Who says poetry doesn't appeal?
Every seat was filled, along with window ledges and floor space, in the Library's Montpelier Room Feb. 3 for a much-touted evening of poetry and jazz promised as an innovation by Rita Dove when she became poet laureate consultant in poetry last October.
And members of the audience had the added pleasure of being the first to learn that Ms. Dove had accepted Dr. Billington's invitation to serve a second year in the post (see LC Information Bulletin, March 7).
"We're going to have a stellar evening," exclaimed Ms. Dove as she introduced poets Michael S. Harper and Quincy Troupe Jr. and members of the George Botts Quartet. She quoted Mr. Harper on the relationship of jazz and poetry:
"One of the things a poet who's interested in American culture has to work out is how to jump the gap between things that are most important to him culturally. He has to figure out how to translate what he learns into his particular craft. I wanted to spend all of my poetic life dealing with improvisation, studying the nuances of improvisation within a tradition so that the tradition was never forgotten. The way in which I did this was analogous to the way musicians would do it. The key is phrasing -- how to break the line, how to organize phrases, how to build incrementally either metaphors or voices or tropes."
Poetry and jazz share the nuances of improvisation, said Ms. Dove; the evening provided evidence.
The program, cosponsored by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Library's Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund, was indeed an evening of improvisation. The poets interspersed verses with chattily offered observations. The George Botts Quartet provided an ad-libbed background to the poems, frequently offering a few bars of favorites like "The Man I Love," "Mood Indigo" and "Bye, Bye Blackbird" before taking off from their chords in new directions. Saxophonist George Botts, Percy Smith on drums, Chaney Thomas on bass and Ellsworth Gibson on piano each had a turn in the spotlight.
While the musicians and poets had discussed what they planned to do, they had not rehearsed. Thus the level of spontaneity was great, like a jam session with words.
Athletics were also part of the evening. Mr. Harper, the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University, was the first to read and quickly offered baseball as an extra ingredient in the evening's mix.
He introduced his fellow reader as the son of Quincy Troupe, famed catcher in the old Negro baseball leagues, and declared that "baseball and jazz go hand-in-hand." Before reading his first poem, he quoted another baseball great, who starred with the Chicago Cubs in the National League for many years:
"Let's play it. That's what Ernie Banks used to say. "Let's play it."
Actually Mr. Harper sang his first poem, with the quartet backing him.
That's the way the evening went. The poets talked about sports heroes and legendary jazz musicians and offered verse devoted to them.
Harper read, or more likely recited, his famous poem about the death of jazz immortal Bessie Smith after an automobile accident in Mississippi in 1937, with its haunting refrain, "Can't you see/what love and heartache's done to me/I'm not the same as I used to be/This is my last affair."
Both poets were generous in their praise of other jazz greats as well. The accomplishments of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and others kept cropping up.
Mr. Troupe read a long tribute to Ellington, but also focused on sports. He explained that his father played baseball year round so his childhood was spent half in St. Louis and half in Mexico City, Caracas, Havana or San Juan.
"Father, Father, Father," he shouted over the music to begin a long poem in tribute to Troupe Senior; he then softened to almost whisper, "It was an honor to be there in the dugout with you."
Mr. Troupe praised basketball superstar Magic Johnson in another long poem. He called it a poem about winning and said, "It has to be fast, fast, fast."
Mr. Troupe holds professorships at both the University of California at San Diego and the College of Staten Island in New York and may have been explaining what he does while commuting when he recited, "Writing poems while cruising at 70 miles an hour on the Pennsylvania Turnpike can be fun if you don't run into anyone."
It was, indeed, a stellar evening.
And it was just the beginning of innovations in literary programs planned by Ms. Dove for 1994. The list includes Crow Indian children reading their poems, an environmental literary event to celebrate Earth Day and a cowboy-poetry reading and seminar in cooperation with the Library's American Folklife Center.
