Jazz Poems

by Kevin Young (Editor)

A vital and surprising hardcover collection of poems about, and inspired by, jazz music. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET. Selected and Edited by Kevin Young.

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 Band in a Parisian Cabaret” by Langston Hughes
• “God Bless the Child” by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr.
• “Jazz Fantasia” by Carl Sandburg
• “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” by William Carlos Williams
• “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks
• “Chasing the Bird” by Robert Creeley
• “Victrola” by Robert Pinsky
• “Pres Spoke in a Language” by Amiri Baraka
• “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara
• “Art Pepper” by Edward Hirsch
• “Snow” by Billy Collins
 
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Genres: Poetry, Music, Nonfiction, School, American Classics, Jazz

256 pages, Hardcover

First published March 2, 2006

About the author

Kevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992-1994), and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young is the author of Most Way Home, To Repel Ghosts, Jelly Roll, Black Maria, For The Confederate Dead, Dear Darkness, and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers; Blues Poems; Jazz Poems and John Berryman's Selected Poems.

His Black Cat Blues, originally published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, was included in The Best American Poetry 2005. Young's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. In 2007, he served as guest editor for an issue of Ploughshares. He has written on art and artists for museums in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

His 2003 book of poems Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award.

After stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young now teaches writing at Emory University, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a large collection of first and rare editions of poetry in English.

Reviews

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first physical book I have read since getting hit by a car last Christmas. I have been surviving on audio books.

This is a nice bridge for poetry lovers who know only a little about Jazz. Also a broad representation of poets is presented.

Next up trying to write reviews again

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome. The Langston Hughes ones were my favourites. The experience reminded me of James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues

[Rob McMonigal · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great anthology of poems!

Kevin Young is a great poet, as I discovered when I read For the Confederate Dead a little while after getting this anthology. (Yet another book I need to do the review on soon!) As such, it is no surprise that in putting together this anthology of poems about and containing the spirit of Jazz, he finds only the best and the brightest.

However, as a poet, he's decided they're best grouped by theme and not by year. In fact, he cares so little about the when rather than the what that we don't even get a note at the end of the poems, which is a shame because I'd loved to have a better sense of context. That's the only disappointment here, though, as these poems are a perfect compliment to the medium they pay tribute to.

The sections follow a rough outline of jazz itself, starting with "Vamping--Early Poems", moving through various sections such as "horns" and "rythym", and including a few almost exclusively devoted to a player (Coltrane, Bird, Billie Holliday) and their style. Young's titles for the sections themselves form a type of poem, as it were, tying all the parts together.

Since there is a large variety of poets in this anthology, I won't try to pull quotes. However, there are selections from Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Amiri Bakara--who does a great poetic rendition of Coltrane's jazz life, e.e. Cummings, Charles Simic, Young himself, and many others I don't know as well. There was only one poem that struck a bad chord with me, it's homophobic violence clashing with the cool. Hatred's anti-jazz, you see, at least to my way of thinking.

Most of this poetry is free verse, as befits the medium. It's also a bit blue at times, so those who don't like their language coarse may not be satisfied. But if you're a fan of experimental verse and a fan of jazz, this is definitely a good book for you! (Library, 03/07)

[Virginia · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If you can’t be free, be a mystery.” - Rita Dove on Billie Holiday

This is neat anthology, and I wish more women poets appeared in it.

[Justice · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do I rate something that's such a huge mix of styles and eras, especially when I never read anything like this? I also fully acknowledge that you're not supposed to read straight through, but hey, I wanted to absorb all of the poems and that's how I know how to do so.

I bought this from the Faulkner House bookstore on my trip to New Orleans, and I was hoping it would give me a better appreciation for the Jazz history from that area.

While I wish the poems were dated so I could contextualize them better, I feel like I did walk away with a bit of a fuller understanding, at least subconsciously, of the Jazz movement. I recognize a few of the names, even if I can't say anything abut the music itself. I get a sense of rhythm and sound from the looser, more Onomatopoeia-focused poems, and the recurring themes of sadness, sex, drugs, race, and embracing the night life.

My rating is partially based on that, and partially based on the fact I'm so happy with this as a souvenir from that trip. It's impossible to tally up what I thought of each individual poem and average them out, so there you go.

Here are a few individual poems that stood out to me, for whatever reason:

- "The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.)" is delightfully chaotic
- "Touching the Past" is perfectly nostalgic
- "We Real Cool" - I first read this in high school and it was one of the few poems that stuck with me. Seeing that this collection had it made me buy this.
- "Lush Life" is one of those poems you gotta read out loud.
- "Charlie Parker: Almost Like Being in Love" lovely love poem that's also a love poem to the artist/genre
- "Jazz" by Frank London Brown painted such a vivid picture
- "Art Pepper" had so much imagery and allusions in it - nothing is said straight out, but you get a full picture. This is how I want to write.
- "Trane" I had to immediately reread it - I loved the sound of it.
- "Mingus at the Showplace" had one of the best opening lines in, "I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, / and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,"
- "Bud Powell, Paris, 1959" and here's another excellent poem, this one about pain
- "Strange Fruit" - this is a poem as well as a song, and included in this because Billie Holiday brought it to popularity. It's so chilling.
- "Canary" has the amazing quote, "If you can't be free, be a mystery."

[Sheila · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a long wait I finally got a copy of this Everyman Anthology of Jazz Poetry. Loving the music I thought this is a book that needs a place on my shelves. Delving in last night for the first time, I was not disappointed. I found old favourites and some new delights.

One of the new delights was Langston Hughes's poem The Trumpet Player.
The text can be found online at https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems....
You can listen to Hughes himself read this work and others on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/album/2kvceU... .
You can read more about the man at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

This poem encapsulates the personal and collective experience of African Americans in a portrait of a jazz trumpeter - stanza 1 is about weariness from the slave experience, stanza 2 is about change specifically the taming of natural hair, stanza 3 is about jazz music, stanza 4 is about desire, to see moonlight on the sea, stanza 5 is back to him playing, carried away by the music, and stanza 6 about how music smoothes away all his troubles.

What strikes me is the structure, the minimal punctuation, the smoothness of its reading. There is the repetition of the opening lines The Negro/ With the trumpet at his lips making it like a musical refrain,

After first reading I am in awe at the final two stanzas - how he inverts the more normal sentance structure in

(The Negro)
Does not know
Upon what riff the music slips
It's hypodermic needle
To his soul -

and how he turns the needle into a positive vehicle for deliverying the suppression of his troubles, rather than the destructive delivery of escapism via drugs that plagued many a musician.

Trumpet Player

The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has dark moons of weariness
Beneath his eyes
where the smoldering memory
of slave ships
Blazed to the crack of whips
about thighs

The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Has a head of vibrant hair
Tamed down,
Patent-leathered now
Until it gleams
Like jet-
Were jet a crown

The music
From the trumpet at his lips
Is honey
Mixed with liquid fire
The rhythm
From the trumpet at his lips
Is ecstasy
Distilled from old desire-

Desire
That is longing for the moon
Where the moonlight's but a spotlight
In his eyes,
Desire
That is longing for the sea
Where the sea's a bar-glass
Sucker size

The Negro
With the trumpet at his lips
Whose jacket
Has a fine one-button roll,
Does not know
Upon what riff the music slips
It's hypodermic needle
To his soul -

But softly
As the tune comes from his throat
Trouble
Mellows to a golden note.

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poems about different jazz instruments, singers, musicians, etc. A few evocative, stand out gems in a good collection.

[Max Kromholc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very long time reading this one! But was actually very enjoyable. I didn’t want to do it too quickly and found this book to be one of the most that strangers have asked me about. The cover art is beautiful and the content matches it. Some average poems in there but also some true masterworks. Hard to pick a favourite but possibly:

Soloing

My mother tells me she dreamed
of John Coltrane, a young Trane
playing his music with such joy
and contained energy and rage
she could not hold back her tears.
And sitting awake now, her hands
crossed in her lap, the tears start
in her blind eyes. The TV set
behind her is gray, expressionless.
It is late, the neighbors quiet,
even the city -- Los Angeles -- quiet.
I have driven for hours down 99,
over the Grapevine into heaven
to be here. I place my left hand
on her shoulder, and she smiles.
What a world, a mother and her son
finding solace in California
just where we were told it would
be, among the palm trees and all-
night super markets pushing
orange back-lighted oranges at 2 A.M.
"He was alone," she says, and does
not say, just as I am, "soloing."
What a world, a great man half
her age comes to my mother
in sleep to give her the gift
of song, which -- shaking the tears
away -- she passes on to me, for now
I can hear the music of the world
in the silence and that word:
soloing. What a world -- when I
arrived the great bowl of mountains
was hidden in a cloud of exhaust,
the sea spread out like a carpet
of oil, the roses I had brought
from Fresno browned on the seat
beside me, and I could have
turned back and lost the music.

By Phillip Levine.

(Close runners up are blue in green by Daryll Burton and Snow by Billy Collins)

[Justin Mann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this collection when Di and I were visiting New Orleans earlier this year. Bought it at Faulkner House Books in Pirates Alley. So much culture down there! Jazz is my favorite music genre, so I thought this would be an enjoyable read -- and it was.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was intriguing and actually caused me to do a lot of internet searching, as I'm apparently not very well-versed in Jazz. The poems were raw, sometimes musical, almost always emotional, and opened up a door to a time and place, to people long gone, who created a movement.

[Ryan Clayton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rich with atmosphere.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very fun read. Kevin Young gives his poems an interesting tempo. Kind of reminds me of Langston Hughes's poetry.

[Briana · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I mentioned in my review of Blues Poems, edited by Kevin Young, Jazz Poems is a book that I owned a long time ago but cannot seem to find anywhere in my storage. It is a natural companion to the anthology about blues music. Jazz is a genre of music that is so expansive and difficult to describe. In addition to it being a style of music, it's an art, a cultural movement, and a way of life.

Jazz is sensual, deeply emotional, and thrives on rhythm and understanding your moods. Because jazz is such a broad genre of music, the vibe of these poems was diverse as well. Some were chaotic, romantic, emotional, sorrowful, and celebratory. Many of them were dripped with nostalgia, especially when they focused on a particular figure within the movement. While blues can be a state of being, jazz is a movement that invokes feelings of pride. Any time I hear people talk about jazz, there's this layer of melancholy and nostalgia; a craving for what was. I got that vibe from a lot of these poems.

I connected to the more personal stories than the tributes and memorials here. That's how I connect to poetry, but I also looked out for experimental storytelling that broadened my mind. I did not have an easy time reading a lot of these poems, and I don't mind that. With the blues version, I was able to instantly relate because I connected emotionally with those, but this book took a little bit more effort. For someone my age, I find jazz to be a little esoteric at times because of the way I associate it with high art and intellectualism. It feels academic, and these poems could be like that too.

Because of the nature of the times, I thought a lot of these were dated, but it's not in a way that is distracting or disrespectful. I enjoyed slowing down and reading these. I think that it's a must for people who want to read something "smart" and that gives you insight into such a huge cultural movement.

[Jee Koh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A winsome selection of poems, organized chronologically and musically into sections: Vamping (Early Jazz Poems), Bop (Bird & Beyond), Horn Section, Sheets of Sound (Coltrane & Co.), Rhythm Section, Free Jazz, and Muting (for Billie Holiday). The well-known poets are here—Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Patricia Spears Jones, Michael S. Harper, Cornelius Eady, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove—and also less well-known ones ripe for discovery. Non-black poets who wrote about jazz are also included in a catholic gesture: Philip Larkin, Robert Creeley, Lawson Fusao Inada, Philip Levine, and Frank O'Hara. I bought the book in New Orleans, thought it was appropriate, and dipped in and out of it. Heard the Big Easy.

[Rob Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

For now, I am marking this book as completed. But I am not done with it. As it is (shockingly) reserved by someone else at the library, I'll just have to check it out again. Or get my own copy.

The esoteric nature of both jazz and poetry - along with my abiding devotion and interest in both - requires spending more time studying what this book has to offer.

I read most of these poems. Some are profound. Some are far beyond my grasp. Such is life.

[Barnabas Piper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite collection. Most of the poems leaned too avant garde for my taste (and is just taste, not an objective criticism). The contributions by Langston Hughes and Billy Collin’s were brilliant and carried the weight.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting and inspiring anthology with poems about Jazz. Who would've thought that that could be a thing? A lovely made book.

[Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Straight up. This book knocked me out. A dazzling collection of cool.

[May · Rating 5 out of 5]

After spending such a long time being obsessed with jazz music, I guess it was only a matter of time before I also started reading jazz poetry.

I keep telling my students (I'm currently teaching spoken word poetry to kids) that poetry = music = poetry. Jazz Poems, with its selection of poems written about the genre and for its musicians, confirms this idea through and through. Like a band, the collection is divided into numerous sections: Vamping (early jazz poems), Swinging (my favourite, obviously), Bop, Horn Section, etc. Each section has its own gems, but all demonstrate the undeniable link between poetry and music.

Some poems use onomatopoeia to convey the sound of jazz:

"go husha-husha-hush with the slipper sand-paper"
- Jazz Fantasia, Carl Sandburg

"Plink plank plunk a plunk
Plink plank plunk a plunk
Plunk"
- Jazz Band, Frank Marshall Davis

Other poems apply a subtler approach, creating rhythms from the form itself. In "Bringing Jazz" by Maxwell Bodenheim, an author's note at the top of the poem informs us that readers should speak the odd-numbered lines slowly and the even-numbered ones quickly. Here are the first four lines of the poem, to give you an idea:

"Last night I had an oboe dream
Whistlers in a box-car madness bringing jazz.
Their faces stormed in a hobo-gleam,
Blinding all the grinding wheels and singing jazz."

In "Jazz is My Religion" by Ted Joans, the irregularities in punctuation/spacing/letter case echo the improvisational nature of the dance itself, the range of dynamics, the changes in tempo, and so on.

But jazz poems are not exclusively about the music itself. In the introduction to the collection, Kevin Young writes that jazz, apart from inspiring experiment, has "just as often inspired elegy" in poetry. Indeed, numerous poems are written as tributes to jazz musicians. The whole last section of the collection, Muting, consists of poems written for Billie Holiday. One of the pieces I found most memorable, Lawson Fusao Inada's "Listening Images," pairs composers' names with a couplet:

"COUNT BASIE
Acorns on the roof -
Syncopated oakestra

JOHN COLTRANE

Sunrise golden
At the throat"

The poems in this collection also reflect the historical roots of jazz and its musicians (indeed, Lindy Hop originated from the folk dance created by African slaves). Lewis Allan's "Strange Fruit," for instance, is a poem about racism that was later turned into a song and made famous by Billie Holiday.

And, like jazz, many poems in this collection are bold and unapologetic:

In the last few lines of AM/TRAK, an elegy written for John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka tells us to:

" Live!
& organize
yr shit
as rightly
burning!"

Baraka's performance of the poem, which you can watch on Youtube, also demonstrates the necessity and beauty of performing jazz poems.

As Jazz Poems delightfully and poignantly demonstrates, music is poetry. The rhythms, rhymes, and words that are inherent in both forms create a pulse that inspires dance and song.

So, "Go to it, O Jazzmen!"

[Adam Carrico · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compilation itself is a good depiction of the beauty and tragedy of jazz and the blues. Some poems are incredible, others lackluster. One of my biggest takeaways was the unapologetically black nature of jazz, which just led me to thoughts about where that genre has moved over the past decades. The poems dealing specifically as odes to certain artists were the ones that least interested me, but do describe the music quite well.

Also, Lush Life is one of the very best poems I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

[Nicholas Shelton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really not half bad.

A lot of it was hit and miss.

It had an entire section devoted to Coltrane.
That was dope.

Some favorites
"John Coltrane: an impartial review" -Spellman
"The Secret Life of Musical instruments" -CD Wright
"Mingus at the Showplace" - William Matthews
"Trane" - Brathewaite
"Photo of John Coltrane, 1963" -Sean Singer

[L.A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

favorites:

"god pity me whom (god distinctly has)" - e.e. cummings
"jazz fantasia" - carl sandburg
"trumpet player" - langston hughes
"rose solitude" - jayne cortez
"charlie parker birthday celebration, tompkins square park" - catherine bowman

[Nice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Better than Feinstein and Komunyakaa's series of Jazz Anthology. I going to buy this one next.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant collection, lovingly assembled by the incomparable Kevin Young.

[Stewart McLendon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to my sister, Erin, for bringing this book back from New Orleans.