Phil Woods Plays A.A. Milne

The Children’s Suite
By Phil Woods
Jazzed Media

Considered the truest heir to Charlie Parker on the alto saxophone, Phil Woods even married Bird’s widow, Chan Parker. However, his latest CD is a definite change of pace for the bop titan that has actually been a longtime coming. Chancing across his children’s A.A. Milne books in 1961, Phil Woods was inspired to write several songs based on his Winnie-the-Pooh stories and verse, but rights difficulties prevented him from recording them for well over forty years. Previously only heard in private performances, Woods’s Milne compositions can now be widely heard on his recent CD, The Children’s Suite.

British actor and Milne family friend Peter Dennis would finally make the project possible, facilitating permissions from the Milne estate and the Disney Company. Sadly, Dennis recently passed away, but his narration can be heard throughout Woods’s Suite. Both a jazz fan and the only actor allowed to interpret Milne’s work on-stage in his one man show Bother!, Dennis clearly had enthusiasm for the project. While many jazz fans will probably find themselves skipping his solo readings like “Sneezles,” younger listeners might well be captivated by them.

Both audiences are likely to be thoroughly charmed by Bob Dorough’s twangy idiosyncratic vocals. Famous for his long stint composing and singing for Schoolhouse Rock, Dorough’s credits also include work with Miles Davis and Allen Ginsberg. He makes a tune like “Pinkle Purr” sound hip and sly rather than cutesy, also contributing a funky electric piano solo. On several tracks he is joined by vocalist Vicki Doney for duets clearly inspired by his Schoolhouse sessions with Blossom Dearie. Doney rises to challenge quite well, bringing a mischievousness to “The Good Little Girl” that Dearie probably would have approved of.

Woods is still a force to reckon with on alto, soloing with power and sensitivity on the ballads “Come Out with Me,” “Solitude,” and “Buttercup Days,” where he shares the spotlight with fellow alto Nelson Hill and baritone Roger Rosenberg. Woods and Hill also spar good-naturedly on the swinging “Us Two.” While the string quartet often gives the session a lush vibe, there is still plenty of swing throughout the Suite, particularly the up-tempo bop number, “The Morning Walk.”

Composer-conductor Woods has assembled a fine ensemble, including his frequent associates, drummer Bill Goodwin and bassist Steve Gilmore, who swing the band nicely. Doney’s husband Eric rounds out the rhythm section on acoustic piano, also providing tastefully supportive accompaniment to Dennis’s dramatic recitations.

Woods’s musical settings of Milne would be a great introduction to jazz for young people that should not drive their parents to distraction when forced to endure incessant listening. Children’s Suite also happens to be a legit jazz session, with plenty of rewarding moments for Phil Woods fans. In addition, it should be noted a portion of the proceeds from Children’s Suite will go to Pocono Area Transitional Housing (PATH), a 501(c)3 non-profit providing shelter to families in need.

On-Stage: The Man in the Newspaper Hat

There can be no more problematic figure in American literature than Ezra Pound. In 1949, he became the inaugural recipient of the Bollingen Prize for poetry, administered by the Library of Congress. This proved understandably controversial at the time, given that Pound had been committed to St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital and still had a charge of treason hanging over his head. Not only was Pound unrepentant for his wartime broadcasts from Mussolini’s Italy, his work cited by the Bollingen judges contained undeniably anti-Semitic passages. Such was the vexing Pound that poet Elizabeth Bishop regularly called on as part of her unofficial duties with the Library of Congress, inspiring her poem “Visits to St. Elizabeth.” That poem in turn would inspire playwright Hayley Heaton’s The Man in the Newspaper Hat, currently running at the 45th Street Theatre.

Mad genius might be a reasonably fitting description of Pound. As the audience enters the theater, he is already on-stage working with a silent fervor that approaches the obsessive. His hospital room is clearly the product of a disordered mind, with papers strewn everywhere and writing cluttering the walls. Into this rat’s nest Bishop periodically ventures, hoping to see the latest output from one of America’s greatest modernist poets. What she usually gets is a barrage of anti-Semitic outbursts, sexually explicit insults, condescension, and paranoia.

In Heaton’s play there is no question Pound remains an unabashed Fascist sympathizer. He frequently uses hateful slurs for Jews, suggesting they are sub-human. However, the final scene paints him as a fundamentally lonely and possibly delusional man, probably humanizing him more than he deserves. He also benefits from Angus Hepburn’s riveting performance. While it is at times a showy role, Hepburn’s quiet moments fully flesh out the troublesome figure. He creates a portrait of a man of obvious intelligence, but whose idiosyncrasies have given way to obsession, perhaps even madness.

As Bishop, Anne Fizzard has a more thankless role, largely requiring her to be appalled and unnerved by Pound’s ugly rants. However, she ties it all together at the end with an effective reading of Bishop’s poem, illustrating how aptly Heaton picked up on the language and images of her verse:

“This is a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is there, is flat,
for the widowed Jew in the newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
waltzing the length of a weaving board
by the silent sailor
that hears his watch
that ticks the time
of the tedious man
that lies in the house of bedlam . . .”

While Newspaper hints at some remorse on Pound’s part, at least for his caustic treatment of Bishop, it is unlikely to radically alter opinions about the man of bedlam. He was an acknowledged giant of American letters, but that is appropriately difficult to hear in Heaton’s dialogue (of which the highly sensitive theater patrons should be strongly cautioned). Short but intense, Newspaper is a challenging look at a devilishly difficult man to take full stock of. Now open, it runs until April 1st.

Documentary Fortnight: Neither Memory Nor Magic

The story of a Jewish Hungarian poet killed during the Holocaust might sound eerily familiar. First Hannah Senesh was the subject of the Oscar short-listed documentary Blessed is the Match. Now Miklós Radnóti is profiled in a new film screening as part of MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight. Relying heavily on the power of Radnóti’s own verse, Hugo Perez’s Neither Memory Nor Magic is a deeply humane examination of one of Hungary’s greatest Twentieth Century literary figures.

The similarities between the lives of Radnóti and Senesh are tragically obvious. Yet, they were vastly different people. Senesh embraced her Jewish faith and the Zionist cause. While Radnóti never denied his Jewish heritage, he was in fact a genuine Roman Catholic convert. Above all else, he considered himself Hungarian, never losing his patriotic love of country even as his homeland descended into madness.

Unlike Senesh, Radnóti’s poetry was widely read and highly regarded within his own lifetime. With the rise of Hungarian Fascism, Radnóti’s greatest concern was preserving his archive. He would eventually be deported to a Serbian work camp, where he incredibly maintained his creative output. In on-camera interviews, survivors tell how Radnóti would share his poems with fellow prisoners in hopes of preserving them. Even on a harrowing forced march that would end in a mass grave, he would write “Postcards,” his final poems, which would be discovered in his overcoat pocket when his body was exhumed after the war. It is the poems from this period that would posthumously cement his reputation.

Throughout Magic, Perez’s focus constantly returns to Radnóti’s poems, dramatically integrating them into the film, with excellent readings that are both sensitive and crystal clear. One such poem we hear is the all too appropriately titled “Forced March:”

“A fool he is who, collapsed,___rises and walks again,
Ankles and knees moving___alone, like wandering pain,
Yet he, as if wings uplifted him,___sets out on his way,
And in vain the ditch calls him___back, who dare not stay.
And if asked why not, he might answer___– without leaving his path –
That his wife was awaiting him,___and a saner, more beautiful death . . .”

Though just under an hour, the well put together Magic says a great deal in its brief running time. Perez judiciously balances the archival and the contemporary, documenting the annual Radnóti celebration at the public school which bears his name. He concludes with a parting shot that perfectly encapsulates the humanity of the man and the tragedy of his loss.

Informative and emotionally engrossing, Magic is an excellent documentary. It screens this Sunday (2/22) at MoMA, with special readings of Radnóti’s poetry scheduled to follow.

Hannah Senesh: Blessed is the Match

According to novelist and Israeli Defense Force veteran Alan Kaufman, IDF soldiers are sometimes referred to as “matches,” in an allusion to Hannah Senesh’s beloved poem. Though executed in the waning days of World War II for her part in an ill-fated attempt to rescue Hungarian Jewry, her poetry endures as a source of inspiration and national pride for the people of Israel. Taking its name from that Senesh quatrain, Roberta Grossman’s Academy Award shortlisted documentary Blessed is the Match: the Life and Death of Hannah Senesh (trailer here) opens today in New York.

Filmed with the support of Senesh’s surviving family, Blessed had access to thousands of photos and personal documents, many never publicly aired before, revealing her short but intense life. Born to a prosperous family, the teen-aged Senesh still chafed under Hungarian anti-Semitism, eventually expatriating to Palestine. As Hitler pressured his reluctant Hungarian allies to adopt his Final Solution, Senesh was living safely on a kibbutz. However, the young poet, barely into her twenties, willingly enlisted with the British for a risky mission back to her homeland, putting herself directly in harm’s way.

When Senesh and her two comrades took off for their Yugoslavian entry point, Hungary was still a sovereign country, where Senesh would have freedom of movement as a citizen. When they landed, Germany had occupied Hungarian and installed the SS-like Arrow Cross to do their bidding. As a Jew, Senesh suddenly had no rights in Hungary, yet she persisted in her mission. In his final recorded interview, one of her fellow paratroopers relates an incident shortly before her capture in which she gave him a scrap of paper, which he nearly lost to the sands of time. On that paper, of course, were the lines of her famous poem: “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame . . . “

For Grossman though, the heart of the film is the relationship between Senesh and her mother Catherine, whose memoirs are voiced by Joan Allen (who also narrated the excellent Rape of Europa, which documented the National Socialists’ systematic plundering of Europe’s artistic heritage.) For months they were imprisoned simultaneously but separately, allowed only furtive glances of each other. However, their emotional bond remained unbreakable.

In Blessed, Grossman uses just about every technique available to documentarians, including talking head interviews, extensive use of still photography, in-character voice-overs, and even dramatic re-creations. While there is an understandable impulse to canonize Senesh, Grossman does include recollections of those who knew the soldier poet, but did not exactly love her (but certainly respect her courage and sacrifice). We also hear from Senesh’s nephews, the always eloquent historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, and even Shimon Peres, who briefly knew Senesh during her kibbutz days.

Though short-listed, Blessed was disappointingly denied an Academy nomination for best documentary. It is in fact, far superior to most of the final nominees, except the outstanding Man on Wire. Senesh’s story is clearly compelling, and Grossman’s absorbing treatment is both informative and quite cinematic. It opens today in New York at the Sunshine Theater.

From PA to Italy to Cornelia St.

Are you Italian-American or interested in Italian culture? Do you just like words? Amy Barone, a friend of J.B., is reading at Cornelia Street Café tonight in conjunction with the Italian-American Writers Association, in support of her new chapbook, Views from the Driveway.

Barone’s work reflects her Pennsylvania roots and the extensive time she spent in Italy. She still writes a column on New York living for an Italian beauty magazine, including this report on Small’s. Jazz is indeed a significant influence on her work, including “Understanding Jaco,” a meditation on Jaco Pastorius and his composition “Three Views of a Secret,” from Driveway:

“I wanted to understand such a confusing and elusive song
Like you, the bass playing wonder who after years of saying
“no” turned to “yeses” that paved your undoing
As you traveled down dark streets and indiscriminately
picked your battles
Abandoning reason and the roles, of leader, teacher,
friend and muse” . . . (p. 29)

There is indeed a long history of poetry taking inspiration from jazz, and vice versa. Jazz musicians and poets have also often shared the same venues, like Cornelia Street. The tradition continues tonight at 6:00.

Anna Akhmatova On Naked Soil

Anna Akhmatova began her career as a poet writing about love and loss. Those poems were immensely popular, but not very Soviet. This led to problems. Ironically, the Soviet persecution of Akhamatova and her family led the poet to write “Requiem,” one of the greatest poetic responses to Stalin’s terror. The life and words of Akhmatova have now been adapted for the stage by Rebecca Schull in On Naked Soil: Imagining Anna Akhamatova, currently playing Off-Broadway at the Theater for the New City.

Both writer and lead actor, Schull actually bears a striking resemblance to her subject. Perhaps best recognized for her role in Wings, Schull is something of an authority on the literature of the Great Terror, having previously adapted Yevgenia Ginzburg’s memoir of the Stalinist era. Her treatment of both poet and poetry is knowledgeable and respectful throughout Soil.

Structured something like a volume of poetry, Soil consists of one continuous act, broken into many short scenes, introduced by Akhamatova’s verse and photos projected on screens above the stage. The action alternates between the late 1930’s and the mid 1960’s. In the earlier scenes, Akhamatova befriends Lydia Chukovskaya, with whom she has much in common. Both are writers and have loved ones condemned to Stalin’s prisons. During the later sequences, Akhamatova reflects on her life with Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of poet Osip Mandelstam, with whom Akhamatova had her own history of a sort.

Schull deftly incorporates Akhmatova’s words into the play’s text, much of which is quite telling of the Soviet experience. She was blessed with excellent source material, since Chukovskaya recorded her time with Akhamatova in journals that were later published. We come to truly understand her later poetry when Schull quotes Akhamatova’s conversation with another woman queuing outside a Leningrad prison for news of those unjustly held within:

“’And can you describe this?’
And I answered:
‘Yes, I can.’
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.”

That exchange would later become the prefatory material of her masterwork “Requiem.” Akhmatova’s life is important to remember for many reasons. Far too many are still willing to accept the early Soviet propaganda, believing the experiment only soured with Stalin’s ascendency. However, her experiences with Soviet oppression began in 1921 with the execution of her first husband, fellow poet Nikolai Gumilyov, well before the Stalin years. As is also quite clear in the staging of Soil, Akhamatova lived under constant surveillance, unable to speak freely in her own flat.

Despite the brevity of each mini-scene, the play starts slowly. However, as the richness of Akhmatova words unfold, the play picks up momentum. The projected verse and photos are nicely integrated into the production (but are somewhat undermined by the screens’ partially blocked sightlines).

Schull is completely believable as the noble, but still very human Akhmatova. As Mandelstam, Lenore Loveman conveys a hard-won wisdom that just seems appropriately Russian. As written, Chukovskaya too often functions simpy as a sounding board for Akhmatova, until late in the play, when the full significance of her visits is revealed. Schull compensates for a weak foil in those scenes, powerfully expressing Akhamatova’s anguish over her alienation from her imprisoned son, and her shame for trying to curry favor with Stalin on his behalf with poetry intended to appeal to the dictator’s personality cult.

More than history, Soil is about the words of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, who lived under one of the twentieth century’s least poetic regimes. It would be great to see Soil performed together with Schull’s Ginzburg play, but separately her Akhmatova work offers much to contemplate. Now open, Soil runs through May 4th.

(Photo credits: Jonathan Slaff)

The Poetic Charles Lloyd

Rabo de Nube
Charles Lloyd Quartet
ECM Records

There seems to be something almost otherworldly about Charles Lloyd. Steeped in the primeval blues of Memphis and informed by Eastern music and philosophy, Lloyd always pursues his own alchemy. His latest, Rabo de Nube a live set released within days of his seventieth birthday, proves Lloyd’s powers remain undiminished with the passage of years.

U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic contributed original verse for the liner, in an appropriate fit between poet and musician. Simic’s work combines the very real, concrete details of our world with a surreal vision of what lurks around the corner, just out of sight. Lloyd has always been very much of this world, grounded in the blues. Yet he is able to step outside it, with his searching flights of exploration.

In “Two for Charles Lloyd” Simic contrasts the pastoral of the flute with the urban of the tenor saxophone. For tenor, Simic writes: “Late night talk/On a tenor/With the dead/And the shadows they cast.” The opener “Prometheus,” a tenor feature, is a turbulent piece that demonstrates why Lloyd was often categorized in the Coltrane school during the 1960’s. Skitterish and constantly changing, it indeed could be an eerie conversation with Trane.

Lloyd continues on tenor with “Migration of Spirit.” Starting with Reuben Rodgers’ unaccompanied bass prelude, it builds in intensity as the full quartet enters, ultimately reaching ecstatic crescendos as Lloyd swoops and soars above. Then the rhythm section locks in and brings it back to Earth for a swinging solo from Jason Moran.

JaMo is one of the most accomplished jazz artists to hit the scene in the last eight or nine years, and it is fascinating to hear him play with Lloyd. Moran has recently been exploring the music of Thelonius Monk (particularly the 1959 Town Hall concert) so he has a lot to say with Lloyd on the Monkish duet “La Colline de Monk.”

Simic associates the flute with nature—the Charles Lloyd pictured in Big Sur, gazing out into the far distance. He writes: “The sound of flute,/That purest of instruments,/Close to breath,/Close to wind in the leaves.” Yet the flute selection is the most boppish tune on Rabo, “Booker’s Garden,” an up-tempo tribute to Booker Little, that also features a funky, percussive solo from Moran.

The concluding title track is the only composition of the set not penned by Lloyd. It is a tune he is revisiting from Lift Every Voice, the powerful set of spirituals and other meaningful tunes Lloyd recorded in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. The version here is much less elegiac, with a relaxed lyricism perfectly suiting his tenor voice.

Lloyd is indeed a poetic jazz artist. He has long had a mysterious ability to invent brief little melodies (or stanzas) in his solos that seem to redefine the entire song. As evidenced by Rabo, he has lost none of his power.

Unhinged in Central Park

The City Park Foundation decided to host an evening of 1960’s “Black Power” poets on Thursday night on Central Park’s Summer Stage, so presumably they got what they bargained for. In fact, both readers, Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez were described as Summer Stage veterans. What those in attendance heard (and largely ate up) was a diet of didacticism, profanity, and hatred.

Baraka started the reading with a “short story” collected in Tales of the Out and Gone, describing 1960’s revolutionaries losing their faith in a newly elected African American mayor. It was short on both character and plot development, but long on invective hurled at those Baraka disagrees with, like “Neo-Colonial Negroes and state collaborating Puerto Ricans” and of course the former “cracker mayor.” Baraka also read a poem dedicated to Sonny Carson, a figure too divisive for even the New York City Council to consent to honor. Baraka himself has a long history of comments that have been condemned as anti-Semitic by the ADL (background here), and his “Eulogy” included Carson’s infamous defense against such charges: "I'm anti-white - don't limit my anti's to one group of people."

Sanchez read next starting with a “poem” that was a list of “heroes” including hardcore Marxists like Chairman Mao and Angela Davis, as well as Cynthia McKinney and Charles Barron, a racial demagogue who represents Brooklyn in the City Council. To include Communist dictators and their apologists in her pantheon while also professing a love for jazz that night reveals a shocking historical ignorance on Sanchez’s part. As the newly announced U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic can attest, jazz and its listeners were constantly persecuted by the Communists during the Cold War.

We did get insight from Sanchez like Pres. Bush is known for mangling “the King and the Queen’s English.” Sadly, ad hominem attacks like this usually get a good hand in New York these days. As for Sanchez’s own use of language, in the poem “Peace” we heard lines like a “terrorist bomb is the language of the unheard” and about “holding hostage the hearts and penises of the workers.”

Last night “peace” was advocated for Iraq in the form of an immediate troop withdrawal with complete ethical disregard for the consequences, while contradictorily preaching “resistance” and revolution to “smash capitalism” here in America. That so many of my neighbors have no problem hearing such extremist sentiments is disturbing. That the non-profit City Parks Foundation (not a City agency) would sponsor such an extremist, one sided event must mean they endorse the sentiments to some extent. Perhaps the City should start looking elsewhere for programming.

Charles Simic, Poet Laureate

Images of nature tend to be very dark in Charles Simic’s work. Though self-described as a “city poet,” there is both menace and whimsy to be found everywhere in the work of the newly announced U.S. Poet Laureate. His influences include jazz and growing up in what was then Yugoslavia under National Socialism and Communism, having said: “I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents.”

In an interview Simic clearly connects those influences:

“Yugoslavia was then a Communist country and in the first years of Communist rule, it was prohibited to listen to jazz. Jazz was regarded as a kind of decadent art form, an invention of the capitalists to undermine socialist youth. You could go to jail for listening to jazz. I know, for example, one of the poets I translated, Ivan Lalic, was then a student at the University of Zagreb and was a Communist party member. He was thrown out of the party for listening to jazz records. Which made it even more fun. So this, like a lot of forbidden things, became a secret pleasure. I remember later on going to houses of older boys who had records and listening to something like Bessie Smith with the volume turned down really low and the poor mother fretting in the next room saying ‘Oh God, those kids are going to get us all in trouble.’”

Simic is a prolific and rewarding poet, accurately described by the Librarian of Congress as “both accessible and deep.” For further reading Hotel Insomnia and Return to a Place Lit By a Glass of Milk are highly recommended. (His poem "Crepuscule with Nellie" was also included in Everyman's Library's Jazz Poems, reviewed here.)

Writing Rumba

Writing Rumba: The Afrocubanista Movement in Poetry
By Miguel Arnedo-Gómez
University of Virginia Press
0-8139-2542-8

There are some archetypal images of Cuban culture, particularly the beautiful rumba dancer, that continue to have romantic resonance for those attracted to the island nation’s music and culture. Such images held great appeal to the Afrocubanista cultural movement of 1920’s and 1930’s Cuba, whose poetry comes in for a critical re-evaluation in Arnedo-Gómez’s Writing Rumba.

At the time, the Afrocubanista movement was championed as a movement towards a culturally unified Cuba, beyond race or ethnicity. It received strong theoretical underpinning from Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz. However, critical notions of identity and authenticity are quickly introduced in Writing Rumba, as many of the Afrocubanistas were of white Spanish descent, but used Afrocuban elements in their poems, particularly music and rumba. For instance, Arnedo-Gómez cites critic Richard L. Jackson:

“Jackson divides afrocubanista poetry into ‘false black poetry,’ written by white negrista poets, and ‘authentic black poetry’ . . . For Jackson, what characterizes the former is the representation of qualities often associated with Cuban culture of African origins, such as song, dance, rhythm, and sexuality. He argues that negrista poets were only interested in ‘black folklore and rituals,’ in beating ‘black-drums in poetry’ and making use of African sounding words.” (p. 11)

Yet, questions of authenticity persist beyond racial lines in Arnedo-Gómez’s survey. Despite poet Nicolás Guillén’s Afro-Cuban heritage and the legitimacy which it grants him in the eyes of some critics, his upper-class upbringing leads the author to question his personal connection to the lives and traditions of average Afro-Cubans:

“His father was a journalist and a prestigious politician who served as a senator from 1909 to 1912 under the liberal government of José Miguel Gómez. . . There is no indication in Angel Augier’s biography of the poet that Afro-Cuban traditions were practiced in the Guillén’s family home.” (p. 55)

Clearly, Afro-Cuban musical forms were a common source of inspiration for the Afrocubnistas. One example Arnedo -Gómez cites for its “European device of personification” is Alfonso Hernández Catá’s “Rumba:”

“While the string complains,
the cornet shouts.
. . . . . . .
The galloping of the timbales
steps over all restraint.
. . . . . . . . .
The bongo has gone crazy.” (p. 132)

Regardless of notions of race and class, the Afrocubanistas poets arguably helped shape the romantic perceptions of Cuba and its music. Arnedo-Gómez does seem inclined to give the Afrocubanista poets a qualified defense against some critical charges, arguing often that they were, in fact, more faithfully representing elements of Afro-Cuban life then commonly believed. However, he has very little to say about their work in an aesthetic sense. Ultimately, Writing Rumba is overly concerned with how its subjects are perceived and other such issues of identity politics, and not interested enough in the work they actually wrote.

Hurricane Blues

Hurricane Blues: Poems About Katrina and Rita
Edited by Philip C. Kolin and Susan Swarthout
Southeast Missouri State University Press tradepaper
09760413-59

For those still looking to support some worthy causes at year-end, Hurricane Blues is a new anthology of poems inspired by the hurricanes of 2005, all proceeds of which go to hurricane relief. As has been the case with all responses to Katrina, the poetry here runs the gamut, from the touching and moving, to the angry and bitter.

New Orleans is the cradle of jazz, so music often plays a role in the poems collected here. In Linda Back McKay’s “Moving Life,” one of the more hopeful poems, jazz is associated with rebirth, as McKay writes:

“Finally, after sky parlays with stars,
the city is frothy again
with charcoal, river fish, jazz riffs.” (p.175)

Conversely, jazz is associated with the death and New Orleans funerals in Marjorie Maddox’s "Jazz Memorial," which starts in a much darker mood:

“While the band jams,
_____Your widow passes out
beads as bright as grief.
_____I tap my feet
__________to “When the Saints . . .” (p. 148)

New Orleans legend Fats Domino makes several appearances, serving as the inspiration for Marion Menna’s “Blue Monday,” which often quotes his songs:

“Our tears fell like rain and the moon
stood still. The four winds blew
‘til blue Monday when Fats came
walking, yes indeed, still walking,
out of the dome.” (p. 105)

There are quite a few political barbs in Hurricane. FEMA, of course, comes in for some well deserved trashing. For some reason, the blue shirt Pres. Bush wore for his Jackson Square address seems to have particularly rubbed some of Hurricane poets the wrong way. While Nagin and Blanco largely get a free ride for their management, or lack there of, in this collection, the image of the abandoned school buses, intended to evacuate city residents, does crop up occasionally. In fact they inspired one of the subtler poems in the anthology, Walter R. Holland’s “The Yellow School Buses.” Holland writes:

“Yellow as flowers in a field, the un-driven buses
sat, loaves of an uneaten bread.” (p. 120)

Unfortunately, there is not much subtlety to Fred Chappell’s “The Grateful Gratitude Blues,” which borders on poor taste for the overtones of its mock obsequiousness, which could be interpreted as playing on past racial stereotypes. There is no interest in uniting the country for the long rebuilding process ahead in lines like:

“We know what you-all did sir to help us in our pain
You gave some cash to Haliburton and sent some ice to Maine
So we thank you very kindly sir we thank you Mr Brown”

Or

“We’ll be bailing out our bedrooms and fighting starving rats
And fending off cottonmouths and voting for Democrats
Who will thank you very kindly sir yes they’ll thank you Mr Brown” (p. 82)

Hurricane Blues reflects the general response to Katrina itself—heartbreaking with interludes of ugly recriminations. Most of the poems are moving reminders of the loss engendered by Katrina, and it is important not to let the excesses of the Chappells to obscure that reality.

The publisher, Southeastern Missouri State, is donating proceeds to hurricane relief, so you can feel good about purchasing it, although they do not identify which funds they will be donating to. You can also give a year-end gift to the Jazz Foundation of America, as I did, for all their relief efforts on behalf of New Orleans musicians in need of a little help here.

Burnt Sugar

Burnt Sugar: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish
Tradepaper edited by Lorie Marie Carlson and Oscar Hijuelos
Free Press
0-7432-7662-0

Music and poetry both have a strong rhythmic component, which may explain why Cubans have a historic affinity for both art forms. In Burnt Sugar a new collection compiled by Carlson and Hijuelos readers get a convincing sample of twentieth century Cuban poets (therefore no José Martí), that deliberately eschews politics.

According to co-editor Carlson they originally intended to include Cuba poets still writing under the Castro regime’s rule: “However, current U.S. regulations, set forth by the Department of Treasury, rendered it too uncomfortable—both from a practical as well as legal standpoint—to do so.” (p. XVI)

While there seems to have been a deliberate editorial choice to avoid political themes, it is difficult not to read political significance into some of the collected verse. Themes of isolation and longing reoccur, as in Heberto Padilla’’s “I Have Always Lived in Cuba:”

“I Live in Cuba.
I have always lived in Cuba
Those Years of roaming the world,
Of which much has been said,
Are my lies, my falsehoods.” (p. 13)

Conversely, for Gustavo Pérez Firmat finds pleasure in the protection of isolation in “The Rain:”

“I miss the rain.
Tonight when it finally pours again
I know the rain
Surrounds the house and makes it safe.
(Thanks to the rain once more we’ll be an island.)” (p. 1)

And there is optimism, despite current hardship, as declared in Pura del Prado’s “The Island:”

“The Island will forever be invincibly alive,
Though we be missing.
She will survive historical ruins,
her emigrations
and political conflicts.
It is good thus.” (p. 76)

Elements of Cuban life and culture are celebrated, including Chano Pozo, the Cuban percussionist who gave the Dizzy Gillespie’s Cu-Bop band Afro-Cuban authenticity, appearing in Adrian Castro’s “To the Rumba Players of Belén, Cuba:”

Did Chano Pozo inherit
he whose ears were present
at the first drumming?
Oye Chano
are your hands homesick
when not beating on goatskins?” (p. 86)

A volume celebrating the poetry of Cuba need not be overtly political. Indeed, the poems collected in Burnt Sugar, are excellent, often covering universal themes, like love and loss. English translations are often presented alongside the original Spanish poems, while a few mix the two languages in ways that make side-by-side comparison impractical.

Yet, reading the brief biographical notes of the contributing poets, it is difficult not to draw some conclusions about Cuban life. Three contributors, Reinaldo Arenas, Jesús J. Barquet, and Lisette Mendez, emigrated to America during the Mariel Boatlift, despite the danger they would be exposed to from brutal street gangs organized by the Castro regime. Indeed, there are many former prisoners of conscious in this collection, including Arenas and Heberto Padilla:

“A poet, novelist, and journalist, he was arrested and imprisoned briefly in 1971 because of a book of poems critical of the government—an episode commonly referred to as ‘El Caso Padilla.’ In 1980 he was permitted to leave the country, whereupon he came to the United States.” (p. 110)

Other poets of conscious were less fortunate in the duration of their incarceration. Angel Cuadra was imprisoned for fifteen years, while Armando Valladares’ term lasted twenty-two years. Clearly, free artistic expression is incompatible with the Castro regime. While Carlson might be reluctant to state that in her introduction, bemoaning Treasury Department restrictions, it is clearly expressed by the fact that twenty-eight of the poets collected in Burnt Sugar were born in Cuba but either now reside in America, or were living here at the time of their death.

Burnt Sugar is a highly recommended volume that hints at some of the artistic dividends humanity will collect when Cuba’s tyrant falls. In his introduction Hijeulos remembers the words and spirit of his grandmother, whose attitude is appropriate when thinking about the poets and musicians of Cuba. According to Hijuelos: “Castro, and any form of tyranny, she abhorred, but never had she shown any malice to ‘her people.’”(p. XXII)

Cuba is a captive nation and ordinary Cuban are prisoners of a totalitarian regime. Perhaps we can start to look forward to a new day, sans Castro, when the poets of Cuba can write as they please, making collections like Burnt Sugar thicker. Until then, we can still enjoy the great many Cuban poets collected here, who voted with their feet, at great personal risk, to live and write freely.

Jazz Poems

Jazz Poems
Edited by Kevin Young
Everyman/Knopf
1-4000-4251-8

Capturing jazz performance in words is a difficult challenge. It often requires poetic expression more than simple descriptive prose. Many such attempts have been collected in Jazz Poems a collection finely edited by Kevin Young in a new Everyman gift edition.

Often jazz poems are elegiac, written on the passing of great artists like Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” in which he recalls:

leaning on the john door in the FIVE SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.

Some poets are able to capture the ephemeral nature of music, like current NEA Chairman Dana Gioia in “Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931):”

He dreamed he played the notes so slowly that
they hovered in the air above the crowd
and shimmered like a neon sign.

Certain themes reoccur, like the classless nature of jazz. Langston Hughes’ “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret” exhorts:

Play it for the lords and ladies,
For the dukes and counts,
For the whores and gigolos
For the American millionaires,
And the school teachers
Out for a spree.

Jazz Poems is a consistently rewarding collection. It was a handy volume to refer to while reading Yaffe’s Fascinating Rhythm, since it anthologizes many of the poems that book analyzes. While many of the selected poems are darker than what you might expect to find in a small trim size gift book, it is appropriate. Jazz is a music that demands honesty and integrity in all things, including editorial choice.