Introduction
Jazz poetry is not always about
musicians. Sometimes the syntax / flow has a syncopation to it
that reminds one of jazz, especially if one is thinking of
Be-Bop or just Bop.
When I first started learning
about jazz, I started with the 20s and worked my way up to the
gates of Bop - city where I stalled out. Not only couldn’t I get
Bop; I couldn’t find the "head" & forget about tapping your foot
to the beat! I was young, so very, very young.
20 years later, I finally got it.
It took me awhile, but a few years back, it all fell into place.
Bop, is a transcendent experience: sound and movement, chaos and
serenity, and most of all, space. So to, these poems flow to a
unique rhythm.
About the dedication. Steve
Fowler, a "musician’s musician" (so says Mark Weber), composer,
a performer of experimental jazz with Vinny Golia (Nine Winds
Records), fighter of ALS (killer of Charles Mingus & Lou Gehrig).
He & I became friends in 1998. This book is dedicated to him and
to all who continue to buck the odds.
RD Armstrong (editor & poet)
from:
Eyes Like Mingus: A Jazz Poetry Anthology. RD Armstong,
editor. Little Red Book # 8. Lummox Press, 1999.
Featuring: M. Hartenbach, L. Jaffe, L. Lerner, G. Locklin, T.
Moore, BZ. Niditch, R. Smith, S. Wannberg, M. Weber, A. D.
Winans, RD. Armstrong
Three Poems
From the Book
Eyes Like Mingus (For Steve
Fowler)
by RD Armstrong
Eyes like flint
like flecks of coal
like shiny bits of starless sky
trapped in the ruins of a slag heap
Eyes like molten steel
sullen and angry
piercing -- a bullet finding its mark
like a jaguar
passionate and alive
yet hating the trap
pacing behind the bars
bars like a skeleton
trapped inside the mind
behind
Eyes like Mingus
like notes caught in the net
like the grid of notation
like Mingus
in shamanic Mexico
trapped in a chair
no strength to grip
no fingers to coax notes with
no feet to stand up and count with
no time -- no signature
Eyes like concrete -- shattering
like glass -- splintering
like the wrecking ball’s slap
like voltage -- unregulated
like a passion laid bare
to the gallery’s scrutiny
like the madman’s frothing nightmare
like the inexplicable accuracy of
random fate
like a shot to the belly
like Coltrane’s "Favorite Things"
like your fingers -- stilled
Eyes like an empty glass
staring bug-eyed into space
upturned and dispassionate
like a dream -- lost in the stars
Eyes like Mingus
silent but never
silenced.
Hear RD Armstong read
Eyes Like
Mingus
1962
by A. D. Winans
the old black hawk
booked the
best jazz musicians of its day
Getz, Mulligan, Diz
to name just a few
I went there but twice
once with the poet
Jack Micheline
once with a young
Latin girl
to see Miles Davis
blow his horn
forced to sit in the
teenage section
because she was only
17
sipping on a coke
smoke curling around
the room in long lingering
lazy circles
sweet sax
smooth slow gin
tenor
my hand on warm thigh
feeling high
feeling cool
be-bop rhythms
dancing inside my soul
bud powell on
verve
(for bob austin)
by Gerald
Locklin
i always had trouble
with the fast guys—
charlie parker, coleman hawkins, bud powell—
i guess i was a young romantic in search of
the lyrical, rhapsodic, and climatic—stan
kenton, gerald wilson, coltrane, ahmad jamal—
the brooding miles who really slowed things
down and took them overseas. but now the
liner notes instruct my ear in the "romantic
agony" of improvisation at a breakneck pace:
the challenge of it, living on the brink of
failure, the incomparable concentration on
coordination of brain, heart, and fingers,
context of the rhythm section, historical
gestalt, the journey taking him from classically
trained child of a musician through the smoke
and drugs of urban blues clubs to the left-bank
caves where his piano would personify le-jazz-hot.
as with heart crane, it was artistry within a
crumbling tower, the crystal peal of aching bells.
i haven’t spent my obligatory april in paris yet, but
i have known the bareness of december in the
gardens there. as caillebotte perceived, it
sometimes rains on sundays on parisian
boulevards. time has a way of getting out of 4/4
joint, and sometimes it is best that we just take it
somewhere; sometimes it’s the last control we
ever exercise. sometimes the stars are only in our
eyes, and sometimes we no longer have the lungs
to contemplate ascending the steep stairway to
the end of night. eventually even bud powell has
to slow things down and meditate, grown elegaic:
c’est la vie; it was just one of those things; it never
even entered my mind.
it never entered his mind.
it never entered ours.
and then it does.
and sometimes not so tenderly.
