The Blues
by Langston Hughes

When the shoe strings break
On both your shoes
And you’re in a hurry-
That’s the blues.

When you go to buy a candy bar
And you’ve lost the dime you had-
Slipped through a hole in your pocket somewhere-
That’s the blues, too, and bad!

Hello, and welcome back to Poetry Wednesday 6/24/09. You can sign in today and take the tour thru Thursday, so take your time.

I’ll be your hostess again this week. My sister, Sans Souci, has completed her poetry book, and is taking a break, but she will check in.

Before we get started, please make sure that your post has a link to get back to this page to make it easier to take the tour:

1) Copy and paste the following link that I have provided for you from this page to somewhere on your poetry post.

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita’s page

2) Leave the link of your poetry post in the comments section below. This is the link guests will click on to read your poem.

Jazz Poets of the Streets

This week, I will be taking a closer look at the history of jazz poetry.

Jazz poetry can be defined as poetry that “demonstrates jazz-like rhythm or the feel of improvisation”. During the 1920s, several poets began to eschew the conventions of rhythm and style; among these were Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and E. E. Cummings. The significance of the simultaneous evolution of poetry and jazz during the 1920s was apparent to many poets of the era, resulting in the merging of the two art forms into jazz poetry. Jazz poetry has long been something of an “outsider” art form that exists somewhere outside the mainstream, having been conceived in the 1920s by African-Americans, maintained in the 1950s by counterculture poets like those of the Beat generation, and adapted in modern times into hip-hop music and live poetry events known as poetry slams.

Early jazz poetry did not mimic the sounds and improvisational spirit of jazz. Instead, it heavily referenced the musical form with allusions made to musicians, instruments, and locations key to the burgeoning jazz scene. Poets like Vachel Lindsay (who actually abhorred the “primitive” sound of jazz music) and Mina Loy wrote poetry in this vein. It was with the advent of the Harlem Renaissance that jazz poetry developed into what it is today.

Poets like Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar incorporated the syncopated rhythms and repetitive phrases of blues and jazz music into their writing. Hughes and Dunbar, like many Harlem Renaissance writers, were deeply concerned with racial pride and with the creation of purely African-American poetry.

Since jazz music was an important part of African-American culture at the time, Hughes and others like him adapted the musical genre to create their own, singularly African-American voices that could easily be distinguished from the work of white poets.

Many of Hughes’ poems, such as “The Weary Blues,” sound almost exactly like popular jazz and blues songs of the period, and vice versa. His work is also highly evocative of spirituals.

Right: Jack Kerouac

As members of the (largely white) Beat generation began to embrace aspects of African-American culture during the 1950s, the art of jazz poetry shifted its focus from racial pride and individuality to spontaneity and freedom. In this case, both jazz poetry and jazz music were seen as powerful statements against the status quo. Jack Kerouac would often accompany his readings of poetry with music, playing the piano or bongos while he read. His colleague, musician and composer David Amram would often scat along as Kerouac read. Amram later wrote of their work together, “We never once rehearsed. We did listen intently to one another. Jazz is all about listening and sharing. I never drowned out one word of whatever Jack (Kerouac) was reading or making up on the spot. Lawrence Ferlinghetti had a similar collaboration with saxophone player Stan Getz.

Left: Bob Kaufman

Beat poet Bob Kaufman was said by some to be the greatest jazz poet ever to have lived, with the exception of Langston Hughes,. Kaufman paid homage to jazz in poems like “O Jazz O” and “Morning Joy.” His work is notable for its syncopated rhythms, surreal imagery, and a quality of alienation stemming from Kaufman’s own role in life as a drifter and a jailbird.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the Beat poet formerly known as LeRoi Jones renamed himself Amiri Baraka and revived the idea of jazz poetry as a source of black pride. Baraka was a cultural nationalist who believed that “Black People are a race, a culture, a Nation”. Elements of jazz show up often in Baraka’s work, such as syncopation and repetition of phrases. Gil Scott-Heron, often seen as one of the founding fathers of rap music, also used many of the artistic devices of jazz poetry in his spoken-word albums of the 1970s and 1980’s.

The tradition of jazz poetry has been carried on by hip-hop and rap artists, who often set poetic lyrics to syncopated beats. Another parallel that can be drawn is that of the freestyle rap, which features lyrics improvised to a beat, thus capturing the spontaneous, improvised nature of the jazz poem.

Spoken word, a genre made up of experimental text-based performance artists and poets, also emphasizes the relationship between poetry and performance, and can sometimes involve musical accompaniment and/or improvisation. Like jazz poetry, spoken word poetry de-emphasizes poetry’s roots in academia and instead focuses on popular culture and issues of current social significance. One of spoken word’s best-known forms, slam poetry, although it is usually memorized and not normally performed with music, often uses styles that owe a debt to jazz poetry.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_poetry

Billie Holiday by Morten Lonvig

Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio
By Carl Sandburg

It’s a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
The cartoonists weep in their beer.
Ship riveters talk with their feet
To the feet of floozies under the tables.
A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:
“I got the blues.
I got the blues.
I got the blues.”
And . . . as we said earlier:
The cartoonists weep in their beer.

1920

New Orleans Jazz
By C. Rudsill

O-Jazz-O
by Bob Kaufman

Where the string
At
some point,
Was umbilical jazz,
Or perhaps,
In memory,
A long lost bloody cross,
Buried in some steel cavalry.
In what time
For whom do we bleed,
Lost notes,
from some jazzman’s Broken needle.
Musical tears from lost
Eyes.
Broken drumsticks, why?
Pitter patter, boom dropping
Bombs in the middle
Of my emotions
My father’s sound
My mother’s sound,
Is love,
Is life.

Jazz & Blues: 1920s-30s

“Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul–the tom-tom of revolt against against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”

–Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926)

“Jazz is a good barometer of freedom. In its beginnings, the United States spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”

–Duke Ellington

[mp3j track=”whenyouresmiling.mp3″]

The tour starts here !

Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio By Carl Sandburg

Sans Souci’s post for this week is at:

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Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio
By Carl Sandburg