Revision in a workshop setting

there's no guarantee that any suggestion I make will actually make the poem better. Sometimes a suggestion can be perfectly good, and it'll end up making the poem worse. There's a movie called Rio Bravo, made by director Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne, and co-starring Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, who were both better known as popular singers than dramatic actors -- this was Ricky Nelson's only dramatic role. Hawks liked the story, and he made almost the exact same story into another movie, called El Dorado, also starring John Wayne, this time with Robert Mitchum and James Caan in the two supporting roles. Mitchum and Caan were both extremely gifted actors (Caan still is--he's still around). But for some inexplicable reason, Rio Bravo is the better movie. But you learn by trying different things, even if they don't always make the poem better.

Played with Bird...one more time

We forgot another one from our list of living musicians who played with Charlie Parker -- George Shearing, who died today.

Shearing came to New York for the first time in 1946. On meeting Charlie Parker, he asked to play something with the great alto saxophonist. Parker suggested “All the Things You Are,” though in the difficult key of B. Shearing was ready for the test. “I really love those awkward keys,” he said later.

From an obituary in the Louisville Courier-Journal

Interview with Marvin Bell

Great interview on poetry with my old friend Marvin Bell.

Changing things around

Often, when I'm trying to find something in a poem that's not quite there yet, I'll experiment with tense or person. Interestingly, this is something I worked out on my own, but once when I mentioned it to my mentor, Donald Finkel (I stayed in touch with him for his whole life, so this would be after we'd been talking and corresponding for 30 years or so), he told me he did the same thing. He told me a poem he'd written about an experience a friend had told him about. The friend had been struck by lightning while standing at a window, and knocked clear across the room. Don said he knew that there was a poem there, and he kept trying to write it, and it kept not working. He tried it in present tense and past tense. He tried in first person and third person. I don't think he tried gender-switching -- making his first person narrator or third person character a woman -- although that's something I'll do from time to time. Finally, he said, he got the poem to work by using two strategies, both of which he didn't believe in and would never use in a poem...but they were right for this one. He put in the second person and the future tense ("You will...")

Here's one I experimented with in that way. I had wanted to write a poem about the days when they still talked about jazz, and I had planned to make that the subject of the poem -- impersonal third person voice, a nostalgic/philosophical musing about a bygone era. It actually came out of listening to a Bill Cosby monologue. But it kept coming out hopelessly hokey and sentimental, which is probably OK for Bill Cosby, but not for me. Then I got the hot asphalt, crushed stone, sand and gravel from a sign on the side of a road which I was driving on when I got lost, and the poem started coming together, but gradually. I started with the present tense, I'm sure about that -- putting myself on that byway, seeing that sign. But that didn't work, so I started to try to get closer to the crushed stone by putting someone to work in the paving company. I'd put myself at some distance from a company like this in the past ("The Gravel Business"), but this had to be different.

I had, not long before, written one poem about a woman, daughter of a jazz musician, leaving her husband and trying to find herself. So suppose I put it in the third person, made it about her, had her move upstate to Kingston -- I pictured her living somewhere down around Abeel Street -- gave her a job with the paving company, and worked around to the jazz line that way?


HOT ASPHALT, CRUSHED STONE

By spring, she was living in upstate
New York, working for a paving company:
hot asphalt, crushed stone, sand and gravel.
The view from her window was great heaps
of stone, scooped, conveyed to barges,
an inlet of water, a distant high bridge, mountains.
Below her flat, old white men drank and talked
about guns and rights. She could hear,
late into night, the tunk! of darts, like
the patter of of raindrops slowed way, way down
by a drummer intent on mastering their rhythms.
She thought about her father, Ellis Perkins,
in the days when they still talked about jazz --
Louis Armstrong and Jabbo Smith at the Rockland Palace
and the next day it was all over Harlem
how Satch had smoked him with F over high C.
How Cootie left the Duke.
How one day everyone opened the windows, and played
Illinois Jacquet’s solo on “Flying Home”
to the streets and stoops: blat... blat... blaat... blaat... blaat...

Music blogs

I've always been remiss about keeping up my links list, but I'm making a stab at it today by adding a list of some of the music blogs and websites that I love, inspired by discovering a new one, JazzWax, which describes itself as "Marc Myers blogs daily on jazz legends and legendary jazz recordings."

I found it through a random web surf that led me to this interview with Jackie Cain, best known for her Jackie and Roy duets.


So...this entry, and this list, starting with my two favorite music blogs.

Bebop Wino Done Gone is devoted to finding and offering for download some great and forgotten rhythm and blues wax, and this one goes straight to my heart, which beats to the rhythm and blues of the 40s and 50s.

And The Old Weird America, which may just be the best blog in all of the Internet. This guy is blogging his way through the entire Harry Smith anthology, with explorations taking off from each entry, including links and downloads. He's currently at #50, “John The Baptist” by Rev. Moses Mason.