Choruses: Poems

by Quincy Troupe

Quincy Troupe launches a pyrotechnic display of jazz rhythms, political commentary, sports tributes, travelogues, and architectural abstracts in his latest volume of poetry, with Choruses . Merging traditional poetic form with contemporary content, Troupe fashions "words & sounds that build bridges toward a new tongue" , as he writes in "Song," an ars poetica. Only Troupe could write a sestina chronicling the mass suicide of Heaven's Gate, or a villanelle for Michael "rising up in time, michael jordan hangs like an ikon, suspended in space / / his eyes two radar screens screwed like nails into the mask of his face." A masterful technician, Troupe experiments with free verse as well, repeating the same words in three different line-break configurations in " Three Variations of Shape & Form." From haiku to tonka, from Mark McGwire to Sammy Sosa, from bebop to hip hop, these choruses "become sound tracks lifted off a poet's tongue, / / syllables, within moments, are transformed into song..." "Troupe's sixth collection covers a wide cultureal the Monica-gate scandal, the Heaven's Gate mass suicide; jazz greats like Miles Davis (Troupe's The Biography is the standard) and Richard Muhal Abrams; sports stars like Michael Jordon, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire; lesser know artists like GeorgeLEwis & the Dancers at Laguna Pueblo, painter Robert Colescott and many more. Perhaps to formally mirror the mix, Troupe puts sonnets, villanelles and sestinas in the midst of his more characteristic jazz-inflected free-verse lines. The best poems here, however, eschew traditional European forms, and foreground Troupe's mastery of a sprawling American "the tongue in his hands now was once a saxophone when whole,/ was a blur of fingers whooshing through golden keys of his voice belling/ . . . .conjures up spirits, the drumbeat of strong hearts goosing everything along." Troupe doesn't quite go as far into uninhibited linguistic musicality as, say, Clark Coolidge, Will Alexander or the best rhapsodic passages in Kerouac. Yet his unwillingness to forgo teh referential severrs a powerful didactic function beyond "the tough aesthetics" of contemporary poetry, as Troupe often employ

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. is an American poet, editor, journalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. He is best known as the biographer of Miles Davis, the jazz musician.

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's so much in this world I am suppose to have read and haven't and I say, "y-e-a-h, I read that (but I didn't, I didn't). So sometimes I lie because I feel like WTF, I'm almost entering my 60th year,
and so hangs the tale of that insecure, problematic guy who lives inside me. But what I like about getting older is finding the things I should have read but didn't, but am damn glad to have found...
Like Quincy Troupe's Choruses. This guy sings. The politics, sense of knowing injustice is here, but the great part is the joy that comes through the language. It's a pleasure to read.

Some people never liked Kenneth Koch or other 'New York School' writers because they were so funny joyful. You can have the poetic sloggers, the plodding plowers who think they're going so "deep". Give me Berryman at his best, Koch and Troupe. These guys love life and it shows in the language.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I still use some of his poetry from this book in my classes. His readings have so much life in them.

[Acacia · Rating 3 out of 5]

finished reading this a long time ago; forgot to add onto here