[In the following two-part essay, the author of the first section, Christopher Logue, calls for more innovations in the field of poetry in terms of style, experimentation with which brought about the technique of reading poetry against a background of jazz music; the author of the second section, Charles Fox, identifies three separate traditions in the jazz-and-poetry movement.]

When a great political man retires he must provide for the future. Nothing can beatify his gifts like disturbed conditions drowning incompetent successors. Then the suffering public can remember his rule as golden, and, forgetting that his final acts are the origin of their present woe, vilify the successors he chose for the vain incompetent fools they are. Nor is anyone better placed to assure the drawing of comparisons favourable to himself than the grandee, who, after accepting the careless public's glory, persuades them, and his own loyal supporters, to promote leaders distinguished by that folly his political genius has recognized but managed to conceal. As his first gift to the world was the excrement of his body, so his ultimate creation is to grant his electorate the democratic opportunity to reveal how much they have learnt from his guidance, and to save themselves from national disaster by the quick, final, and jubilant ousting of his faithful colleagues.

Considering the ambitions of government, such measures are reasonable and their achievement by design, virtuous; but the succession and judgement of poetry, particularly the free or romantic poetry composed in Western countries, is not so democratically governed. Its obligations are individual and didactic. Poetical disaster is not to be understood in terms of dying or dithering among serious old writers; it derives from profound, natural causes, like ignorance, torpor, and self-satisfaction among young writers. Votes cannot correct this situation, and, in any case, the populace is indifferent. They have other fish to fry. The work of professional literary critics generally supports inferior modern poetry, for the stale ranks of criticism are thronged with failure poets.

As lack of revolution or constant reform indicates political decadence, so avoidance of experiment and the morbid popularity of exhausted verse forms, show poetic reaction. Politically, if the decadence is aggressive, it leads to counter-revolution, fascism, etc.; the poetic equivalent to this aggression is open hostility towards experiment, with the support of critical systems whose values are drawn from dead literary products as collateral. This, with rare exceptions, is the position of English poetry now. And although the relationship of contemporary politics to contemporary poetics must be recognized if the decadence of the latter is to be grasped, it gives only a general clue about the factors encouraging to decadence. Understanding this relationship will not enable us to create alternatives and increase tradition. To turn a new face to heaven without denying one's ancestors is not a critical function.

It would be foolish to lay the 150-year death of sophisticated English poetry that followed Chaucer at the doors of medieval or Tudor politicians. But the ugly blunderings of Messrs Hawes, Lydgate, and Occleve, represent more than traditional literary obedience vitalizing, for a little while, the naturally untalented. If they did not develop Chaucer's literary inventions it was not because they misunderstood his technical genius, but because their own slavish attitudes towards social and political authority made them exclude current historical experience. To-day, when it is timely to reject the genteel bellyaching of Messrs Larkin, Amis, and Conquest, we must recognize that the literary disaster they represent could last for many decades, and lies in their general attitude towards moral and political commitment, and their particular attitude to experiment with form, rather than in any gap occasioned by the dotage of Pound and Eliot, the cutting off of Auden and Spender, and the silence of Barker and Graham.

The work of Messrs Larkin & Co., together with their even weaker associates, is characterized by the exclusion of impersonal subject matter, the combination of trivial, subjective impressions with refined techniques, and an academic devotion to Caroline and Georgian poetry. They promoted themselves by means of a group name and radio anthologies. They flourished during the post-war decadence; indeed it may be said that their seedy and niggling views corresponded nicely to the timid political administration of the early fifties. They were, and are still, defended by the critical doctrines of the university teacher Doctor Leavis, but not by that master himself, whose imagination, however spare, requires works of greater significance than theirs to excite its innate puritanism. They are to be distinguished from their predecessors by the unique inferiority of their collective output. Lacking the originality of talent to assimilate the literary discoveries and inventions made during the first third of their century, they have not found in themselves the humility to imitate those superior writings. To them, and to their critical supporters, experiment has been anathema. Cleverly, they associated the word with amateur pretentiousness. In fact, any serious experiment that took place during their ascendency, though its practical result was failure, was worth more than all their 'stabilizing'.

Critical appreciations of their position like the above are amusing, but except as exercises in justified abuse, not very useful. To check the disaster they have originated, experiment is necessary, allied to the constant defence of experiment. What is more, any experiment that is made must not start from the position established by their wretched works, but from the necessity to write poetry adequate to the times and conditions in which we live.

For me, experiment in poetry means two things. First, recognition of those factors which must form its subject-matter if the work is to have relevance and meaning for present living experience. This implies a basic change in content. For example: three-quarters of English poetry today is written by those who live in, and consumed by those who read in, urban or semi-industrial surroundings; yet, if you idle through one of our innumerable anthologies (Larkin & Co. have something of a corner in anthologies), listing the descriptive contents relative to each poet at the time of writing, you would think they were written by people inhabiting a small sunlit fun-fair set in the middle of a thousand-acre bramble patch. Such poems have no more relevance to our lives than a picture of packaged bacon does to a pig in a slaughterhouse.

A change of subject matter results in technical changes, for stylistic properties are derivative of content. The two are (how many times have we been told?) inseparable; therefore a writer's duty to both is equal. His judgements are unavoidably social as well as aesthetic. Alter your way of writing and you discover that those who imagine poetry to be special, private, and exclusive, no longer enjoy your work. They have to be abandoned and experiments to make a new audience undertaken. This is not so difficult as it sounds. Many people who read poetry, do not read recent poetry; they omit to say this out of humility and politeness. This second class of experiment involves use and communication; it was with this aspect in mind we developed a technique of presenting jazz and poetry together. The field has scarcely been opened. There is room for small operas, song cycles, dramatic stories, a hundred different things. I do not believe that recorded poetry will replace the book—a popular fantasy nowadays; on the other hand, public readings that reassert the traditional association of words and music, increase the sale of books enormously.

Lastly, experiment involving public performance raises problems of audition and visuality. For example: lyrical poems read by one person, about one person, quickly bore an audience no matter how good the poems are. If attention is to be gained and retained, didactic, satirical, and narrative poems are essential. In this way the obligations of public experiment influence the more solitary act of writing. The two aspects cannot be separated; experiment is total or non-existent. Methods of reading must also develop. The big, fruity enunciation (Thomas school) and the gritty lisping (You-must-accept-me-as-I-am school) are both destitute.

We have made a modest and worthwhile start. Let's see what happens.

Gutenberg had a good idea with printing, but it ran away from him and ruined it for the poets! Put the clam on the voice.

(LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI)

It is very important to get poetry out of the hands of the professors and out of the hands of the squares. If we can get poetry out into the life of the country it can be creative. Homer, or the guy who recited Beowulf, was show business. We simply want to make poetry a part of show business.

(KENNETH REXROTH)

These two quotations sum up pretty accurately the intentions of those San Francisco poets who, during the spring of 1957, began reading their work in public to a background of jazz. Their aim was not only to reintroduce the old bardic relationship between poet and audience, it was also to increase the size of that audience. The idea quickly caught on in San Francisco, a city swarming with beatniks, and soon regular sessions were taking place, either in espresso bars or at The Cellar, a downstairs club which had once been a Chinese restaurant and now became headquarters for the jazz-and-poetry movement. Outside California, however, the response was cooler. Some of the better-known San Francisco writers, among them Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Kerouac, made forays to New York, but apart from Rexroth appearing for a fortnight at the Five Spot, and some Sunday afternoon readings by Langston Hughes at the Village Vanguard, jazz-and-poetry met with only limited success on the East Coast. Some gramophone records were made, a poet or two appeared on TV screens, but otherwise the movement in the United States retreated back to California.

'A good thing too'—that might easily be the reaction of many British men-of-letters, anxious to frustrate such an apparently obscene mingling of the artistic and the vulgar from defiling these shores. Yet that reaction would be stupid, unfair not only to jazz—which should no longer need defending among intelligent people—but also to the possibilities which lie in the blending of poetry with jazz. Most of the San Francisco experiments, alas, scarcely lived up to Rexroth's vision of poetry as 'a part of show business'; indeed, to judge from recordings, Rexroth's own manner of reading (at times he sounds like an Old Testament prophet in mufti) cannot have helped things to go with a swing. And now the trouble is that other attempts at fusing poetry with jazz are likely to be written off without a fair hearing as further outcroppings of the 'Beat' generation. In fact, however, at least three separate traditions can be discovered in jazz-and-poetry to-day: that of the San Francisco movement, the Negro tradition found in the work of Langston Hughes, and what can loosely be described as a European approach.

To attribute a tradition to something quite so temporary as the San Francisco jazz-and-poetry movement might be called misleading. But if there is no precedent for its method of putting poetry and jazz together, there certainly seems to be for the poems and the way they are declaimed. A mixture of Walt Whitman, the Old Testament and the doom-heavy rhetoric of primitive gospellers—this impregnates the style. Only too often Kenneth Rexroth or Allen Ginsberg boom away in denunciatory fervour, their voices edged with hysteria, and while, at its best, this can result in Ginsberg giving a genuinely impassioned, almost frightening reading of 'Howl', at the other extreme one gets such a performance as Rexroth's reading of 'Thou Shalt Not Kill,' a poem in memory of Dylan Thomas:

He is dead.
The little spellbinder of Cader Idris.
He is dead.
The sparrow of Cardiff.
He is dead.
The canary of Swansea.
Who killed him?
Who killed the bright-headed bird?
You did, you son of a bitch.

If a muted trumpet did not echo the cadences, if the final phrase was not quite so forthright, one might swear that Rexroth, finger outstretched, was standing by the lecturn in some Little Bethel, perhaps lamenting the passing of Lloyd George. But if the poets' readings are remarkable for their aggressiveness, exactly the opposite is true of the music. The rôle played by jazz in the recordings of San Francisco poets is a remarkably passive one. Chords may be sustained, a trumpet or saxophone whimper here and there, but the approach is basically negative. In the case of Rexroth's 'Thou Shalt Not Kill,' for example, the accompanying group deliberately used no prearranged chord pattern, key or rhythmic structure. So relentless a quest for spontaneity must be self-defeating. Occasionally there is an exception, as in the case of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'Autobiograph' (Ferlinghetti, incidentally, is far less vehement than his associates), where the poet reads between four-bar snatches of jazz improvised on the chords of T Got Rhythm.' In nearly every recording, however, the music has been used only to invoke a mood; it has no identity of its own.

One feels, in fact, that the main function of the San Francisco movement has been to reflect a particular rather than a universal set of attitudes, to express the cultural climate of certain people in a certain part of the United States a dozen years after Hiroshima. Yet it is always risky to condemn too glibly those species of art most indigenous to a nation. And where Allen Ginsberg or Lawrence Ferlinghetti are concerned, it may be their Americanism which disconcerts us, just as most Continentals cannot hear what we hear in Elgar or Vaughan Williams. Both Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, it seems worth noting, are keen admirers of William Carlos Williams, an American poet of undisputed stature and yet a writer who remains practically unknown in this country, except among a very small circle. Yet Williams's work is no more difficult or complex than that of Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore or Richard Wilbur, all of whom are cheerfully accepted here. By what can only be called a happy chance, one of the few genuinely successful fusions of poetry and jazz on the West Coast occurred when Hoagy Carmichael read Williams's 'Tract' above a very simple but effective blues played by a trio consisting of guitar, bass and drums. The brilliance here springs almost exclusively from the reading, a remarkably fine one, and the expressive use Carmichael makes of his birch-bark voice, although the poetry is undoubtedly heightened by the way the lines are splayed across the music's slow, metronomic tread.

On only one West Coast recording, however, do poetry and jazz meet on anything like equal terms. That is in Ferlinghetti's 'Dog,' read by Bob Dorough, a young jazz pianist and arranger who also scored the music. 'Dog' belongs to the school of William Carlos Williams, half-playful, half-ironic, very American in its use of the vernacular. The music underlines the narrative, but instead of being subsidiary it moves honestly, obeying its own logic; the performance, in fact, possesses such identity that if a trumpet or tenor saxophone replaced Dorough's voice the music would still have merit in its own right. Dorough also makes effective use of devices peculiar to jazz: the 'break' for instance, where the music stops for two bars (or perhaps four, punctuated by a chord) and where the words that fill this gap take on a special impact, or the way in which a string of comparisons is spoken above a series of descending harmonies or a set of stopchords. There is, in fact, genuine interplay between words and music, a relationship which allows the poetry and the jazz each to enjoy a life of its own, while together they create a third entity.

But before Rexroth, Ferlinghetti and Patchen started their experiments in San Francisco; before Mike Canterino, the owner of the Half Note Club in Greenwich Village, hung up a notice in his window: 'Poets Wanted', and auditioned the applicants ('Anything a bit off colour', said Canterino, 'I cut out. After all, I run a family place.'); long before any of these events took place, jazz had been doing very well on its own, fitting words and music together in a pattern that has been traditional to it for almost half a century. That pattern is the blues, basically the secular folk-song of the American Negro, normally sung in three-line stanzas over twelve bars of music. And it is that tradition, together with the allied tradition of Negro gospel-song, that informs Langston Hughes's poetry, not only the technique of his reading but the actual content and structure of his poems. Hughes, of course, is a Negro, so it is perfectly natural that this should have happened, as well as that he should draw similes and metaphors from the repertoire of Negro blues and folk-singers. When he reads some of his poems against an improvised jazz background, in fact, the effect is not all that different—formally, at any rate—from the semi-recitative blues-shouting of singers like Joe Turner or Jimmy Rushing.

For the European poet, too, a tradition already exists, a way of setting poetry against music that started with the choruses in Greek drama (even if the details of that technique are lost to us) and which embraces such elegant forms as the Provengal ballads. The words, it seems, stayed well on top until the time of the Renaissance. But with the exploration of harmony and counterpoint, with music assuming an artistic status of its own, poetry began to slip into second place. The decline in operatic libretti between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries provides a clear illustration of this; so does a comparison of the songs of Campion or Dowland with those of the Victorian or Edwardian decades. Yet the idea of setting poetry against music has continued to nag some poets. W. B. Yeats, for instance, chose to ignore his tone-deafness and tried many times to use music behind his poems; unfortunately he rarely ventured beyond employing a psaltery or a harp. Then there was Facade, a work which Dame Edith Sitwell claims to be the earliest example of jazz-and-poetry in action, but where the poems were read above Sir William Walton's ingenious pastiches and parodies of popular dance music (not jazz) of the 1920s. In other contexts one could cite Brecht's use of sprechtesang, the Ramuz-Schoenberg Pierrot Lunaire and Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat.

Red Bird Dancing on Ivory, broadcast in the B B C's Third Programme, and Fazzetry, performed at the Royal Court Theatre, set out to continue this tradition. In each case the poetry was written by Christopher Logue and the music—modern jazz of a fairly eclectic kind—composed by Tony Kinsey and Bill Le Sage. Jazz was used because it seemed the obvious music for the job, malleable in form and mood, metrically regular and possessing vigour and an identity of its own. In this country, as in most of Northern Europe, it has filled the gap left by the death of our native folk-music; certainly no idiom of our time is so international, so capable of adaptation. Before starting work on Red Bird Dancing on Ivory, all of us connected with the actual putting together of words and music listened to the American records, but only Bob Dorough's performance of 'Dog' turned out to be of much practical help. That recording, however, was taken as a starting-point for the British experiment. There were, it seemed three alternatives: (a) to use the words inside the music, going along with the rhythm, cushioned by the melody; (b) to deploy words against music, counterpointing it rhythmically, running across the structure of the tune; (c) to place words and music in ironic contrast. While it would have been interesting to make some use of the last technique, irony seemed out of place in this particular sequence of love poems. Most of the time, therefore, the readings alternated between techniques (a) and (b), often using both approaches within the same poem. It was necessary, also, for Christopher Logue to resist making any 'orchestral' use of his voice, to avoid getting over-musical or grandiloquent in his reading; instead he was to aim at projecting a cool, sinewy line, almost a companion to the sounds made by the trumpet and trombone.

With the exception of two poems, one virtually a duet between Logue and the trombonist, Ken Wray, all the music (except for individual solos) was scored. So closely did Le Sage and Kinsey work with Logue, in fact, that even the natural pace of his speech was taken into account, to prevent the reading sounding forced or hurried. The reason for concentrating upon arranged rather than improvised jazz was simply because planning seems necessary if the meaning of a poem is to be underlined and given impetus. With an improvised jazz backing such effects remain a matter of fortuity, the product of happy accidents. Much more successful results come from carefully fitting the poem inside the music and the music around the poem, even when it is an oblique relationship rather than a direct one that is being sought. In 'Wings Whirr by Moon and Midnight,' for instance, the reading draws its poise from the fact that the stanzas never plump down exactly within the eight- or sixteen-bar patterns of the music; they stretch across them, only coinciding at certain points, but because of that giving those passages much greater dramatic emphasis. Similarly, in 'Can You Trap Shadows Like This,' not only is the 'break' used rather effectively, followed by descending harmonies, but the images of headlong flight—hands out', 'drum', 'stones', 'trees', 'deep holes'—are all pointed up by accents on the drums, a pattern which had to be co-ordinated beforehand.

I think it is fair to claim that Red Bird Dancing on Ivory has made more ambitious use of the jazz-and-poetry medium than anything previously attempted. And since that broadcast some aspects of the technique have been developed in further programmes at the Royal Court Theatre, notably by the use of longer narrative poems and poems carrying a heavier residue of meaning. The treatment here was a little more sober, the story-line being allowed to develop without too much distraction and with more use being made of recurring themes. But it would be a great mistake to think that everything possible has now been tried. On the contrary, it will be interesting to see just how many different kinds of poetry can be employed within this medium and whether the extended form can be developed to exploit dialogue, to make, in its own way, a kind of chamber-opera. As far as this country is concerned, further programmes will certainly be attempted (there are already plans for Christopher Logue and the Tony Kinsey Quintet to work together again on both sound radio and TV in the autumn), and these should provide the opportunities for following up some of those fresh approaches.