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Poems about different jazz instruments, singers, musicians, etc. A few evocative, stand out gems in a good collection.
Rich with atmosphere.
Thanks to my sister, Erin, for bringing this book back from New Orleans.
Very interesting and inspiring anthology with poems about Jazz. Who would've thought that that could be a thing? A lovely made book.
This is the first physical book I have read since getting hit by a car last Christmas. I have been surviving on audio books. This is a nice bridge for poetry lovers who know only a little about Jazz. Also a broad representation of poets is presented. Next up trying to write reviews again
Awesome. The Langston Hughes ones were my favourites. The experience reminded me of James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues
A great anthology of poems!Kevin Young is a great poet, as I discovered when I read For the Confederate Dead a little while after getting this anthology. (Yet another book I need to do the review on soon!) As such, it is no surprise that in putting together this anthology of poems about and containing the spirit of Jazz, he finds only the best and the brightest.However, as a poet, he's decided they're best grouped by theme and not by year. In fact, he cares so little about the when rather than t...
“If you can’t be free, be a mystery.” - Rita Dove on Billie HolidayThis is neat anthology, and I wish more women poets appeared in it.
This was intriguing and actually caused me to do a lot of internet searching, as I'm apparently not very well-versed in Jazz. The poems were raw, sometimes musical, almost always emotional, and opened up a door to a time and place, to people long gone, who created a movement.
Compilation itself is a good depiction of the beauty and tragedy of jazz and the blues. Some poems are incredible, others lackluster. One of my biggest takeaways was the unapologetically black nature of jazz, which just led me to thoughts about where that genre has moved over the past decades. The poems dealing specifically as odes to certain artists were the ones that least interested me, but do describe the music quite well. Also, Lush Life is one of the very best poems I've ever had the pleas...
After a long wait I finally got a copy of this Everyman Anthology of Jazz Poetry. Loving the music I thought this is a book that needs a place on my shelves. Delving in last night for the first time, I was not disappointed. I found old favourites and some new delights. One of the new delights was Langston Hughes's poem The Trumpet Player. The text can be found online at https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems.... You can listen to Hughes himself read this work and others on Spotify ht...
This was a very fun read. Kevin Young gives his poems an interesting tempo. Kind of reminds me of Langston Hughes's poetry.
Really not half bad. A lot of it was hit and miss. It had an entire section devoted to Coltrane. That was dope. Some favorites"John Coltrane: an impartial review" -Spellman "The Secret Life of Musical instruments" -CD Wright"Mingus at the Showplace" - William Matthews"Trane" - Brathewaite"Photo of John Coltrane, 1963" -Sean Singer
Better than Feinstein and Komunyakaa's series of Jazz Anthology. I going to buy this one next.
eternally grateful to the guy who saw me walk into our third year american lit seminar with a saxophone case and went "oh, we're doing jazz poetry in the modernism course this week, you might like it." he was extremely correct, because jazz poetry combines many of my favourite poetic things (formal experimention! cultural references! elegy! frank o'hara!) and this book ended up being the starting point for what I eventually wrote a dissertation on.
After spending such a long time being obsessed with jazz music, I guess it was only a matter of time before I also started reading jazz poetry.I keep telling my students (I'm currently teaching spoken word poetry to kids) that poetry = music = poetry. Jazz Poems, with its selection of poems written about the genre and for its musicians, confirms this idea through and through. Like a band, the collection is divided into numerous sections: Vamping (early jazz poems), Swinging (my favourite, obviou...
favorites:"god pity me whom (god distinctly has)" - e.e. cummings"jazz fantasia" - carl sandburg"trumpet player" - langston hughes"rose solitude" - jayne cortez"charlie parker birthday celebration, tompkins square park" - catherine bowman
A brilliant collection, lovingly assembled by the incomparable Kevin Young.