Jazz Poems

MUSIC FOR HOMEMADE INSTRUMENTS

improvising with Douglas Ewart

I dug your artless, I dug you out. Did you re-do? You dug me less, art. You dug, less do art. You dug me, less art. Did you re-do? If I left art out, you dug. My artless dug-out. You dug, let art out. Did you re-do, dug-out canoe? Easy as a porkpie piper-led cinch. Easy as a baby bounce. Hop on pot, tin pan man. Original abstract, didyou re-do it? Betting on shy cargo, strutting dimpled low-cal strumpets employ a hipster to blow up the native formica. Then divide efficiency on hairnets,flukes, faux saxons. You dug me out, didn’t you? Did you re-do? Ever curtained to experiment with strumpet strutting. Now curtains to milk laboratory. Desecrated flukes & panics displayed by mute politicians all over this whirly-gig. Hey, you dug! Art lasts. Did you re-do? Well-known mocker of lurching unused brains, tribal & lustrous diddlysquats, Latin dimension crepe paper & muscular stacks. Curtains for perky strumpets strutting with mites in the twilight of their origami funkier purses. Artless, you dig. Did you re-do? For patting wood at flatland, thanks. For bamboozled flukes at Bama, my seedy medication. Thanks for my name in the yoohoo. Continental camp-out, percolating throughout the whirly-gig on faux saxon flukes. You dig art, didn’t you? Did you re-do?

Harryette Mullen

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

 

More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet

Jazz Poems

VICTROLA

Dead forty years Bird brings his lips to the reed.

He rules the roost, and rues the rest,

Do wot-jadda bop.

Recovered from the shock

The war veteran Hitler found the doctor

Who cured his hysterical deafness,

And had the man killed , hoping that I

Might never exist to tell the story here,

A little distorted.

But Illinois Jacquet playing ‘Round Midnight

On the bassoon, better even

Than the death speech of Falstaff.

And listen, Moshe Leib Halpern, I

Have a miracle cabinet

Made in Japan–listen.

ROBERT PINSKY | 1940

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet

Jazz Poems

FOUR BONGOS: TAKE A TRAIN

for Vinnie

The drummer wears suspenders to look like 

an old-timer, and plays a salsa

“Caravan,” bad boy from the panyard with 

an evil, evil beat. The conga man 

chants Yoruba and shakes his sweat loose on 

a girl up front. His hand worries the drum 

like a live fish thrashing. Call the bassist 

“Pops,” with his grizzly goatee, his Banshee 

yelp, his rhumba step. Tha hall is fluorescent.

“Take a Train,” Lawrence Welk called that tune, 

and played. Ellington, hovers above this group 

like changeable weather, in gabardine.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER | 1962

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet

Jazz Poems

ELEGY FOR THELONIOUS

Damn the snow

Its senseless beauty pours a hard light through the hemlock. Thelonious is dead. Winter drifts in the hourglass; notes pour from the brain cup. Damn the alley cat wailing a muted dirge off Lenox Ave. Thelonious is dead. Tonight’s a lazy rhapsody of shadows swaying to blue vertigo & metaphysical funk. Black trees in the wind. Crepuscule with Nelly Plays inside the bowed head. “Dig the Man Ray of piano!” O Satisfaction, hot fingers blur on thosewhite rib keys. Comingon the Hudson. Monk’s Dream. The ghost of bebop from 52nd Street, footprints in the snow. Damn February. Let’s go to Minton’s & play “modern malice” till daybreak. Lord, there’s Theloniou wearing that old funky hat pulled down over his eyes.

Yusef Komunyakaa | 1947

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet

Jazz Poems

SHAKING HANDS WITH MONGO

for Mongo Santamaria

Mongo’s open hands

huge soft palms

that drop the hard seeds

of conga with a thump,

shaken by the god of hurricanes,

raining mambo coconuts

that do not split

even when they hit the sidewalk,

rumbling incantation

in the astonished dancehall

of a city in winter,

sweating in a rush of A-train night,

so that Chano Pozo,

maestro of the drumming Yoruba heart,

howling Manteca in a distant coro,

hears Mongo and yes,

begins to bop

a slow knocking bolero of forgiveness

to the nameless man

who shot his life away

for a bag of tecata

in a Harlem bar

forty years ago

Martín Espada | 1957

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet