Thursday, Sept. 12th: Jazz Poetry 1 — Jazz, Blues and Beyond

(l-r): Langston Hughes, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Fred Moten

You'll find the majority of Thursday's readings in one archive here: [ZIP]

Jumping forward from Walt Whitman into the 20th century, we'll begin with jazz, America's first unique native art form, and a selection of poets who were inspired by it.

We'll start with a healthy selection of work by Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance's poet laureate, taken from Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Classics, 1959).  Because I've scanned these two pages at a time, there are extra pieces of poems thrown into the mix, but here are the titles I'd like you to read:

• The Weary Blues
• Hope
• Reverie on the Harlem River
• Morning After
• Genius Child
• Song for Billie Holiday
• Fantasy in Purple
• Trumpet Player
• Midnight Dancer
• Misery
• Dream Boogie
• Projection
• Flatted Fifths
• Dream Boogie: Variation
• Harlem
• Good Morning

You'll also want to take a look at Hughes' essay, "Jazz as Communication" and browse through his 1958 album, Weary Blues (which features musical collaborations with both Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather).

In addition to Hughes, we'll look at two more recent poets who are working within the shadow of Hughes' influence while also transforming the sounds and syntax of more contemporaneous musical forms.  Our selections from Thomas Sayers Ellis come from his wonderful first collection, The Maverick Room (Graywolf, 2005), and will include the complete title suite.  We'll also read a handful of pieces by Fred Moten, taken from two recent books, Hughson's Tavern (leon works, 2008) and B. Jenkins (Duke University, 2010).  You'll find several full-length readings by Moten on his PennSound author page, including segmented tracks for many of the poems we'll read for today.

Thomas Sayers Ellis

• A Pack of Cigarettes
• Sticks
• The Maverick Room (complete sequence)

Fred Moten (Hughson's Tavern marked "HT," all others from B. Jenkins)

• jazz (as ken burns (HT) [MP3]
• trumpeters (HT)
• bebop (HT)
• billie holiday/roland barthes
• fishbone/joseph jarman [MP3]
• elvin jones, malachi favors, steve lacy [MP3]
• yopie prins
• sherrie tucker, francis ponge, sun ra [MP3]
• william parker/fred mcdowell [MP3]
• cecil taylor/almeida ragland [MP3]
• charlie parker

Finally, for another variation on mid-century jazz poetry, here's "The Clown" by Charles Mingus with improvised narration by Jean Shepherd:

In our next class we'll focus on jazz-inflected work by Beat Generation authors and their contemporaries.