Jazz Poems
BILLIE HOLIDAY
Here lies a lady. Day was her double pain,
Pride and compassion equally gone wrong.
At night she sang, “Do you conceive my song?”
And answered in her torn voice, “Don’t explain.”
HAYDEN CARRUTHfrom Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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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
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Jazz Poems
VICTROLADead 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
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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
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Jazz Poems
ELEGY FOR THELONIOUSDamn 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
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