SOURCE: "Jazz and Letters: A Colloquy," in Tri-Quarterly 68, No. 68, Winter, 1987, pp. 118-58.

[In the following essay, which was originally presented as a panel discussion among Young, Kart, and Harper at the annual meeting of the Associated Writing Programs in Chicago, Young, Kart, and Harper—all writers with a great interest in jazz—comment on the interrelationship among the arts, especially focusing on how jazz has shaped their creative process, the style and content of their works, their self-identity, and their response to other art forms.]

YOUNG: My father was a professional jazz musician in the 1930's, back in the days when the tuba held down the rhythm section, along with the drums in the jazz aggregations. It wasn't until a man named Jimmy Blanton came along with the Duke Ellington orchestra that the string bass, the acoustical string bass, became the bottomizing element in swing and jazz music. I grew up in a household where records abounded. In fact, my mother used to get very upset with my father, who worked as an auto mechanic, because when he got his paycheck, he would stop by the record shop and pick up a bunch of records before he ever got to the house.

So I grew up with all these records and later played tuba and baritone horn myself and trumpet in junior high and high-school bands and took music as just a very natural part of life. Because I had been interested in writing from the age of six, the two always went together for me. I never made those distinctions between the arts that a lot of people make, despite the differences in practical approaches to various media. As a teenager I would go to the Detroit Institute of Arts to look at paintings and sculpture, visual and plastic arts. I always carried that same idea about all art with me into that experience. I would look at paintings as a form of music, poetry and literature. I would learn an awful lot of things from the painters when I'd go to museums, and bring it back into my writing, and project those things into the music that I'd listen to. And I think I was very fortunate to grow up in the late forties and during the fifties when there was sort of a ferment in American culture that eventually rose from subterranean level to become a very evident public factor in shaping, I'd say, even the art that we find around today in all media. In the 1950's, when I was at the University of Michigan, the phenomenon of poetry and jazz became very bankable, as they would say out in Hollywood. And you had people like Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen and others. Langston Hughes even got into the act, although Langston had been doing the poetry-and-jazz thing way back in the thirties. But they were making national tours with jazz bands and making records and everybody would go and experience this synthesis, myself included.

That was also the period, you have to remember, when abstract expressionism was king. Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and all these people were holding court and, if you can recall the New York poetry scene at that time—"San Francisco East"—as somebody called it once, you would note that the painters were actually running the show. All the other artists, the musicians and the poets, all looked to the painters, circa 1954-55, for cues as to how to proceed. So that if you talked with somebody like Robert Creeley or LeRoi Jones (as he's calling himself again) they would tell you that they checked out the painters first, before they went on and wrote their poems. And if you look at, say, the poetry of Frank O'Hara, who was very powerful in those days and held a position at the Museum of Modern Art, you'll see that it was very jazz-conscious and very painterly-conscious, and it was a very exciting period when all of these people's ideas were flowing together.

I was a kid then and I was paying attention to this in a very intense way, as you can only do when you're about fifteen, sixteen years old. You're much more serious then than at thirty-five or forty because, like Jan Carew was saying yesterday, those are the days when you can sit up in the tree-house and go through five or six books in a day, or certainly in a week, and really think about them and absorb them. Well, I was doing all that. I was absorbing everything at once. Now the writer who emerged on the scene nationally and internationally and turned everybody around—and I find people in English Departments still don't understand how this happened—was Jack Kerouac.

Jack Kerouac came out with On the Road in 1957. There had been excerpts from it in New Directions as early as 1956. There was a lot of noise about the Beat Generation and Kenneth Rexroth was writing all these long manifestos and there was a very exciting groundswell taking place. Everybody I knew in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was reading On the Road. Copies were dogeared, and people didn't want to lend you a copy because they were afraid they wouldn't get it back or it would come back with beer stains on it and jelly and bacon grease and all that. And it wasn't so much that the writing was "good," whatever that was supposed to be, but it represented an alternative to what we'd been getting. I think that one of the things that the Beat Generation did was to take art out from under glass. I had been brought up in grade schools and middle schools and high schools where we were taught that art was something that was unapproachable. It really didn't have much to do with your life. It was something you had to learn in order to become a more expanded person, acquire good taste and all that. And one of the things that the Beat Generation did was to restore poetry and literature to the people. The people went out and attended poetry readings. Dylan Thomas had come through town—there were a lot of factors in this—had come through in two or three national tours and given people the idea that you could actually get up and read this stuff aloud and people would respond to it, instead of sitting around underlining it late at night in dormitory rooms. So that all of that excitement seemed to coalesce in the pages of On the Road.

Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with Mr. Kerouac's techniques of writing. But he published a very influential manifesto of his own in the pages of Evergreen Review in 1958, which is called "The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," in which he attempts to articulate the way in which he himself worked. He proposed, for example, that you not think about what you're going to say, just picture in your mind what your objective is going to be on the page. And then just blow. That kind of thing, like a jazz musician. You've got to remember that he, as much as anybody else, was under the influence of things like abstract expressionism. I mean those canvases that Jackson Pollock achieved by getting up on a scaffolding and just taking the paint and just—to the uninformed eye or to the people who didn't know the vocabulary of modern art and all that, it would look as if—like if my Uncle Billy saw it, he'd say, "That man is just splashing paint on the canvas. You call that paintin'? I can do that!"

But there was a very elaborate, articulated esthetic that accompanied it that said that process to the abstract expressionist was more important than product. Those painters themselves were highly influenced by jazz. If you went down to the—what's the name of that place they used to hang out? Tenth Street—aren't there any old-timers around here?

VOICE: The Cedar Bar.

YOUNG: Cedar Bar. If you went to the Cedar Bar, they were all talking about Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and whatever was going on in the jazz world at that time and they were trying to recapture the spirit of jazz, the spontaneous spirit of jazz in their work. When the Zen Buddhists turned up during that period, because people like D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts were also publishing in the pages of Evergreen Review, they brought that spirit of Zen spontaneity which enhanced this whole idea that art was supposed to be something that came from the spirit, that for all too long, certainly in the West, it had been dominated by what somebody in those days called the "form freaks," people who were more involved with product and form than they were with content and spirit. Now as a kid I got the idea that still persists with me, that when we look at any painting or piece of writing or listen to any piece of music, what we are actually doing is searching for the human spirit. There's a spirit that accompanies a piece of art that we're usually not aware of except perhaps in a subliminal way. But if it isn't there, it can be the most clever work, it can be perhaps a masterpiece formally and all that, but if it does not have that spirit, if it doesn't swing, as they used to say in antique jazz parlance—what was it that Duke wrote?—"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." So I got the idea that it was better to sacrifice form if necessary for content.

I was also reading people like William Saroyan, who would sit down and knock out three and four stories in a day and publish all of them. As a kid, you admire this kind of stuff. You think that this is the way it should be. That it should be fun above all else. And jazz always represented this for me, as I think it did for the majority of Americans who were looking beyond everyday, quotidian American values for some meaning to life. I think that jazz mythology has always affected American intellectuals and artists when they were looking for a way out of what Artaud once called "the bourgeoisification" of everything in life. You see these guys who lead odd lives, quite often they have odious habits, personal habits. They stayed up all night, died young. They bared their souls and gave us some pleasure and some insights into a way of life that can be very interesting.

When you look at jazz itself, you see some interesting divisions historically. The early jazz musicians, for example—this is very rough—the early jazz musicians of the New Orleans school, if you want to call them that, the Dixieland people, were heavy drinkers. You go into, even now, a Dixieland bar, it's very difficult to be depressed because they're stomping that stuff out, and they're drinking that juice, and rum ta da ta da da dum, and it engenders a kind of spiritedness that, I don't know, may be artificial, but it's kind of a happy music, happily oriented music. This persisted on over into swing, which was a dance music, and people forget that during the thirties and early forties certainly—I'd say from the mid-twenties up until World War Il—jazz was the popular music of the United States because people didn't say, "Oh, I like jazz," they just liked Benny Goodman, they liked Count Basie—they danced to this music, it was a social music.

It wasn't until the advent of World War II and the postwar years that musicians tended to switch from alcohol into heavy pharmaceuticals, and became very introspective. Among Afro-American musicians you had this intense awareness of themselves as artists and they took themselves very seriously. Those of you who followed mythologized jazz history would get the stripped-down idea that jazz was invented in one night in Minton's up in Harlem when Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker decided to come up with a music that white musicians couldn't steal because they wouldn't be able to play it.

Much is made of that, but of course that's very distorted. You talk to people who were around and you see that this music evolved over a long period of time. But the jazz spirit has always been solidly grounded in technical ability and in the spirit to soar. In a book called The Interpretation of Music, Thurston Dart, who's a musical historian, points out that in western European music prior to the middle-to-late nineteenth century, room was always left for the soloist to express himself or herself. Composers would leave whole sections open for a gifted soloist to come out and improvise, and that was regarded as the apex of a musical performance—somebody not reading the notes, just standing up there playing from the heart. That went out of western European music when inexpensive ways of reproducing musical scores were arrived at—so that what Mr. Dart calls "the tyranny of the composer" set in. Every note, every speck, every sound, every silence was written down on the page. And the drummer Max Roach, who's a professor of jazz these days at the University of Massachusetts, has said, "I wouldn't be in a classical orchestra for anything, because that's like working at the post office. Go there and sort that mail, you get no chance to do anything on your own."

People always gravitate towards where the spirit is. And when jazz in the late fifties and early sixties got to taking itself so seriously, sealed itself off by being available only in clubs where a lot of the young people couldn't get in because they didn't have money or they weren't of drinking age, whatever, then of course rock drew them over. They always go where that beat is and where there's the freedom to say something on your own. Sure, learn your instrument, be firmly grounded in what's gone on before, but have an opportunity to contribute something of your own.

How does this function in writing? It functions for me in a very interesting way. Whenever I sit down to write these days, I always begin by free writing. That is to say, a typical morning for me is to get up and to record remnants of dreams, if there's anything that's taken place in my dream-life. I sit there and I just put some paper in the typewriter and I pay no attention to what's being written, whether it's good, bad or whatever. I have no idea how long it's going to run, and I just start going! And I put all these things in a notebook, and that notebook has become one of the most interesting books in my library, because all this writing hasn't been consciously done, but over the years you've been writing for so long it's hard for you to really write anything bad at a certain point, the same way that it's very difficult for an improvising musician to play anything bad. You might catch a musician on a night when she or he is not so inspired, but their professional level is such that they can be proficient even when they're not feeling well. It's rather like those old Zen painters, who used to look at a tree for fifteen years and meditate upon it and in thirty seconds they'd sit and with pen and ink and just go brrrrrrr and get the whole spirit of that tree. I think this is attractive to people the world over. It's no wonder that jazz has been called the music of the twentieth century. We're probably less aware of that in this country than people would be in a lot of—abroad. Whenever I travel abroad, I'm always amazed at how aware people are of American music.

In conclusion, I thought I would read something from a series of books that I've been doing, something very short. There are two volumes of this that have been published so far, and there's one more coming out next year. They're called Musical Memoirs. The first volume was called Bodies & Soul. The second volume was called Kinds of Blue. And the third will be called Things Ain't What They Used to Be, which is an old Mercer Ellington title. What I tried to do in these books was to take a piece of music and conjure in prose in one form or another what the music meant to me. It's a difficult thing to do because even though music is powerfully evocative, sometimes it's so private, the experience that it evokes can be so private, that it's difficult to communicate this to anyone else. And so the problem here—and you need a problem when you play jazz—people aren't just up there blowin'. They know the chords, they know sixteen different versions on record of what everybody else has done to this and they know it's going to count if they can do something that's original, that hasn't been stated before. That's the problem for me. How can I say this so that everybody will understand what I'm talking about and at the same time make it, keep it meaningful? And I experiment each time I write one of these things. Probably the most experimental I've been, and with this one I really let go. It's a form that I'm inventing as I go along, so to speak. And so each time I sit down to do it, I say, "Wait a minute, you know, I've already done that. Do I want to do that all over again? Let's try something new." So I depend a lot on intuition. In the sixties, later sixties, Herbie Hancock, a very different Herbie Hancock, wrote something called "Maiden Voyage," which was one of those milestones in contemporary American music—in fact, one critic says that everything that's been produced since "Maiden Voyage", every original sounds like "Maiden Voyage." And I was so taken with this that even though Herbie Hancock came out with it in 1969, I used it as a metaphor for an actual maiden voyage, my first ocean trip that I took in 1963 when I sailed from Brooklyn Harbor to the Azores and to Portugal on an off-season freighter. And this is how that piece begins. I'll just read a page of it and get out of here. But I tried to—the music was playing in the background as I was writing, and it sort of fired my thoughts as I went along:

"Maiden Voyage/Herbie Hancock, 1969"

Shhh. Listen. Can you hear it? Listen, listen. Shhh. It's like a soft whispery splashing sound. Symbolic. Cymbalic. It's a cymbal tap. The sound of wood barely touching a cymbal. The drummer's poised and ready to slip up on it and the moment Herbie Hancock drops his fingers to the keyboards. Reeeal pianissimo. To sound that lovely dark chord and four bass notes in tricky off-accent time. We'll be on our way. It's still astonishing, isn't it? What is time? I'm laying this down, you're picking it up. Everything happens at the same time. Ask any quantum physicist the kind of dancing that goes on inside atoms, if you get my drift. This time we'll be drifting over and across the Atlantic, sailing away from the Brooklyn pier like an easygoing recreational blimp in an amazing, if not exactly good, year. It just happens to be the very year they shot Medgar Evers in the back, the year they bombed that church in Birmingham and killed those little girls, the Russians put a woman in space, the year they marched 20,000 strong on Washington, D.C. and Martin Luther King and other black leaders met with the President, the year Defense Secretary McNamara and Diem started taking over the headlines, the year they were singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody / turn me round, / turn me round, / turn me round. / Ain't gonna let nobody / turn me round / in Selma, Alabama." The Governor was shouting, "Segregation forever." It was the year they shot Kennedy down like a dog in Dallas and when they started beating those little white kids, especially the girls, beating them with those billy clubs the way they've always done colored people, you knew the American century was coming home to roost. Shhh. Herbie's just mashed down on the go-forward pedal. George Coleman is sounding the ship whistle. The waves are churning all around us and if you look closely, you'll see me, a little brown speck of a speck in eternity, standing on the deck of a freighter pushing off from the Brooklyn pier. It's the twenty-eighth of August, 'sunny and hot. Standing on the deck waving at the workers on a ship from India docked next to ours, I'm growing a little bit sad and joyous at the same time as I picture myself atop the timeless ocean pondering the vastness of my animal-wrapped soul and vision which I know I must cleanse of false learning before I can go the infinite way of Atlantics and Pacifics, Indian Oceans and Bering Seas. I stand there watching the Statue of Liberty grow greener and tinier in the fog beginning to roll in now. "Roll with the boat," I'm remembering hearing somebody say. "Roll with the boat, don't fight it and that way you won't get seasick." We'll rolling along right now with the beat, which isn't easy to pin down and measure, and all the ghosts outside our porthole ears seem to be portholed ears carrying on in Portuguese. Timelessness, meanwhile, is enfolding me and washing me clean on this maiden voyage. Who am I? What am I doing? Where are we going?

KART: That's a tough solo to follow. I'd like to begin by bouncing off one of the first points you made, which was how you came to the music and, in effect, how Americans manage to decide that something that has the label "art" is theirs. My circumstances were a little different, but I think the process was similar, similar enough that I think there's a general principle involved here. Music was a little bit around me as I grew up, but not jazz. Because the music around me and the literature around me were clearly, at least as I felt, not mine, I was looking without being aware of it, for some way to find something that had the qualities that I knew art had, so that I could say, "This is mine." And it hit me in about adolescence. I think it hits a lot of people in adolescence, and that's another interesting point. Jazz is a music that includes the world. And not until you're an adolescent do you begin to think of yourself as a being moving through a society. Before that, it's the family, or you don't even know that there are other people. But when it hit me, I was about age twelve, which is thirty-one years ago. I think it was maybe a recording by Jackie McLean. I'd heard some jazz before that, but something about Jackie McLean, who's a wonderful alto saxophonist, spoke directly to me, and when that happened, it was like a covenant had been made, a bond that he wasn't of course a direct participant in, but I thought I had made a bond, and thirty-one further years have convinced me that it was for real. The process of making that bond and coming into contact with all the music I readily identified as jazz, all the qualities that it had, enabled me to come into contact with, and make mine, or believe that I could make mine, all kinds of other art. And I think that's one of the basic problems that any young American, black or white, has. How do you deal with this culture which, when you're born into it, seems more or less alien to you, and how to say, "Yeah, I have a role to play in here"? Maybe as a responder only, maybe as a fulltime participant, either with a horn or with a pen. I'm convinced that the notion of covenant is crucial to it, and I was reading something last night about Moses in Egypt, which was where the covenant was first formed, and then was renewed when the Ten Commandments came down. This guy explained, very interestingly I thought, that the word "exodus" in Hebrew has the meaning of liberation and covenant and that because of the story of the exodus from Egypt, the idea of liberation takes precedence. But they're one thing. The point I'm trying to make is that, in one way or another, and I think it can be fairly specific a lot of times, jazz is a music of liberation, spiritual liberation. There's a wonderful book that Sidney Bechet wrote, his autobiography. Treat It Gentle. And there's no doubt on his part—I can't remember exactly how he puts it. I didn't think to bring that with me.

YOUNG: He says at the beginning of that book that things were—you had this tension in New Orleans between the blacks, the Creoles and the whites, and it was a fixed race, and he said about some other musician they were talking about, "You know, if we developed this music right, it'll be something that'll slip in on these people."

KART: Do you remember the part where he says that the music arose after an actual physical liberation, the Emancipation Proclamation and all that followed in its wake, but that the music had the role, whether or not the people who made it and the people who were on the receiving end were conscious of it, of teaching the people what to do with the freedom they now had, that they didn't have before. I think that strain in the music has been prominent all the way through, and it can be felt, since a certain kind of liberation is what we're all striving for. It can be felt down through the whole history of it. And I knew that when I listened to Jackie McLean and lots of other people and responded to them the way I did, that I was using that music in an attempt to define myself.

Another point, to switch horses a bit, about the literal connection between jazz and specific writers. You demonstrated how vital the connection is between the music and your writing, and it runs all through Michael Harper's work. But I remember once listening to Charles Olson read on a TV program. I'd always been fascinated by what I thought his rhythms were, as I read them on the page. When I heard him read them live, or live on TV, I said, "He sounds just like Sonny Rollins." He swung in just the same way. It was frightening. And then something later, I ran across this collection of letters that Robert Creeley and Charles Olson exchanged. Creeley, who was very much involved in jazz in Boston in the late forties, was trying to sell Olson on listening to the people that Creeley was interested in. In this one letter he quotes what became one of Creeley's most important poems: "Le Fou," which is, I believe, the breath. I guess I'll try to read it:

                           for Charles

who plots, then, the lines
talking, taking, always the beat from
the breath
              (moving slowly at first
the breath
              which is slow—

I mean, graces come slowly,
it is that way.

So slowly (they are waving
we are moving
              away from (the trees
                        the usual (go by
which is slower than this, is
                        (we are moving!
goodbye

And then in the letter Creeley has in parentheses added in pencil, "Thank you, Charles Parker. Et tu, Thelonious Bach." It was so natural. I mean, you get the lists of the guys he's trying to tell Olson to listen to. It's Bud Powell, it's Dizzy Gillespie, it's Al Haig, it's Monk—I mean, it was natural to them. They knew it.

A third point that intrigues me is that the connection between jazz and literature might be that jazz has more or less spontaneously developed in the course of its life musical parallels to preexisting literary forms. I've always thought of the typical good jazz solo as being more or less a lyric poem. It's a way of stating and elaborating your personal identity, as they say in show business, "in one." You're up there, you are you. You don't have a costume on, you're not playing a role. If it's going to be any good, it's your story. I mean, it's almost a truism of jazz that when somebody gets up there and plays well, the reaction of a fan who responds in kind is, "He's a good storyteller." The literal storytelling, the personal lyrical storytelling, just goes without saying.

There's also a sense that orchestral jazz particularly is dramatic. A typical Duke Ellington piece, like "Harlem Airshaft" or "Sepia Panorama," is a play. And the soloists function both as people who are expressing themselves and as actors who have specific roles to play. Ellington casts them in those roles because he knows who they are and what they have to say and he gives them this framework. He says, "O.K., Johnny Hodges, I know what you can do and you're going to be—oh let's say, the lover—in this play. And Cootie Williams or Tricky Sam Nanton, you're going to be maybe the sarcastic commenter on it. And then Ben Webster, you're going to be another kind of romantic lover, maybe one who's a little rougher than Johnny Hodges—maybe it's the male and female principle going on there." But a definite dramatic context, one that includes the lyrical element.

Then there's a way in which over the course of his career the accomplished jazz musician is either compiling an historical account or writing a novel, because there's no doubt that jazz takes place in a specific society in a specific chunk of historical time and it is about, to some extent, being a person in that world over that period of time. John Coltrane would be a perfect example, or Dexter Gordon. Any great player, their music changes over the years, and it changes because of inner musical impulses and psychological impulses, but it's also an accumulated body of knowledge about what it means to have been that person over that period of time. And I think that's not a bad definition of what a novel is. Another way to look at it is that it's autobiographical. But the interesting thing to me—and Kerouac comes in here—is that as jazz musicians have, without necessarily thinking about it, made those literary-musical forms their own, put their own spin on them, they also have affected certain kinds of literary artists. There are techniques about the way jazz musicians state things, state the self, the way they incorporate their history in what they're doing, in response to which various writers have shrewdly or innocently said, "I can use that." I mean, you just did.

YOUNG: Old tunes, man.

KART: In Kerouac's case, I think there's a lot of doubt about how honestly such things were done. I admire his work sometimes, but did he know enough about the materials to use them as high-handedly as he did sometimes; was he a tourist? I think that's one of the problems the music poses to anybody who either writes about it or just comes to it for pleasure or personal enlightenment. Are you part of it, or are you a tourist? Because being a tourist with it doesn't feel good. And it doesn't feel good if you suspect you are a tourist; and if you are one and don't know it, then you're making a big mistake. I wrote a piece about Kerouac and jazz that I brought along, thinking I was going to quote from it, and I guess I am. But I don't know now if I can find a chunk of it that will work. Kerouac tried to do it in two ways. One, he consciously said, "I'm going to try to imitate in my prose and in my verse"—and I think it worked better in his prose than in his verse—what he felt to be the core structure of a jazz solo. "I'm going to get up there and improvise." What was the name of that essay again?

YOUNG: "The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose."

KART: I think there's a fair amount of evidence that he rarely, if ever, followed those principles, that what really counts is just the work on the page. Does it feel, does it have the joy of spontaneity? Whether he actually labored over it or not. I think he did a lot of laboring over things. Which is fine, as long as it works.

And the other thing was that a lot of the furniture of his life was jazz. Some of it got a little creepy, for my tastes. I'll quote some things, if I can find them, that will make anybody's hair curl. Let's see. Here's a line from Visions of Cody: "I am the blood brother of a Negro Hero." Or he refers elsewhere to "good oldfashioned oldtime jitterbugs that really used to lose themselves unashamed in jazz halls." And he also refers to "wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy"—oh man—"the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America." I mean, you just go, "Wait a minute, Jack." Although you could say in some of these cases, that's a narrative voice, maybe that narrator is supposed to be a little bit of a fool at that point in the book. But a lot of times that doesn't work. He was going all the way with it.

YOUNG: But he's speaking—if I could intrude on your time.… Black readers were always aware of that tendency in Kerouac, but it was no different than when I would go with white friends at college to see a Marx Brothers movie and you'd have a sequence where Harpo would go down into Niggertown and everybody'd be dancing and singing and he'd be playing the harp and all that. And my friends would say, "Are you embarrassed?" And I said, "No, I'm not embarrassed, because I know who's making this movie."

KART: It's a good point, because I guess the person, or kind of person, who would be most embarrassed by that would be somebody in my shoes. But also in the back of my mind I'd be thinking, when he's doing something like that, what would his contact with the music be, compared with someone like Al Cohn or Zoot Sims or Bunny Berigan or whatever? Measure it that way. I mean, there's something, there's a strength in the one kind of contact and something presumptuous or weak in the other.

YOUNG: Remember—I haven't talked about this—he was in the hipster tradition, the tradition of the white hipster, which attempted in large degree to turn middle-class white America on its head. If his folks didn't like it, then he liked it, you know.

KART: I'll end with that passage from my piece on Kerouac and jazz, which begins with a quote from his Book of Dreams: "I wish [tenor saxophonist] Allen [Eager] would play louder and more distinct, but I recognize his greatness and his prophetic humility of volume, his 'quietness.'" (Eager, by the way, was an excellent white disciple of Lester Young, and his music and his example obviously meant a great deal to Kerouac.)

Then, after the quote, I go on to say [reading]:

Listening to Allen Eager or Brew Moore, one knows what Kerouac meant, a meditative, in-ward-turning linear impulse that combines compulsive swing with an underlying resignation—as though at the end of each phrase the shape of the line drooped into a melancholy "Ah, me," which would border on passivity if it weren't for the need to move on, to keep the line going.

Of course there are other precedents for this, which Kerouac must have had in mind, notably Whitman's long line and Wolfe's garrulous flow. And I wouldn't insist that Kerouac's prose was shaped more by his jazz contemporaries than by his literary forebears. But that isn't the point. For all his moments of softness and romantic overreaching—his "holy flowers … floating in the dawn of Jazz America" and "great tenormen shooting junk by broken windows and staring at their horns"—Kerouac's desire to be part of what he called the "jazz century" led to a prose that at its best was jazzlike from the inside out, whether jazz was in the foreground [as in much of Visions of Cody] or nowhere to be seen [as in Big Sur]. And perhaps none of this could have come without the softness and the romanticism, the sheer boyishness of Kerouac's vision.

"These are men!" wrote William Carlos Williams of Bunk Johnson's band, and he certainly was right, as he would have been if he had said that of Louis Armstrong or Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter or Thelonious Monk. But there is something boyish in the music of Allen Eager and Brew Moore and in the music of Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Teschmacher for that matter—a sense of loss in the act of achievement, the pathos of being doubly outside, that is an essential part of their grace. When he was on his game, Jack Kerouac knew that too.

HARPER: I have been internalizing this dialogue between these two gentlemen, and I'm going to try and respond. I come out of a very strange background culturally, and I think that's very important in the way in which we define ourselves as Americans. The whole question of self-definition is the American problem, and the way in which you locate yourself in this very strange terrain is a question, of course, of voice. And I've had some considerable difficulty communicating with my peers on many levels, mostly at the level of assumption. So I'm going to be rather tedious for a moment and go through a few principles of my own way of approaching this self-definition process.

Everybody begins with a notion of autobiography that sometimes expresses itself as sensibility, sometimes in terms of the construction of what I call "work," which is to say the way in which one gets inducted into the culture. Oftentimes this happens by accident, sometimes it happens by geography—the notion of black people in particular being forced to migrate because of all kinds of economic concerns. And something which doesn't get talked about very much but which I'm going to bring up, and that is the notion of terror. Black people in this country have been under a continuous assault, and the response to that assault has a great deal to do with the vibrancy, not to mention the rigor, of the artistic expression.

I'm reminded of a review which I recently wrote for the New York Times of Count Basie's autobiography, as told to Albert Murray. A man called me up on the phone and I said, "Well, send it to me," and he did. I looked at it and I wrote this review. And then I saw the review in the New York Times on Sunday, and I was amazed at what they'd done to it. They had cut out all of the illustrations of how the tradition gets extended through people, through circumstances and events, particularly events having to do with economics and war, and the kind of continuity which was necessary to understand something about Count Basie's minimalism, his refusal to overplay, and the way in which he developed his "charts," particularly after he got some exposure on the radio. I'm a little bit tired—and I don't want to start throwing stones here—but I'm a little bit tired of people assuming that John Hammond discovered Count Basie. The question is, who did John Hammond bring Count Basie to? And the answer is, to the job market of New York City, publishing and the control of the markets which brought that music to a wider audience. Now this is typical American technological commercialism. But Count Basie was already somebody in his various communities, and the Blue Devils band was wonderful.

I began my review by talking about an incident which took place and seemed to be of no significance. Basie is in Tulsa in 1925 and he's got "a head," which is to say he's drunk himself into sleep. He's a young man and he hears this music, which he assumes can only be Louis Armstrong, the quality of the playing being such. And he wakes up and he says, "I gotta find out who that guy is that's playing. You know, it's gotta be an album. Somebody in here's playing a record." And he wakes up and stumbles downstairs and he runs into some people who are advertising on the back of a wagon and it is the nucleus of the Blue Devils band, including Hot Lips Page, and a number of other people. This is Basie's introduction into the standard of what he has to live with, in terms of artistic excellence. And the narrative begins with this little episode and then it goes back to a kind of chronology, that is, in Albert Murray's handling of the story of Count Basie.

Now it's important that we understand something about the Tulsa riot, because I thought I was just making a kind of aside, but a woman from the Philadelphia Inquirer called me on the telephone and said, "By the way, what are your sources to the Tulsa riot?" And I said, "Well, why are you asking me these questions?" And she said, "I'm just interested, because you said it was the first instance of aerial bombardment on any community in the modern world." And I said, "Yeah, well, that's true." She says, "Well, I'd like to know about your sources." So I said, "Well, you know, one of the sources is the New York Times," and I gave her the date. I got the sense that she was trying to solve political problems, because those of us who know anything about Philadelphia and MOVE, for example, know that that community was decimated by a certain kind of technological temper tantrum which burned down a whole city block and ruined a neighborhood, a community. And that attitude, I think, is as American as apple pie.

I want to take you back to Tulsa for a minute because it is there that the beginning of the story of Count Basie is framed. Tulsa was a place which had a very burgeoning middle class. The black community was right next to the train station and the community was full of entrepreneurs. The white community was very angry about this because it seemed to be that with the discovery of oil, black people just had too much. They had too much of a frontier enterprising spirit, and they'd gone out to Oklahoma and carved out, among other things, a way of existing with the Indians. And you could oftentimes go into all-black communities or all-Indian communities very much as you do in Narragansett in Rhode Island now. But when the Indians get together—they have a big powwow—and they all look like bloods. I mean, you'd be looking around saying, "These all look like brothers!" And they call themselves Indians, and they are Indians. And so the amount of interchange at the cultural level, not to mention the bloodline level, is long and extensive. The reason why I tell you this is because Basie came to have a standard of playing simply because he ran into some musicians who taught some things that he could have never believed were being done. So the first question I would ask is, Who taught these people how to play like that? I'm talking about the Ben Websters and so on. Somebody taught them, and the people who taught them were people who were invisible—the people who came out of communities and believed in discipline, who knew something about the arts, who knew something about expression and who knew something about living, how one had to make a life. And the communities out of which these people came were black communities, they weren't white communities—and it was kind of a surprise to John Hammond, among other people, that this kind of music had been in existence for a long time.

Now all you have to do is get the albums and listen to the Blue Devils band and you'll know what I'm talking about. That became the nucleus of Counts Basie's band. I tell you that because it seems to me that we have this ongoing dialogue—I think that Ellison said it best in an essay where he corrected Irving Howe for approaching his particular novel (that is, Invisible Man) in the wrong way. He said that he was in "a continuous antagonistic cooperation" with Mr. Howe and others. I think that that is a good expression for our use here—"antagonistic cooperation," which is the willingness to disagree about the way in which we see what we call reality.

Which brings to me to some compositional questions. I as an academic—I characterize myself as an academic because I've spent too many years in American universities explaining—oftentimes to people who don't deserve the kinds of explanations—the complexities of what it is to live one's life, and saying that one does not live one's life exclusively out of books and that one has to have some experience and background. This is a visceral question and has to do with one's attitude about all kinds of things. It has to do with my attitude about composition when I was too stupid to know any better. Which is to say that when I was taken through my paces in courses, literature courses, I was critiquing my teachers at the same time that they were evaluating me.

I'll give you a couple of examples. I remember when we were studying O'Neill. I had seen, because I was a kid who would go to the library and just read randomly, that, for example, in the undergraduate school that I went to, the novels of Richard Wright had never been taken out of the library. Never. No one had to read the books. No one had read Native Son. Nobody had read Black Power. Nobody had taken these books out. So I was the first one to do this. I mean, the books were there, but one had to read them. I tell you this because when we got to talking about All God's Chillun Got Wings, one of O'Neill's plays, we found Eliot had done a review of it. I wa amazed at the way in which Eliot could be so much "on time" when he was talking about Dante, when he was talking about tradition and the individual talent. But the minute he started talking about brothers, his whole expertise, his formal training, just went to hell. I asked myself, How come? What happened all of a sudden with T. S. Eliot? At that time, Eliot was the high priest. He's still that, but there are some other voices now. But at that time everybody was hung up on the New Criticism and so on. I just listened to these white folks and let them say anything they wanted to tell me and I did what they asked, which included writing villanelles and sestinas and Petrarchan sonnets and Shakespearean sonnets and Miltonic sonnets. And they always assumed that you were doing this by accident, you were kind of stealing this. What they didn't know is, they didn't know anything about my life.

I left school and went to the post office. I heard this riff about the post office and I ran into many young men and women who were advanced people, who had gotten an academic degree, who knew more about Melville and Shakespeare, not to mention the Russians! Now, take Gaines. Mr. Ernest Gaines writes about his rural community of Louisiana, has used the framing devices he has learned from other people who have studied peasant communities, like those Russians, so that he could exalt his own and give the speech rhythms, the modes of discussion, the communal interests and values, a kind of relief which hasn't been seen before. People just think that Gaines is somebody who's got a good ear, walking around with a tape recorder, you know. I mean, this is madness. At that same time, there are people walking around with their biases, their attitudes. I was taking a course from Christopher Isherwood, who would come to class sometimes and not say anything, he would just walk in and say, "We're going to have my colleague read to us." And I would look over—I was the only black person in the class—I'd say, "Damn, that looks like Auden." He would read for about forty-five minutes and then he'd stop and say, "Well, are there any questions?" and I'd raise my hand and say, "Well, I wonder if you'd read the memorial poem for W. B. Yeats?" And he'd recite that, and then I'd ask him to read other things. And when we'd walk out of the class, the girl who sat next to me would say, "How did you know that that was Auden?" And I'd say, "Well, I'd seen his picture on the cover of a poetry book, you know." She thought it was kind of magical that anybody black knew anything about anything else.

And she always used to talk to me about Langston Hughes. "Well, are you going to be the next Langston Hughes?" I don't want to be mean now, but I'm kind of reminiscing now, and it's interesting to know about how people develop. She used to drive a bread truck to school and she'd pull this damn bread truck up, and you know, it had a lot of charisma. She'd get out of this bread truck—it didn't say "Wonder Bread," but it said something like that on the side—and she'd come into these seminars, and she assumed that I was a black person and that the best way to get in touch with me was to talk about black people. Well, I didn't share with her my great love for Langston Hughes. I grew up in a household where Langston Hughes's poems were framed and were on the steps going down into the basement which, as you know, is the real solid part of the house.

All right. So that gives you some sense of the kind of antagonistic cooperation that goes on in this long dialogue in this country, which begins even before the Declaration of Independence, over the American tongue and who's going to control it. The American tongue is something which I think is extraordinarily important and we owe musicians a great debt because musicians were always at the frontier of what we call "parlance," the way in which they express themselves to other people. And by the time the hipsters, the Kerouacs and others, caught on to what black musicians had been talking about, black musicians had gone on to other things. The language was revivified and revitalized as the result of these particular men and women living their lives at literally the margin of destruction from one time to another.

I tell you that because I think we have to have a respect for the historiography of this culture and the lack of memory. There are terrific losses in America that are taking place. And many people don't even know they're there, because nobody took the time to write them down. Or much of the memory is in black periodicals. I'm talking about things like the Chicago Defender or the Pittsburgh Courier or whatever. And who reads them? I mean, where are the archives on these newspapers? There aren't many, but there are a few. And out of that memory and out of that loss comes a kind of ritual content, which is to say the framing of the experience and the presentation of the experience, which I've spent some time dealing with.

Now I've been asked to tell a few tales. I'm glad to do that, but I want to say a few things first about the interrelationship of the arts. I would speak to you about Romare Bearden, for example, who, in the process of putting together a theory of collage, can manage to give a social context, a social feel and an artistic expression simultaneously. This is something which he learned as a result of studying the technical innovations of collage and modern painting. But his heart and soul lives in the black community and the black community has never been looked upon as a resource for art at the level of cosmetics, of decorating appeal—which is to say black figures which hang on the walls of people's homes. Richard Yard told me a wonderful story one day. He said, "You know, Michael, people love my paintings, but they don't want them hanging on their walls. Too many black faces in there." And I thought he was making a little joke.

Then later on we came to do a little project together, and he had done something on the Savoy Ballroom, making these figures which are about four feet tall in the attitudes of dance as one would run into them playing in front of Chick Webb's band in 1938. This looks like a dance hall of some sort, and in its better days it probably was. If you went to the other end of it, you could just imagine these dancers spread out in various ways, and they were painted in the attitudes of dance. And the musicians up on the bandstand were responding to the dancers—you could imagine Lester Young, for example, who was getting his energy from watching somebody do the Lindy. This is important cultural iconography, and I tried to capture it in an essay.

Now Sterling Brown wrote a poem called "Cabaret 1927, Chicago." It was about the era of Prohibition and it was probably Fletcher Henderson's band playing to a segregated audience. In it, Sterling Brown, in the manipulation of voice, criticizes the lyrics of Irving Berlin, and he has as a backdrop the lyrics of Bessie Smith singing about the Mississippi Flood of 1927, with James P. Johnson on piano. It was James Baldwin who talked about taking that record to a small village in Switzerland so that he could write Go Tell It on the Mountain. Now I think that we owe Bessie Smith and James P. Johnson a debt, and the way in which I pay it back is just to say what happened. And maybe to say in either one of their idioms, maybe both combined, that the business of making a poem is a complicated matter.

I ran into Hayden Carruth recently and he was just sitting in the audience and I was there to give a concert with two musicians, a man who plays cello named Abdul Wadud [Ron DeVaughn]—some of you who follow contemporary music might know him—and the other Julius Hemphill, who plays with the World Saxophone Quarter. We were playing to a small library in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is a depressed area, and we got up and we put together this program in two parts. It was a wonderful evening and it was right next to a church and the acoustics were terrific and we were glad to see one another and to talk about all kinds of things, old times, and there's Hayden Carruth sitting in the back. So he comes up to me at the break, and he says, "You know, Michael, you ought to write a book on jazz." And I said, "Well, there's some people that are writing books on jazz." And I mentioned Al Young's name, because I've known him for years, and other people. And he says, "No, your stories are just as important as their stories."

He says, "If you don't write them, they'll never be down. The poems are fine."

He says, "But nobody's going to read the poems."

He says, "You and I know that."

He says, "Poets only read one another's work."

He says, "And by the way, I liked your book."

He says, "I always do this when I go to people to find out whether they got any heart. I read the last poem in the book, turn to the last page."

He says, "In your recent book, Peace on Earth [Which is a takeoff on Coltrane's great song, 'Peace on Earth'], I read that poem and I knew I wanted to read the whole book."

Hayden Carruth knows a good deal about jazz and has written about it wonderfully. He's a fine poet, and he's also an eccentric. He knows that you carry the legacy and the resonance of your experience with you no matter where you are. Certainly musicians do this, and this is why they're all my heroes. I can't imagine a greater tribute than a person who is tired coming into a town and getting up on a bandstand and singing about "love, oh careless love, oh aggravatin' love." And making those particular people who are either on the dance floor or in the audience transformed. That's the hardest work I know, and for people who do it day after day is just beyond me. And so I think we owe them a tribute.

Now, I'm trying to write a poem for the ear as well as for the eye. The New Criticism and postmodernism has forced us away from the ear in large part. I don't think that we can get along without our eyes, but we still need aural quality of poetry. And I remember when Etheridge Knight was talking the other night, when he was talking about his belief that no matter what, as long as he could say a poem to somebody that somebody could hear it, that was pre-technological and pre-textual in the written sense. That that aural quality was very important. And for him to stand up on the bandstand and sing gives me some idea of what it means to be terrorized in a real sense and at the same time to not be totally inarticulate.

Which brings me to a few of my notes in conclusion. My education was rather scattered and what I would call in the vernacular "habit" of putting together disparate things to make a kind of collage. That's certainly my education and it continues to be that way. I have to go back to the University of Iowa in about a month, and I have to lie. I have to say to Paul Engle and others that they helped me become the poet that I am. I have to say it helped me to be a student of Philip Roth, who accused me of writing a pornographic novella. This is Philip Roth in 1961 accusing me of writing a pornographic novella! I've got to lie when [Donald] Justice, who's a friend of mine and whom I love and who's a very decent man, told me in private, "You know, Michael, when I write this letter of recommendation I can't say how angry you are." I was considered angry because I would speak up. I would say things to Paul Engle like, "Don't you think it's important that the next time you have a black person come here, maybe from a foreign country like Nigeria, that you better check and find out whether you can get an apartment for him, because he'll be walking around here in Iowa City, maybe being run over by some farmers who are not used to seeing Nigerians walking around downtown?" He thought I was making a kind of accusation. I wasn't making any accusation. I was telling him about the world he lived in but didn't know about at the level of race relations.

So I've got to go back and be nice. Be euphemistic, forget memory. Forget loss and forget ritual.

Now here are my notes:

Because one does not deliberately echo European conventions for prosody does not mean that one is not aware of them. One oftentimes, in a kind of counterpoint, is referencing them.

Notions of personality. How do you get the attributes of a personality into a poem at the level of phrase or the level of diction or the level of meter even, or rhyme? That's a poetic question. It's an artistic question. The analogies, the logic of vocabulary, the shaping of vocabulary—how do you make these choices so as to elicit the time, the time frame, what I call the "mode of expression"? How do you control that? The whole business of the telling of people's dreams. We in this country have nothing but nightmare to record when we talk about this "antagonistic cooperation" because we are actually at war, even now.

There are other people, this panel and people in the audience and people who've got private record collections and people who don't write in newspapers, who buy records, dance to them and tell their daughters and sons that Coltrane's the greatest musician that ever played. But let me play for you Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul." Let me tell you something about how he learned to play "Body and Soul" in that way. After being in Europe all those years, trying to escape racism and trying at the same time to live his imaginative life, he heard Herschel Evans's "Blue and Sentimental" on a recording, and he just said, "I just gotta go home." So he went home, and he was met by musicians, four or five hundred of them, and everybody was saying, "Man, how was Europe?" He said, "Man, where is Herschel?" Herschel had died and nobody could tell Coleman that Herschel was dead. So finally they went to a joint and he found out that Herschel was dead and he went into seclusion for a couple of days and the next thing you know, here comes "Body and Soul."

Now that little riff, that little story, was cut out of the New York Times review that I gave. I was furious, because I think that that kind of linkage is important for people who could never hear the musicians play in person. They ought to know that story. It's important to know that when Count Basie was a youngster and went to Cleveland, Basie was on Art Tatum's turf and didn't know it. He walked into the place and started playing and thought he was the baddest dude in the world because he'd been traveling around. He sat down and talked to the waitress and the waitress said to him, "You know, there's a local musician that'll be in here in a little while. Why don't you wait, have a drink and listen to him?" Basie was walking around and talking about "I'm going to cut and blow this cat away." And he was downstairs, he was away, and all of a sudden he hears on the piano somebody he ain't never heard before, named Art Tatum. So he goes up to the waitress and he says, "Who is that guy in there?" She says, "Oh, that's Art Tatum." Basie says to her, "Why didn't somebody tell me I was on his territory? Why do I have to have my hands cut off by that hatchet?" And Tatum later on sat Basie down and said, "Show me a few things. What are you doing here, man?" And Tatum gave him some instruction. These kinds of things were cut out of my review.

Two other things in conclusion. The titles of my books are important. I was accused of being a sentimentalist because of Dear John, Dear Coltrane. But I've got that "blue and sentimental" in my background, that music going around in my head. And so the word "sentiment" is not a bad word for me. The other thing is that the titles of songs are also important, and Al Young knows some great songs. "All the Things You Are." You've got to hear Charlie Parker play that before you understand all of the residue that is in the mechanics of just assigning a title to a song. There are reservoirs and resonances.

And the last thing I have to say is that it's an honor to give testimony to people who got me through terrible times. When I was in graduate school at Iowa, the only thing that saved me was a record [album] called Kind of Blue [by Miles Davis]. A friend of mine, Lawson Inada, who's a Japanese-American, also had a great collection. We had apartments right next to each other, and the walls were so damn thin that if he turned his record player on first I didn't have to turn mine on. And if I turned mine on first, he'd say, "Man"—I mean, he'd do things like this: I'd meet him at the mailbox and he'd say, "Man, you played Kind of Blue forty-eight times this morning, Jack." And I'd say, "Really?" He'd say, "Yeah, let me tell you a story." He says, "You know, I bought Kind of Blue and I played it and wore out one side, and this morning you turned over Kind of Blue and it's the first time I'd ever heard the other side of Kind of Blue. I fell out! A two-sided record!" Nowadays you listen to a record and you find your favorite tunes then you decide you're going to tape and if you don't like all of the thing you take little excerpts from here and there and you put that together and then you play that over and over again. But this was before we could make cassettes. We would just play one side, or we'd play one cut! We'd play that over and over again. We didn't want to be bothered going through the entire side. And he said to me, "Kiss my ass—a two-sided jam!"

That was wonderful to me, because I understood exactly what he meant. He meant he'd been playing Kind of Blue on one side for a year and a half, and had no idea that there was this mystery on the other side. And to be given this at four o'clock in the morning or whatever time it was, to actually hear a tune he'd never heard before on a record that he'd been carrying around with him all over the country and hand't had the nerve to turn over because he didn't want to be disappointed! You know, he didn't want to be let down after listening to side one of Kind of Blue.

The fact that Al Young's second memoir in his three collections of memoirs is called Kinds of Blue speaks volumes to me because I memorized many, many records to the point that I don't have to play them. I know the tunes. They're running around in my head. So when I sit down in the compositional sense these things impact on me. In the process of making up a kind of commentary or an investigation into any one of a number of poetic subjects, I've got those tunes in my head.

They're blessings to me and they wouldn't be there if those musicians hadn't played.

And many of them are not on record. Most people don't understand that musicians weren't concerned about records. Musicians that I know are not buying too many records. They've got eighty references or a hundred or a thousand. They've played "Body and Soul" eight hundred times. But I'm playing just one version on the record. It matters a great deal to me as a non-musician. Doesn't matter much to them.

Process and performance are important. Music for black musicians is almost never entertainment. Almost never entertainment. So for you to approach Armstrong through a film with Bing Crosby in it is a way of not understanding Louis Armstrong. If you want to understand Louis Armstrong, listen to "Potato Head Blues" or "What did I do to be so black and blue?" Or look at Mr. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and ask yourself why is it that he frames his particular tale around the story of a musician [Louis Armstrong] who was perhaps the greatest innovator in music in the twentieth century. Certainly right up there with Stravinsky and all the others that you might bring to mind in talking about twentieth-century culture.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: A given jazz piece can lose a lot of people real quickly because of the nature of it. People know words, but they don't know tonalities. Is jazz dying?

YOUNG: What you're talking about is life. Life doesn't die. It took the forms that we talked about up here today, but there's always a continuum. Life continues to flow. And I think that what jazz is really about, like I said before, is human spirit and life itself. I remember something that William Carlos Williams said in some of his letters. He said he thought that when society became too staid and static, the artist should throw herself or himself on the side of a little bit of chaos. When it would get too chaotic, he would seesaw a little over on the side of order. And the idea was to keep a balance. I think that people will just naturally always gravitate to whatever is life-giving and life-restoring.

KART: Regarding my saying that jazz is dying. I have some questions, which I could briefly go into, about what I think the future or the present problems of jazz are. I don't think—if I understand what post-modernism is in art—that jazz can be a postmodern art. It's an essentially humanistic art. To the degree that play with the codes, in a distant way, is what a lot of arts are up to these days, jazz can't do that. Let me quote from a piece I wrote recently about this problem:

It seems logical to assume that jazz is a music that can should be played con amore, that is because jazz is this century's most humanistic art, a music whose goal, the discovery and expression of one's personal identity, can be reached only when musicians speak openly and honestly to those who are willing to respond in kind. But the belief that such transactions can take place rests on the faith that individual human beings still care to make that kind of response, a faith that is seldom found in the elaborately coded messages of this century's highbrow art and is even less prevalent in the mass-market products of our popular art. So the jazz musician, whose rebelliousness has ranged from bold cultural pioneering to romantic despair, now finds himself cast in the role of the loneliest rebel of them all, an artist who is unable to speak without evasion or artifice in an age which seems to demand little else.

That, in a nutshell, seems to be the problem that the music in general is facing today. Many of those who can and must still speak in that way, and their names are legion, don't seem to be abroad in a culture that is losing its ability to respond to that kind of speech. There are other people, many of them very well-intentioned, who are beginning to play a music that certainly derives from what I would think of as being the jazz tradition, but who are speaking behind masks, where before that was known not to be the way it could be done. And I think still is the way it cannot be done.

HARPER: I'm going to go back to what I said earlier about American speech and the American tongue. I have great belief that people as makers are never going to be mechanized in any final sense. And I think that one has to believe in the process of improvisation at every level. And I'm going to give you a couple of example here.

I'm reading from the Collected Prose of Robert Hayden. "Not too long ago, he [he the persona—in this case, Hayden as he remembers himself as a youngster] decided to include as part of the design of a new series of poems, words and phrases remembered from childhood and youth. Under the title of Gumbo Ya Ya—Creole patois for 'Everybody talks'—he wrote down several pages, hoping of course, to make use of them in poems later on. Here are a few selections:

1. God don't like ugly and cares damn little for beauty.
2. She looks like a picture done fell out the frame.
3. Goodbye. Sweet potato, plant you now and dig you later.
4. Every shut-eye ain't sleep and every goodbye ain't gone.
5. Married? The man ain't born and his mother's dead.
6. He's a bigger liar than old Tom Culpepper and you know the devil kicked him out of hell nine times before breakfast for lying.
7. Yez, Lawd, I got me three changes a day—in rags, outa rags, and no damn rags a-tall.
8. I promised God and nine other men I wouldn't do that again.
9. Gonna hit you so hard your coattail will fly up like a window shade.
10. To be a good liar you got to have a good remembrance.

Ain't that the bad one! "To be a good liar you've got to have a good remembrance." Which is to say, you've got to be able to tell stories, you have to be able to tell stories in a true idiom, the true idiom that comes out of life. And that the kind of call-response business, which has been highlighted in black American churches, in dramaturgy, in street plays, in bars, in the kind of hopeless, soporific exchange that goes on at academic conferences—that can become distilled by a great poet into something which will be a commentary on our age and our culture. And I think that a phrase will sum that up. You know, musicians are terribly economic. I remember when Stevie Wonder came out with a song called "Up Tight, Out of Sight." You remember when the term was appropriated and everybody took "up tight" to mean "psychologically duressed"? You know? And I remember black folks just saying, "What is wrong with them? Don't they understand?" They'd say, "Well I guess we'll just let them have that. You can have that. Take that and we'll come up with something else."