Minor Poets of the New York School

He spoke sharply--as though a shark’s fin
Could wound the sea, or the fog
Be subject to a tongue-lashing--
Impatient, but not rushing the beat.

The world had coarsened, a meaner
Conception taken hold; or he had
Idealized Surrealism, badly
Misjudged the loyalty of goldfish.

A manuscript, "Minor Poets
Of the New York School,"
Lay unfinished on the kitchen
Table. The fog closed in.

***


I see 1960, the year of my birth, as the high point of culture in the twentieth century. Monk, Miles, Mingus, and Ornette were at the height of their power, as were Ray Charles, Sinatra, and Samuel Beckett. Picasso, Breton, Frank O’Hara, and Jack Spicer were still alive. This is the year of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. Yet by the time I was forming my own taste, around 1975, most of this had faded from view. I remember assuming, as a child, that jazz belonged completely to the past. This would have been only a few years after the death of Coltrane. I remember the debate about whether the Beatles were as great as Mozart. Why the Beatles and not, say, Coltrane, Monk, or Ornette? I was reading some of Ned Rorem’s Diaries and essays a few months ago. He had a controversial article about the Beatles in the 1960s, yet he rarely engages jazz in any significant way. At one point he speaks of Ornette’s trumpet and his white imitators of the 1950s, leading me to think he meant to say Miles Davis. This from a composer who claims Billie Holiday as a significant influence. Buying a loaf of bread at St. Louis Bread Company one morning, I heard Monk’s “Brilliant Corners,” played as background music. No one else was listening, I suspect.


***


After I started playing drums I developed the ability to hear a poet’s individual sound as though it were a ride cymbal pattern. With Clark Coolidge, a drummer who employs this analogy himself, this is a natural step. He does phrase like a bop drummer. But I can hear Beckett’s ride cymbal as well. As a teacher of literature, how do I teach such things? Students want different sorts of answers, though in my translation course I am closer to teaching what I truly believe in.