Jazz Poems [Hardcover]

Ever since its first flowering, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry; this scintillating anthology offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music that inspired them.

From the Harlem Renaissance to the beat movement, from the poets of the New York school to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force—one thatJazz Poemsmakes palpable. We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, E. E. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, William Matthews, and C. D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz’s great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.Foreword

VAMPING (Early Jazz Poems)

LANGSTON HUGHES
Jazzonia
Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret
The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.)
Trumpet Player

CARL SANDBURG
Jazz Fantasia

HELENE JOHNSON
Poem

VACHEL LINDSAY
The Jazz of This Hotel

E. E. CUMMINGS
“god pity me whom (god distinctly has)”

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
Ol’ Bunk’s Band

STERLING A. BROWN
Cabaret

MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Bringing Jazz

MURIEL RUKEYSER
Homage to Literature

FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS
Jazz Band

GWENDOLYN BROOKS
We Real Cool

SWINGING(Jazz Origins, New Orleans & Ellingtonia)

ROBERT SARGENT
Touching the Past

WILLIAM MATTHEWS
The Buddy Bolden Cylinder

LUCIEN QUINCY
In Praise of Buddy Bolden

ANDY RAZAF
Black and Blue (What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?)

ERNST MOERMAN
Louis Armstrong

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