital work. This unusual volume will be of interest to scholars and students of literature, music, American and African Studies, and popular culture as well as anyone who enjoys jazz and poetry. Emphasis is given to a call and response between white and African American writers. The earliest jazz poems by white writers from the 1920s, for example, reflected the general anxieties evoked by jazz, particularly regarding race and sexuality, and jazz did not fully become embraced in American verse until Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown published their first books in 1926 and 1932, respectively. By the 1950s, jazz poetry had become a fad, featuring jazz and poetry in performance, and this book spends considerable time addressing the energetic but often wildly unsuccessful work by dominantly white, West coast writers who turned to Charlie Parker as their hero. African American poets from the 1960s, however, focused more on John Coltrane and interpreted his music as a representation of the Black Civil Rights movement. Jazz poetry from the 1970s to the present has had less to do with this call and response between races, and the final two chapters discuss contemporary jazz poetry in terms of its dramatic change in tone from elegy to joy.
This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz's influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary spoken word poetry. Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. Applying prosodic analysis to emphasize the musicality of African American poetic performance, she examines the gendered meanings evident in collaborative performances and in the criticism, images, and sounds circulating within jazz cultures. Jones also considers poets who participated in contemporary venues for black writing such as the Dark Room Collective and the Cave Canem Foundation, including Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, and Carl Phillips. Incorporating a finely honed discussion of the Black Arts Movement, the poetry-jazz fusion of the late 1950s, and slam and spoken word performance milieus such as Def Poetry Jam, she focuses on jazz and hip hop-influenced performance artists including Tracie Morris, Saul Williams, and Jessica Care Moore. Through attention to cadence, rhythm, and structure, The Muse is Music fills a gap in literary scholarship by attending to issues of gender in jazz and poetry and by analyzing recordings of poets both with and without musical accompaniment. Applying the methodology of textual close reading to a critical "close listening" of American poetry's resonant soundscape, Jones's analyses include exploring the formal innovation and queer performance of Langston Hughes's recorded collaboration with jazz musicians, delineating the relationship between punctuation and performance in the post-soul John Coltrane poem, and closely examining jazz improvisation and hip-hop stylization. An elaborate articulation of the connections between jazz, poetry and spoken word, and gender, The Muse Is Music offers valuable criticism of specific texts and performances and a convincing argument about the shape of jazz and African-American poetic performance in the contemporary era.
Profiles twenty-six of the jazz greats of all time, from Count Basie to Louis Armstrong, through a review of their work, their life stories, and their greatest hits by one of today's top jazz performers. A is for "almighty" Louis Armstrong, whose amazingartistry unfolds in an accumulative poem shaped like the letter he stands for. As for sax master Sonny Rollins, whose "robust style radiates roundness," could there be a better tribute than a poetic rondeau? In an extraordinary feat, Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz composer Wynton Marsalis harmonizes his love and knowledge of jazz's most celebrated artists with an astounding diversity of poetic forms-from simple blues (Count Basie) to a complex pantoum (Charlie Parker), from a tender sonnet (Sarah Vaughan) to a performance poem snapping the rhythms of Art Blakey to life.
