David Jauss

WAYS OF BREAKING: LYNDA HULL'S "ORNITHOLOGY"

The title of Lynda Hull’s poem “Ornithology” comes, of course, from the famous tune recorded by Charlie Parker in 1946, a composition he co-wrote with the trumpeter Benny Harris based on the chord changes of the standard “How High the Moon.” The song’s title is something of a tongue-in-cheek pun, for “Ornithology” is not about the study of birds but the study of Bird. How high can I fly? Bird seems to ask as his alto swoops and soars. The answer: As high as the moon.

Lynda’s poem is a self-study, too, but one that approaches the self through a meditation on Parker and his music. There are parrots, macaws, mourning doves, and cardinals here, sure, but the only bird that really matters is the Bird who recorded “Ornithology.” Like Parker’s performance in that song, Lynda’s poem is “a way of thinking, / a way of breaking / synchronistic / through time.” Though the poem is set in Chicago, on a street that “becomes water” when it reaches Lake Michigan, most of it takes place in the Kansas City of Lynda’s memory, where she and her friend Eric go on a quest to find Bird’s grave and see what happens when “you touch a finger to the cold stone / that jazz and death played / down to.” Seeing a girl on the corner, she suddenly recalls “the old photos” of herself in her “Kansas City hat,” and with this thought, the past “breaks” into the present. For the rest of the poem, the two times—and Lynda’s two selves, the alcoholic high-school dropout living on the streets and the well-educated, accomplished poet living just off affluent Lakeshore Drive—are “synchronistic.” But though the two times co-exist, the past overwhelms the present. She relives it with such intensity, in fact, that the Kansas City of her memory seems more solid, more real, than Chicago, the “phantom city” she now inhabits. Clearly, her past has “torched” her so much that she still feels its “cardinal flame.”

As in so many of her poems, Lynda’s memories here are charged with an alluring brand of desolation. She describes Kansas City as a noir-ish place of shower-slick asphalt, charred and gutted buildings, poverty, neglect, mourning, street violence, and the “night-long tidal / pull from bar to bar,” yet it was also a place of vibrant colors, glitzy dresses, gardenia perfume, and “the rumpled musk of lover’s sheets,” a sensual place whose very air seemed charged with the ozone of jazz. To borrow her words from “Hollywood Jazz,” Lynda finds in the “desolation” of that time and place “a music so voluptuous” she wants to linger in it. And she does linger in it until the final lines, when she returns to the present moment in Chicago and looks again at the ailanthus tree she mentions in the opening lines. Importantly, she now sees the “poverty tree” as “Extravagant.” Like her life in Kansas City, the tree is both poor and rich, and its colors—the slate blue of the mourning dove and the red flame of the cardinal—reflect the “synchronistic” sadness and passion of that time. The ailanthus is the ideal image to sum up Lynda’s paradoxical response to her past; known as both stinkweed and the tree of heaven, it encapsulates in a single image the squalid paradise the poem recounts.

If “Ornithology” did no more than examine Lynda’s past self with a moving mixture of lament and nostalgia, it would still be one of her most beautiful and important poems. But the poem is also an ars poetica of sorts, exploring as it does the relationship between her past self and her art. How high did I fly? she seems to ask. Not too high, she answers: she “had the music,” she says, “but not the pyrotechnics.”

Maybe that was true then. But now, she clearly has the pyrotechnics. Formally, her poem mirrors the “liquid geometry” of Parker’s solo break on “Ornithology.” As Martin Williams has said, “Never before (or since?) had Parker’s ingenious rhythmic originality been so dramatically evident. For one thing his phrasing—rapid as it is!—is an ingenious alternation of long/short/long/short lines, with some rests in between” (206). Lynda’s lines, too, alternate between long and short—they range in length from two to twelve syllables—with some rests in between. Like Bird’s phrases, her words burst into flight like the parrots in line four, then hover a moment, as if testing the current of the air, before swerving off into another flight of “sixteenth / notes.” She flies as high as Bird here, and reading her lines, one can almost hear his solo.

Lynda’s formal imitation of Parker’s performance helps establish the parallel the poem draws between her and Bird, and between her poetry and his music. But the principal way Lynda turns this brief account of her Kansas City days into an ars poetica is through her exploration, and illustration, of various “ways of breaking.” By the end of the poem, the word break has become a complex pun, one far more serious than that of Parker’s title: it refers to Bird’s solo break, to his breaking of the conventions of musical time, to line breaks (“Take a phrase, then / fracture it”), to the way the past breaks into the present, and, ultimately, to emotional heartbreak and, even, breakdown. Reading Lynda’s account of the sorrow that “torches” her when she goes to Bird’s grave, we inevitably think of Bird’s own heartbreaks and the emotional breakdown he suffered shortly after recording “Ornithology” (which resulted in his seven months of “relaxin’” at Camarillo State Hospital).

Given all of the “ways of breaking” the poem explores, when Lynda says “Take it all / and break forever,” we realize that she’s instructing herself (and any writer who wishes to achieve the artistry of Parker) to endure all the suffering of her past and break emotionally forever. But she’s also instructing herself to claim her suffering and to break—or improvise poetry—on it forever. You can’t break in this last sense of the word, her poem implies, unless you continually break emotionally. This willingness to embrace suffering again and again was, from the beginning, the essence of art for Lynda. In “The Nature of Light,” an uncollected poem she wrote in 1982, she even suggests that writing poetry is itself a form of suffering, a way of breaking down the self in order to transform it into music. The poem defines poetry as a fire that “refines, burns excess, strips / to the singing bones,” thus revealing the self, which is “single and multiple as light.” The epigraph of the poem is telling. “What is to give light,” she quotes Heinrich Fraenkel, “must endure the burning.” “Ornithology,” like “The Nature of Light,” seconds Fraenkel’s belief. And more pertinently, it also seconds Parker’s aesthetic credo, which she quotes in the last line: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.”

Of course, just living it doesn’t mean it will automatically come out your horn; as Lynda recognizes, it’s one thing to have the music and another to have the pyrotechnics needed to express it. Lynda definitely had the pyrotechnics. In all three of her books, she reveals that she had the chops to make with words the kind of music that Bird made with notes. Because of her great linguistic gifts, she not only lived it, it came out her horn. She found ways of breaking that transformed her turmoil and suffering into music as lyrical, as powerful, and—I predict—as enduring as Bird’s. And though she is no longer with us, her burning continues to give us light.


From MAKING IT NEW: EXPERIMENTING WITH TRADITIONAL FORMS

The revolution is over. The war has been won. As anyone even remotely familiar with contemporary American poetry knows, free verse has swept the field. Free verse may have once been revolutionary, but it has long since become the fashion. Traditional verse, on the other hand, has for several decades been considered at best old-fashioned and at worst downright evil. Perhaps nothing conveys this fact more readily than the following comment by Karl Shapiro, who four decades ago wrote several books of and about traditional verse: “Remember what Williams said, if he said it: a sonnet is a fascist form. Poets here and now who use ‘forms’ are turning back the clock, winding the metronome, making trains run on time—with black boots and whips.” I do not wish to quarrel with Shapiro’s taste or his association of poetry and politics, but I would like to challenge his assumption that contemporary poets who use traditional forms are in fact “turning back the clock.”

Shapiro’s assumption is a common one: the use of traditional forms is somehow a nostalgic act, a yearning for the harmony and order of the past. In fact, however, most contemporary poets who write in traditional forms have not returned to the past at the expense of the present. In particular, they have not ignored the free verse revolution and its daring departures from past poetic practices. Indeed, most of them write frequently—if not predominately—in free verse themselves. It is not surprising, then, that the spirit of experimentation that so invigorated the free verse revolution is also evident in the traditional verse of our time. Contemporary American poets have not merely repeated the forms of the past; rather, they have revised those forms dramatically, in order to make them compatible with our changed times and our changed conceptions of poetry. For these poets, then, Pound’s injunction to “make it new” did not mean to “start over”—to invent new forms—but to make the old forms “new.”

In making the old forms new, contemporary poets have experimented with many formal traditions. There are as many kinds of experiments as there are poems, of course, but nine types of experiments predominate. Since these experiments will undoubtedly have a considerable impact on the way future poets employ fixed forms—and, I believe, on future scholars’ estimation of the influence of the free verse revolution on traditional forms and prosody—I would like to define them briefly here and provide a few examples of the new look our poets have given some old but indispensable forms. My hope is that these successful experiments will encourage younger poets to use these nine modes of experimentation to create additional new variations on old forms.


From STOLEN MOMENTS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID JAUSS

Sascha Feinstein: I’d like to discuss how you create poems from other texts -- as opposed, say, to live performances -- because I think this could be educational for writers who never had the opportunity to hear seminal figures in jazz. But I’d like to begin by breaking a classic creative writing workshop rule of separating speaker and author: Is the narrative in your poem “Traps” true to the origin of your actual infatuation with jazz?

David Jauss: No it’s not, but it’s very close. I had a friend in high school who was a jazz fanatic and a drummer, and he’s the one who introduced me to jazz. He played Dave Brubeck constantly--his hero was [the drummer] Joe Morello--and he was the guy who talked me into going to the Buddy Rich concert. I didn’t know Buddy Rich from anybody and I wasn’t really all that excited about going, but I went, had a great time, and the incident that I describe in the poem is actual. Rich did turn and growl at this longhaired bass player. A couple of weeks later, Buddy Rich was on the Tonight Show, and Johnny Carson was talking about his reputation as demanding, hard-to-please bandleader--apparently he was the George Steinbrenner of Big Band leaders--and he said, “Yeah, I just had to fire a bass player.”

So all that part of it’s true, but to torque up the drama of the moment, I acted in the poem as though I’d been dragged to the concert by my parents and didn’t want to be there. But [in actuality] it was my choice and I was with my friend.

Feinstein: Was this the first major jazz musician you heard?

Jauss: The only one I’d heard at that point. I was seventeen. We did not hear jazz on any of our radio stations [in Minnesota]. We didn’t hear much beyond the predictable pop. In fact, for my tenth birthday in 1961, I was given one of those radios they had then, the kind with vacuum tubes in them, and at night I could get KAAY in Little Rock, which at that time was a rock and roll station, and they were playing things that I was not hearing on the radio stations in Minnesota, songs by people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. And I just thought they were local boys [laughs].

Feinstein: And how, after the Buddy Rich concert, did you nurture your new attraction to jazz?

Jauss: Largely by listening to my friend’s jazz records. I bought a few records of my own, too -- the first album I bought was a Coleman Hawkins record. I didn’t know anything about Hawkins, but the album was called The Genius of Coleman Hawkins and I figured he had to be good if he was a genius. [Both laugh.] Mostly I was like everybody else my age, listening to Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, that sort of thing, but I was liking jazz more and more. And in my senior year in high school, I wrote my English research paper on the history of jazz. I somehow managed to get it down to about nine pages. [Both laugh.] That was the first time I felt the desire to read about it, to find out the sources behind the music. I didn’t feel that desire from the Buddy Rich concert, but when I started to hear the jazz that really spoke to me, I felt that this was the language I had wanted to hear all my life. It was like the unconscious talking, expressing everything that you can think and feel in a language you cannot rationally explain. It just communicated so intensely compared to anything else I’d ever heard before. I wanted to read about the people who made it and learn how this music came to be, so I wrote this research paper.

When I went to [Southwest Minnesota State] College [in 1970], I had a really bad Introduction to Music class; it was not a good experience for me and I never took another music class. I didn’t have much money to buy records, and in graduate school I spent most of my time reading and writing. But while I was at Syracuse University [1972-74], I spent a lot of time at Stephen Dunn’s house--Stephen was my first creative writing teacher, back in Minnesota, and we’d become friends--and I listened to just about everything in his jazz collection. But jazz didn’t really take me over heart and soul until I moved to Little Rock [in 1980]. In part it was because there was a good jazz and blues scene there, but mostly it was because my son Steve began to be interested in jazz. We went to clubs together almost every week for years--he was always the youngest person in the room--and watching his love for the music grow brought me back to the way I felt when I first discovered it. And now that he was interested in jazz, and playing it himself--he played guitar in jazz bands in high school and college--I had a good excuse to buy all the records I wanted--I was furthering his education, after all! [Laughs.] But of course, I was also furthering mine at the same time.

Feinstein: Was there a parallel moment to the Buddy Rich experience when you realized that writing would be at the center of your life?

Jauss: Not really, because I always wrote--I started writing stories when I was in first grade and I’ve never stopped. I always assumed I would have to stop someday when I grew up: I’d have to find something practical to do. Even after a couple of creative writing classes in colleges, which I really enjoyed, I thought, “You can’t be serious about this.” And then I just got selfish and said, “I’m going to learn as much about literature and writing as I can. Regardless of what I’m going to do for a living, I’m going to spend the rest of my life reading books and writing poems and stories.” So it was more of a gradual giving in to an impulse that had been there forever.

Feinstein: Given the fact that you are nationally recognized in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, why has jazz so much more strongly influenced your poetry?

Jauss: I would like it to more strongly influence my fiction as well. I have tried to write jazz stories and have always failed. For some reason, jazz seems more congenial to poem form. Part of it is that I am conscious of feeling inadequate, of not knowing enough about that world, since I’m not a musician myself. I think in a story I would have to know more, whereas in a poem all I have to do is try to capture a moment. Usually in capturing a moment, I bring in some of the past life--like in that Ornette Coleman poem [“The Master Musicians of Joujouka”], which summarizes his past leading up to the poem’s present moment--but that moment takes center stage and it’s the only one I feel I really need to inhabit imaginatively. I figure I can enter a moment better than I can a life, so that’s probably why I write poems about jazz but not stories.

Also, I think I’m drawn to certain moments more than to the overall stories of their lives. It’s the same with the music. There are certain passages in, say, Coltrane’s Crescent: every single time I hear them, the hair stands up on the back of my head, I can feel my heart rate go up. There’s just something about it, and I couldn’t possibly tell you why. The combination of the notes, the tones, the feeling that’s put into it--it just nails something inside me that nothing else does. And that happens when I read about jazz musicians’ lives, too--certain moments just leap out and beg to become a poem.

Feinstein: In terms of genre, though, if you had a student who said, “I’m not a musician but I love jazz and I’d like to write about it in a short story,” wouldn’t you encourage that student?

Jauss: Oh, absolutely. And I would encourage myself, too. [Feinstein laughs.] I have tried. But I don’t want to write something bad about jazz--it means too much to me--and I work hard at the jazz poems that I write because I feel part of the impulse behind them is to honor the people who made this great art and who have not gotten the recognition that they deserve. I mean, they’re famous among those of us who know something about jazz, but I always have to explain to my students who Coltrane is, who Billie Holiday is, who Thelonious Monk is. But I can’t blame them. I can remember the first time I heard Coltrane’s name, and I didn’t have a clue who he was, so when I encounter students and other people who haven’t heard of him, I can empathize with that, but I feel the need to spread the word because these people are missing so much. I feel that very strongly. As I told you the other day, I was once teaching Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died” and talking about Billie Holiday and one of my students said, “Well, in order to really get this poem, we need to know who he was.” (Even though it’s “The Day Lady Died”!) I asked everyone to raise their hands if they knew who Billie was. Only one hand went up. And that upset me. The fact that some of these students were African-American upset me even more: if they’re losing this astonishing contribution to American culture, what’s happening to the WASPs out in the suburbs?

...

Feinstein: Your Miles [Davis] poem “Black Orchid” seems to have been inspired by Miles’s autobiography [Miles, 1989].

Jauss: That’s right.

Feinstein: In the book, Miles mentions--in passing--that he may have played in the club [Black Orchid] at that time [1950]. You’ve taken a possible gig and turned it into a lengthy poem. How did that happen, and why?

Jauss: Partly because, since we don’t have a record of it, no one can accuse me of describing it incorrectly. [Both laugh.] Throughout my life of writing jazz poems, I have strategically picked as often as possible moments that were not recorded. [Both laugh again.] For example, in the Sun Ra poem [“After the End of the World”]: I could have set it in 1970, when he actually recorded there [Berlin], but then people might say, “Well, no--this didn’t happen, and that didn’t happen,” so I picked another year in which he did tour Germany but didn’t record there.

Feinstein: But the Miles Davis autobiography includes many interesting stories. It’s a fairly hefty book--unless, of course, you edit the swear words, in which case it boils down to a third of the size. [Both laugh.] There must have been something about the moment, or title of the club, that offered such an energizing trigger.

Jauss: I think it was the club’s name, to an extent, but I also wanted to set the poem in 1950 because that was such a crucial year for Miles. It was a time in his life when he was in danger of losing his genius, because of the drugs and the emotional turmoil of leaving Irene and all that. Since it was such a dramatic, important time, and since the Black Orchid gig wasn’t recorded, I did what I do as a fiction writer, which is to try to get into the mind of the character. I thought imagining Miles playing “April in Paris” would be a good way to bring in the Juliette Greco story. The story of his marriage. Heroin addiction. The death of Fats Navarro. All of that. Basically, I just tried to imagine what someone in that spot would be thinking while playing a song that would bring back all these memories.

Feinstein: Two issues ago, Brilliant Corners published a tribute to Lynda Hull, which included your excellent essay on her poem “Ornithology.” We’ve often discussed our admiration for Lynda, how we both think she’s one of the greatest voices in twentieth-century poetry. Why did you dedicate this particular poem to her?

Jauss: My first instinct is to say that I dedicated it to her because she helped me so much with it. But now that you ask the question, I think that’s only part of the answer--and probably just a small part. After all, I could have asked any of my other poet friends for their advice. So why did I choose Lynda? Partly because she wrote so well about jazz herself, I suppose, but also, I suspect, because I feared she was like Miles in the poem, at a point in her life where her genius was threatened by her addictions. But I don’t think I was conscious of this when I dedicated the poem to her. At that time, I think I was just thanking her for all of her help. And I needed her help badly--it was the first jazz poem I ever wrote.

...

Feinstein: For someone eager to read interesting accounts of the jazz world, what books have been important to you? What would you recommend?

Jauss: That’s a little hard to answer because the books that have been important to me--or at least to my poems--aren’t always books I’d recommend. The books I’d recommend--the books I most admire--are probably David Hajdu’s biography of Billy Strayhorn [Lush Life, 1996], which is the best jazz biography I know, Art Pepper’s Straight Life [1979], and Miles’ autobiography [Miles, 1989]. I also like Geoff Dyer’s book But Beautiful [1991], which does in prose some of the things that I try to do in poems: he imagines his way into various musicians’ lives, expanding brief anecdotes into full-fledged scenes, complete with dialogue and thoughts for which there’s no record. Essentially what he does with their lives is what jazz musicians do with melody: improvise. And I like [Charles Mingus’s 1971 autobiography] Beneath the Underdog too, bizarre as it is at times. But only a couple of these books have helped me write my poems. I got one poem from Miles’ autobiography, and I got another one from Beneath the Underdog--“The Hatchet” is based on Mingus’s description of a painting Monk did while he was in Bellevue. Actually, I got two from Beneath the Underdog, but one of them wasn’t publishable--or rather, I did publish it, but I shouldn’t have. It dealt with his Mexican experiences . . . [Both laugh.] But mostly my poems have come from biographies I don’t really admire all that much -- [C.O.] Simpkins’ biography of Coltrane [Coltrane, 1975], John Litweiler’s Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life [1992], Ross Russell’s Bird Lives! [1973]. I guess it goes back to what I said about why I write jazz poems instead of jazz stories--it’s the moment that grabs me more than the whole life, and even in these less accomplished books, there are moments that made me want to write a poem.

...

Jauss: What actually appeals to me most are the poems where I’m allowing myself to go into the character and imagine what that person was like. I have a great sense of curiosity about great artists of any kind. The first book [Improvising Rivers] has a lot of jazz poems, but it also has poems about Flaubert, Chekhov, and Kafka; I’ve done the same thing with them. More often, it’s the moments where I don’t know what happened, where I don’t have all the information, that I’m most interested in writing about.

...

Feinstein: Which jazz poems mean more to you?

Jauss: The ones I care the most about are the ones where I worked my imagination the most. I don’t know if “Black Orchid” is one of my best jazz poems, but it’s one that matters a lot to me, simply because of that effort to enter into Miles’ mind. I like to try to collapse a whole life into one moment, so I try to bring many facts about his life into that one moment of playing that song. Same thing with the Ornette Coleman poem [“The Master Musicians of Joujouka”]; I tried to suggest that in this moment he found, in a sense, a home--that through his immersion in the ancient, timeless music of the Master Musicians, he found a self within all his previous selves, a self that had always been there but had remained hidden. Whether or not that’s how he felt, I have absolutely no idea, but when I listened to the music, it seemed like some incredible release. So that’s how I interpreted it.

Feinstein: Aside from the strength of the poem itself, I’m interested because, frankly, the album that inspired the poem [Dancing in Your Head] is not one of my favorite Ornette Coleman recordings.

Jauss: It’s not mine at all. I like the early Ornette [recordings for Atlantic] much more than anything else, although I do like Sound Museum: Three Women and Sound Museum: Hidden Man a lot. But his early stuff, with [bassist] Charlie Haden and [trumpeter] Don Cherry, that just knocks me out.

Feinstein: I guess I’m surprised that you chose an album that means much less to you, at least in terms of the musical impact.

Jauss: If I was to write about an Ornette Coleman composition that means a lot to me, it would probably be “Lonely Woman,” which is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. But I was more interested in the psychology of his character than my emotional response to the music. For some reason, I felt this had been a big moment for him, that it changed him in some significant way.

...

Feinstein: Your Coltrane poem “Hymn of Fire” has the feel of a sestina, though you’ve obviously pulled it out of form. Could you talk about that?

Jauss: It began as a sestina. I was trying to write a legitimate sestina, but it wasn’t working, and I realized part of the reason was the content: the poem was about things falling apart, and at some point it occurred to me that maybe the sestina should fall apart too. So I shrunk it. I shrunk the stanzas from six lines to five and shortened the number of end words from six to three, leaving two lines in each stanza without repeating end words. And instead of the three-line envoi, I put all of the three of the repeated end words into one final line. So there’s a sense of things funneling down, that all of these things that are apart are gradually getting closer and closer, and in the final moment they come together. It seemed appropriate for this poem because of what was happening in the world at that moment when Coltrane died: the riots in Newark, and so forth.

Feinstein: It also pays homage to the late Coltrane performances when he explored circular, sometimes diffuse themes and then suddenly pulled them together at the composition’s close.

Jauss: Yeah, I meant that. [Laughs hard.] I’d love to say I intended to imitate that structure, but if it’s there--and I guess it is--it’s just a lucky accident. What drew me to the sestina form was its principle of repetition with variation, which is of course the principle behind all improvisation but especially, I’d say, behind Coltrane’s improvisations. If he can play “My Favorite Things” for twenty-nine minutes with Eric Dolphy, you know? That’s a sign that someone can really explore repetition and variation. So maybe that’s why I turned to such a repetitive form, and maybe one of the reasons I shortened it is because I’ve always loved that Miles quote. Coltrane asks him for advice on how to end a solo, and Miles says, “Take the damn horn out of your mouth!” [Both laugh.]

Feinstein: Why focus on the end of Coltrane’s life as opposed to his performances with Dolphy?

Jauss: What I’m able to connect to--if anything--is the life. Since I don’t have access to the musical sides of their lives--the technical aspects of music--my way of connecting to the music, apart from the sheer pleasure of listening, is through their lives, through them. Since I’m also a fiction writer, my natural impulse is to try to enter another character’s mind, and, in my jazz poems, to pay homage to these people whom I wish I had heard and known. One of the reasons I write about these musicians, I guess, is my sense of loss, the fact that they were gone before I could hear them. Because I know the difference between hearing something live and hearing it on record. I know how much more moving and powerful it is. I know what it feels like to sit in a room and feel the vibrations in your chest that you don’t get from your CD player.

Feinstein: Michael Harper once said to me that he thought people should only write about musicians they’ve actually heard.

Jauss: Well, I’d be in bad shape!

Feinstein: I was blessed to hear quite a number of astonishing musicians before they died, but most people of my generation--certainly the next--will never have that opportunity. So, sad though it might be, it seems important to address art as artifact.

Jauss: There have been some musicians I have heard that I have tried to write about. I heard [tenor saxophonist] Joe Lovano play in Little Rock a few years ago and it was one of the most powerful sets of music that I’ve ever heard. But I wasn’t able to get it in writing, partly because I was there. I couldn’t convey the music; I don’t think there is language that can convey it. But I couldn’t even convey what it felt like to be there. In some ways, it’s easier for me to enter into something that I haven’t actually experienced, a performance I haven’t heard but only imagined.

Another example: Recently, I was visiting my son and his wife in Philadelphia where we heard [bassist and leader] Dave Holland with [tenor saxophonist] Chris Potter--I’ve heard Chris Potter play several times; I love his playing--and the others in the band: the wonderful trombonist, Robin Eubanks. [Vibraphonist] Steve Nelson: I’d like to be able to describe just his body movements. They’re almost a part of the music he makes, I think. And Holland was as solid and wonderful as could be. It was a great night of music, and I have since tried to write about it. But all my efforts just turn into vapor. I would like to able to capture something that I’ve heard, but I have yet to be able to do that. Even in the Buddy Rich poem, where I was there, I’m not really writing about the music; I’m writing about his fury at the bass player’s mistake.

Feinstein: But I also love the aspect of the poem where the speaker realizes there’s a lot happening on stage that he doesn’t know--why Rich is so upset--and thinking, “I want to know more. I don’t want to miss that next time.”

Jauss: And of course, I continue to miss it . . . [Both laugh.] But the concert also showed me how important this was for Rich. This wasn’t just about money; this meant so much to him that he was furious when someone made a small mistake.

Feinstein: I think, too, you very cleverly use the word “traps,” not only to describe the drum kit but also the traps on stage (playing for Buddy Rich, say) and the positive trap: being utterly captivated by this music.

Jauss: Yes. I think the last word of the poem is “caught.” That’s how I felt. For the rest of that concert, I was paying as close attention as I was able to. I was trying to hear what was so important to Buddy Rich. And I think now I can hear it, at least a little, and I wish more people could. Jazz is such an important contribution to our culture. [Federico García] Lorca once said, “The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails,” and, obviously, the most important has been jazz. It’s behind the music that everyone listens to, and the people who created it never got the respect that they deserved. Classical musicians are sort of like the golfers of music: they’re in their orchestra halls, everyone’s quiet, so much respect, everyone’s dressed up. Meanwhile, the jazz musicians are having to play over conversations and the ching of registers. To create great music in that environment is astonishing. And it is great, great music.

I firmly believe that jazz is the greatest contribution to American culture, and I believe that the jazz created in the fifties through the mid-sixties is the equivalent in music to what happened in the middle of the nineteenth century in literature with Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and Thoreau. And to have those people disappear. . . . People just don’t know about them, and if their albums don’t get transferred to CDs, the names disappear, and they’re gone.

Feinstein: I can’t say “they’re gone.” Maybe gone from a general consciousness.

Jauss: Right. You know all those nasty books about cultural literacy? Well, they didn’t really talk about African-American cultural literacy, especially given the great cultural contributions African-Americans have made to our culture. It seems to me a form of racism that we’re ignoring it. It seems to me a form of racism that we make fun of the Rolling Stones for still performing in their old age and yet we consider it normal for an old blues musician to still be playing. And that’s partly why some of my poems have focused on moments of racism in jazz history.

I once tried to write a poem about Dizzy Gillespie’s one experience in Arkansas, where he was beaten up in a rest room for being black.

Feinstein: Oh God ...

Jauss: I would like more people to know about it and about all the obstacles jazz musicians had to overcome to create their music. But mostly I’d like more people to listen to the music, to give it a chance. I’ve found that people who think they don’t like jazz don’t know the breadth of it. They don’t know that there’s some part of it that absolutely will speak to them. They think, somehow, that it’s homogenous: just one thing, one sound. It’s a word that ... As Duke Ellington always said, it would be better just to call it “music” and not try to categorize it. But a lot of people will hear one tune, not like it, and then reject everything. I’ve had people hear early Ornette Coleman and say, “That’s too avant-garde.” Well, that’s fifty years old! [Both laugh.] Can’t they catch up?

...

Jauss: I have a marvelous envy for jazz musicians. To me, art exists because of a need, a desire to express, and I get a certain amount of satisfaction from writing poems and stories, but it seems to me that the alphabet isn’t large enough, and the musical vocabulary is so large, so expressive, so emotive--far beyond what can be done on the page. I just remain in love.