Al Young

STATEMENT ON POETICS

Music-with which poetry remains eternally intimate-seems a dead ringer, as it were, for life itself. And while each also seems invisible, I always catch myself asking: What is life but spirit; spirit-thought made hearable, seeable, smellable, touchable, and delectable?

Who hasn't sung or listened deeply to songs, re-lived recordings, or melted into some performance to the point of identifying almost irretrievably not only with the sound and inner look and feel of music, but with all of its inexplicable beauty; the rapture, the crazy, life-quickening sense of it?

"Man," Jackie McLean told Pacifica Radio's Art Sato in a late 1980s interview, "if we wanna sound like airplanes... we can be an airplane, man." McLean was recalling the reluctance of trumpeter Lee ("The Sidewinder") Morgan to parachute into terrain he hadn't even surveyed before, much less explored. With trombonist-composer Grachan Moncur III, they were rehearsing Moncur's modal, eeriesounding "Air Raid" for the ground-clearing 1960s Blue Note
album, Evolution.

"So," McLean is supposed to have said to Morgan, his longtime soul-buddy, "let's be an airplane, you know. 'Cause Grachan is different, man. He likes Frankenstein and Donald Duck and a wide variety of topics, weird topics to write music to."

As Mary Shelley's 1817 horror story and Walt Disney's cartoons have inspired movies, costumes, whole philosophies and music, so music routinely provides poets with 'z wide variety of topics, weird topics.

Like jazz players and all the other artists and poets, I want to fly, to sail, to leap and jump and jaywalk; I want to walk, skate, surf, skateboard or ski across barriers. If I play Gene Ammons' "Canadian Sunset" and Thelonious Monk's "Carolina Moon" back to back, can you imagine how an escaped slave must have felt once she actually reached Toronto or Montreal? How powerfully odd she must have felt to look back at herself, plotting this break; back there outside Raleigh or Charlotte, where the passing thought of Canada was a dream.

I want to zoom forward and at the same time be watching everything rush by me through the porthole blue of some cloud-blown sky-ship. Or, backlit, seated at the window of a train, Duke Ellingron's favorite composing site, I have no trouble seeing and hearing centuries whiz past.

Einstein had it pegged; the mover isn't always necessarily moved by all this movement. Grounded in stillness, rooted in silence, all motion, like sound, feels hopelessly yet deliciously relative. Even so, the beauty of all these scheduled and improvised arrivals and departures neither fades nor reaches any point that even remotely resembles a fully orchestrated stop.

Like the advancing hands of a clock closely watched, the action we know as music or poetry will sometimes appear to stand still. But in truth it is only the quiver and shimmer of being profoundly alive and for-real that slows. The sweet, hot solo jam of believing what you hear just plays and thickens and builds.

After 60 years of listening, I still feel as though I can't get started; as though I have so little to say about jazz and the roles all music continue to play in that curtainless sun-room in the mansion of my life, where thinking and telling take bloom.

THE BLUES AD INFINITUM (SAY AMEN)

The positively thrilling look of you
sometimes, like now, this very afternoon,
where Pittsburgh
shimmers on the brink of fall,
where trees in clumps and copses (from the air)
look almost
blue and swollen with the red
and gold of you; cerulean and ochre,
magenta, all those colors in
between
the ones we grew and knew and drew before
Miss Raskin said, "Your basic yellows, greens
and
reds and blues you've got to really learn.
Your browns and blacks and whites, your orange, your
pink
all this is basic. You don't need the rest.
How many things around you look chartreuse?
Primary colors make up all the rest."

You heard her say that, didn't you? You were there;
invisible except for sneaky winks
you'd give me when I looked across the lake
for colors hip Miss Raskin wouldn't have known
if they'd sneaked up and bit her on the neck.

To school a bunch of hoodlums, what a gig
that must've been. New forms of lunacy
were getting off the ground around that time:
Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, bebop jokes,
atomic bomb tests, witch hunts, Bird with Strings.

Attachments weren't our schtick; we aimed to please
ourselves, so when we drew, we'd draw her way
and then we'd switch; go back to what we liked.
Miss Raskin's color theories slid past us;
implosive, blue, they felt too close to home.
Whatever brown would warm, white might wash out;
whatever black denoted could blow up
right in our faces, detonate. The trick
(we learned it well) was just to chill.
Nobody said that then; we said, "Be cool."
But chill was what we meant, and what we did
until I learned from drawing that the page
exists as an extension of the world.

The world, as drawn by you, cartoons itself;
we color and re-color it the way
this town took back the red and iron rust
the hard Ohio River used to drag.
Once factory-smoked and steel-worked, Pittsburgh breathes.
Without you, without flame or thrill or light,
where would a lonesome traveler go to rest?
But time has never meant a thing to you,
or has it in some way helped you keep score?
You look so good, you make me feel all right.

PREZ IN PARIS, 1959

By 1959 he'd moved to Paris.
Prez wouldn't eat. Sweet alcohol harrassed
his system. Cooled, the jazz "To Be or Not
to Be"-withdrawn, a whisper-seemed a jot.

Once there'd been ways to get back at the world;
Ex-G.I. Prez had tried and tired. He hurled
himself now-hearsay, smoky horn-down-stage.
"Well, Lady Gay Paree, it's been a dog's age,"

he might've said. Or "Ivy Divey! Wrong!
The way that channel swims-too cold. This song
-the lyric's weak. We'll drown. No eyes, my man.
No, let's don't take it from no top. The band

can skip it." Prez. Monsieur le Président,
who played us what can work, and what just won't.

DEPRESSION, BLUES, FLAMENCO,WINE, DESPAIR

Depression, blues, flamenco, wine, despair--
sunk in, they make you cross your heart and die
for hope. Dark times come at you; they don't care.
"So deal with this," they say. And so you buy
the pain and stress, the restlessness-the works:
low back pain, aches and limps, the twitch
of fear your face betrays.
John "Dizzy" Birks
Gillespie's cheeks puffed out (fat love an itch
scratched by the trumpet at his goateed lip),
they said: "Take chances, stretch, jump at the sun.
You just can't spend your whole life acting hip.
Be corny sometimes. Have yourself some fun.
You can't be cool forever, so relax."

Diz knew puffed cheeks were anything but chic,
but when you closed your eyes you heard him axe
infinitives, split atoms, hairs. You speak
that tongue-curves, flatlands, all of it. You do.

You understand the hoodoo stab of hurt;
the blues, their messy messages, a few
trashed hopes, some lame goodbyes, her skirt,
your coat, the folded jeans, wet tights. Black night
is falling all around you in the rain.
Dark times, dark times can fix you in the light
of reason, recognition, lasers, pain.

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©2000-2004 by Al Young