Defining the Meaning of What Is Is
by John Hawkins
Title: Kinds of Cool: A Jazz Poetry Anthology
Author: Joe Maita, editor
City: Portland, Oregon
Publisher,: Unsolicited Press, 2025, 166 pages, $24.95
Kinds of Cool: An Interactive Collection of Jazz Poems sets a tone for things to come with a succinct and true epigraph: Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language. That riff from the hips and lips of the late Lucille Clifton, who knew something about the stuff. Winner of the national book award, twice a finalist for a Pulitzer, and poet laureate of Maryland. She called poetry "a way of being," which would strike a chord with jazz enthusiasts.
The volume is edited by Joe Maita, who has been publishing the online poetry webzine Jerry Jazz Musician for 25 years. Maita started it up just before the twin towers came down in Manhattan, after which we all had riffs to play, questions to pose, things to say. Still do.
Maita writes in his introduction to Kinds of Cool that his website strives to appeal to poets and "readers with an interest in the music's complex history and the culture it influenced -- and was influenced by." He mixes in interviews, biographies, and anecdotes with the poems. Maita adds, "Jazz and poetry have always had a symbiotic relationship." He points to their enormous influence on the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Generation.
I can relate to this influence, to the hours in night clubs and the all-night jazz jams in churches, in the '70s and '80s, when I began writing poetry, began getting busy being born, as Bobby Dylan puts it. When Miles starts in with that strident riff at the beginning of Tribute to Jack Johnson, I'm still inspired. "I'm Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world," a voice in the dark intones. "I'm Black and they'll never let me forget it. I'm Black alright; I'll never let them forget it." Poetry. A startling existential statement. Instant comeuppance. (Note: I have a poem in the volume about an all-night jazz festival.)
The 90 poem, 164 page collection features 47 poets from all over the world, writes Maita, who capture the spirit of jazz through rhythm, improvisation and emotion, echoing the genre's profound influence on world culture and creativity. Featuring brilliant artwork by Marsha Hammel and a foreword by Jack Kerouac's musical collaborator David Amram, each poem invites readers to experience the moods, moments and musicians that define jazz: cool, bluesy, soulful, and bold.
And he adds that the collection is "interactive" (and quite unique) because it invites readers - through the use of QR codes printed on many of the book's pages - to link to selected readings by the poets themselves, as well as to historic audio and video recordings (via YouTube) relevant to many of the poems. Consequently, this concept - what Maita calls "Read. Listen. View" - offers a holistic experience with the culture of jazz.
The poems go in myriad directions, cover a wide array of themes, display affection for the forms that denote jazz, and are totally accessible.There are four sections of the volume. Maita says that the first section is mostly poetry about identifying what jazz is; the second section sees poets writing biographical sketches of artists of personal importance or experience; the third section deals with the abstract nature of, either in poetic style or subject matter ; and, the last section is "a winding down, essentially."
In the first group, Geer Austin, a Pushcart Prize nominee who provides poetry workshops to "the underserved," gives the genre's development a spin with the syllables and beats in this excerpt from "The Evolution of Jazz, Part 1":
First it was jasm. Or so somebody
said. Ragtime, marching bands &
blues merged in late 19th Century
New Orleans. Descendants of African
Slaves confronting European music.
"
A jazz artist can be a monster
with a whiplike tail. Or someone
who observes Shabbat. Or a Lady
in white pearls like Ella. Crazy plaid
hatted, grim faced. You don't even
have to be a somebody. Sometimes
it happens in church. White people
turned it into their own thing.
Here the poem is concrete and straightforward, telling of early confrontation of rhythms and clashing sounds. A hint at the exclusivity of white orchestral music compared to the celebration of everyday experience demonstrated by jazz. Naturally, the poet tells us, white folks eventually came to claim it as a mode of production they could own, too. Here is a QR code that will lead you to Austin reading his poem:
In the same section, Laura Trigg, a retired physician living in Missouri, situates the sound in its largely Southern milieu, as confrontation. Disruption. The chaos of freedom. Here is an excerpt from Trigg's "Jazz: A Partial Definition":
It's a stew of New Orleans, Kansas City, Memphis,
St. Louis, and the little river towns between.
There's a peppering of marching bands, swing,
call and response, and Gospel, with a mix of Latin
and Afro-Cuban flavors. Salt has been rubbed into
the wounds of its melodies. It is stirred constantly
like a dark gumbo roux.
Tasty, exotic, a mystery to the senses, but once imbibed it creeps into your soul and sasses it up with blues that are essential in their ontology, sacred and profane. For once, true.
The volume contains many odes, paeans, and portraits of old friends of sound, new mysteries of rhythm, chromotones and acknowledgements of atonal, eternal power. In "King Bolden," Connie Johnson, a Pushcart Prize nominee and California native, gives us the unsquare root of Buddy's Crack cornet. Here is a taste:
Unruly
Disruptive
Freewheeling big four rhythm
Loose and laced with ragtime!
In the beginning it felt like --
Red light Blues / Bordello Blues
Buddy Bolden
King of NOLA in the 1900's
King of Storyville and Back O' Town Blues!
Cornett so loud they could hear you clear 'cross
The Mississippi River -- calling your children home
It's amazing how much the Mississippi River passes through these new sounds from Kansas City to New Orleans the Blues abound. Mark Twain, river pilot -- river never the same twice -- had the rivers of Jazz in his heart.
Artwork by Marsha Hammel used with permission.
And there's no little hero worship in Michael Edman's poem "Coltrane 29." It plays like this:
It is loud
in the spaces
between a man's fingers
where they walk
and the song comes out in
sentimental drips
catchall
meanderings
the likes of poetry
with their fleetingness
and color,
soft rose brown
that yellows beneath
club lamps
In the biographical notes, Edman tells us that "he appreciates work that is broken, obtuse, unapologetically sentimental, and smooth." His poem is followed by a QR code that leads to John Coltrane playing his classic "Impressions":
Sometimes the poet sings the virtues of a hero who is a political figure, preferably controversial, it seems, or must inevitably be, given the nature of the blues involved. One such poem righteously praises the strength of 1960s counterculture leader Angela Davis, who was wrongly accused of murder and spent time in prison before being acquitted in 1973. Last year her book, Abolition, addressed the continuing practice of slave labor in prison and its connection to an as yet unreconstructed practice of exploiting African American labor. George Kalamaras, former poet laureate of Indiana, writes here in praise of Davis in "Angela Davis Listens to a Smuggled-In Tape of Louis Armstrong's "Black and Blue" Over and Over While in Solitary Confinement in the Women's Detention Center, 1970." Here is a small excerpt::
One of my favorite reads from the last section of the book is Jianqing Zhang's "Jazz Fusion." The genre is maybe jazz's ultimate form. It developed in the late 1960s when musicians combined jazz harmony and improvisation with rock music, funk, and rhythm and blues. Here Zhang, who lives in Mississippi, close to the river and its ways, speaks of it:
In the river
passing downwards
jazz cafe',
the moon
shakes loose
in the eager sax
slithering out
for a solo
date
Who hasn't been there when Heraclitus squealed and honked his exquisite harmonies, each turn new, and kind of blue, changing horses in mid extremes?
Back in the introduction Maita quotes the unofficial poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance to give voice to the lasting value of jazz. It is "one of the inherent expressions of negro life in America and the tom-tom revolt against weariness in a white world and the tom-tom of joy and laughter and pain swallowed in a smile." But this collection is eclectic, pluralistic and more celebratory than about wokeness. The volume acknowledges some historical progress; Little Orphan Annie can now be played by a Black girl on Broadway; tomorrow has arrived; poverty is egalitarian.
Lucille Clifton elaborates on what poetry is in a brief answer to the question on a YouTube thing. Like jazz, poetry deals with what is is, to quote the sax sessionist, ex-prez Bill Clinton, who wowed us with "Little Willy Leaps." It's Existential and insistent".it resists"arrest. Here is Clifton:
