Influences

Like many, I think that most of my primary literary influences were not themselves literary.

Influences

It’s all present tense: a certain scent returns, the sweet combination of tobacco and burning leaves on autumn air. And certain sights, like the pair of gray squirrels gamboling in a tree, moribund with Dutch Elm Disease; overhead, a swarm of starlings, gathered for the long migration—given their unfathomable numbers, it seems a wonder they don’t collide with one another in flight.

But of course, it’s the sound that stops me in my figurative tracks: I’ve never heard anything like it.

Though my father sang quite well, my parents were both by and large unconcerned with music unless they were dancing to it; my grandmother, in whose big house we lived, claimed affection for classical compositions and, bless her, introduced something called HiFi into our home; but we were as apt to catch her sleeping by the speakers as listening, just as she often dozed in her seat at the Academy of Music.

As for me, I’d hear some Swing number on my little radio now and again –Goodman or Shaw or whomever– but that was mostly by accident. The stations I listened to featured songs covered by TV’s Your Hit Parade, ones by Kay Starr, the Four Aces, Perry Como et al. I’ll admit I had a fondness for this late Tin Pan Alley stuff, and I vividly remember an actual crush on Patty Page.

Before the plume of smoke I remember rose on that early November morning, I noticed that Lovell had strung a long extension cord from a socket in the school’s cellar out to the swath of grass where he and I sat. He’d also somehow produced what was then called a portable Victrola, which in a moment would play a music uncanny to me.

That moment changed my life.

I’d been tootling away on the clarinet from about age nine, without much progress but now, as I told my mother when I got home at noontime, I longed for a saxophone. Her response was that she’d consider that notion once I started practicing the instrument I already had with greater dedication.

And so I did– but only for a brief span, to be sure; nor was I much more assiduous even later, when I finally bought a cheap tenor on my own. Much as I longed to be the white Sonny Rollins or Ben Webster or Dexter Gordon, there were some serious obstructions to that yearning, primarily a lack not so much of dedication as of talent. I haven’t played a reed instrument since about 1962, when at last I concluded I’d be a lot better fan than performer.

This Lovell I refer to was the African-American custodian, groundskeeper, and night watchman at the lily-white day school I where I studied, using that verb somewhat liberally. Lovell’s collective nickname for the student body was “corn-feds”; for me, it was “Stack o’ Dollars.” I called him “Money” to the day he died.

That school assigned demerits to students for various infractions. Compile four of them and you came in to work for three hours on the weekend. I think in my crazed, newly pubescent 8^th grade year I set a record: 36 consecutive Saturdays. Even I didn’t understand my behavior: I’d fly into rages at friend, foe, and teacher alike, fits whose origins, once they subsided, I could barely remember, if at all. I’d cry like an infant at some longed-for girl’s rebuff, real or imagined; I’d take any side of an argument that you were not taking, and would proceed from sham disagreements to actual fights, which, again, seemed righteous when they started and, when they ended, win or lose, were downright unaccountable.

And yet I scarcely dreaded detention when Money was on duty. Among his other copious obligations at the school, he was often the detention monitor on Saturday morning. Almost as often, he was monitor of one student only– me.

In the fall I recall here, we’d been raking leaves for a couple of hours. Money decided it was time to burn them up, as was common in those innocent days. He struck the match, then said, “Hey, Stack o’ Dollars. You gotta hear somethin’.”

Though enormously more even-tempered and, when needful, prudent, than I, Money was in some ways every bit as much a rascal. Like me, he considered many of the rules applied to the corn-feds to be silly; his supervision of me on the weekends, then, was hardly Draconian.

The smoke from the bonfire veiled us from any imaginable passerby, and, thus hidden, Money pulled out his pack of Pall Malls, lit two at once in his mouth, and passed one of them to me. I feigned—unconvincingly, doubtless—familiarity with the bad habit. A tick later, he dropped the needle on Work Time, with Sonny Rollins, Ray Bryant, George Morrow, and Max Roach.

Wow.

There are a number of ways, looking back, in which Lovell, a young man then, was more important to my view of the world than virtually any classroom teacher. His kindness to me, his wit, his drive, his capacities as a raconteur—I suspect that my lifelong commitment at once to language and to the civil rights cause, for example, may have started with him, but more germane is the fact that he made me into a jazz enthusiast from that very instant into this, my 81^st year.

I’ve lived 58 of those years in the upper New England woods, so I don’t hear live performance much; but in the sixties, I traveled to New York clubs as frequently as I possibly could. My heroes were chiefly the hard bop greats: Silver, Mingus, Blakey, Cannonball, Davis, Coltrane, Morgan, and above all Monk. I was blessed to see and to hear them all, along with many another gifted artists; I really owe all that to Money of sacred memory.

I rarely engage in writing without a jazz album playing. Obviously, I don’t give the music the sort of attention I do when I’m engaged in nothing but listening, and yet—I’ll never explain this rightly—there is simply something enabling in the music’s presence when I am composing, especially, a poem. Like this one, “Misterioso,” which originally appeared in the now defunct, excellent journal Margie:

Misterioso

John Ore stood up his bass and Frankie Dunlop laid his sticks on the snare.

They walked offstage but Monk stayed on hunch-shouldered and with one finger

hit a note and stared at his keyboard a long long time, then another

and stared and another and stared, not rising to whirl as he often would do

when he played this club or any other. He didn’t smile as usual,

benign, whenever he danced like that. He wore his African beanie—

I mean no disrespect, Lord knows, just don’t know what you’d rightly call it—

his face beneath it both blank and rapt. I was rapt myself as I’d been

for the whole first set and in fact for years even then, but for other reasons.

I believed he spoke right at me somehow, knowing my inmost sorrows,

my expectations. A lot of people thought that way, of course.

I was looking for eloquent mystery in those odd plinkings, which was no doubt there,

though no doubt in a way I couldn’t fathom. With the noise of chatter and movement,

I couldn’t have heard my heart lubdub but I did. The last set ended,

he sat the same after, playing lone notes as if he were contemplating

where each had come from. They came from right there in front of him. Who knew

that there lay in front of him too those interludes of speechlessness,

his piano hushed, till he died like anyone else? I don’t want to riff

on what I dreamed Monk meant to my life, so small and young, consisting

only of things that any man that age is bound to go through.

I don’t want a poem all full of lyric cliché, like the smoke-softened light

that glanced off bottles behind the bar. I don’t want to dwell on the sad

and quizzical looks of his sidemen as they left him. It was ’63,

but I won’t go into racial matters or history or music theory

or whatever else might make something grander than they truly are of my thoughts.

There was Monk’s blue funk, there was sound then quiet, and I could cry out loud.

As the poem implies, the determinative moment as I sat on the grass with Money, my senses somehow more alive than they’d ever been, was not the only inflective one I associate with what Roland Kirk called Black Classical Music. When I reflect, for example, on the last of our five children’s departure for college seventeen years back, I hear the Branford Marsalis quintet playing “The Blossom of Parting,” as I asked them to do that afternoon in my writing cabin.

I pushed and re-pushed the repeat command on my stereo, listening to Bill Frisell’s “Smile on You,” from his debut album In Line, on the day I decided it was high time to ask Robin, my wife of 44 years if she’d marry me.

I could go on, but how, as I have so often been asked, has jazz influenced my practice as, primarily, a poet? Here in many ways I am more than a bit agnostic, wishing, no doubt vainly, to resist any facile response. The influence is surely beyond mere words: I surmise that it’s one of many crucial aspects of my life that I’ve tried in my poetry to find words for. I may even have chosen this verbal art because in the end I couldn’t be an improvisatory musician. Nowadays, as in that crucial moment with Money, I somehow feel the enlivening of all my senses by way of jazz—that, and something(s) else I’ll never depict.

From sustained attention, I’ve learned how the true masters, like commanding poets, must be intimately conscious of prior literature, which they can either revere or challenge. Or both. They nurture affection for form even as they have the savvy and alertness to divagate from it, or as in “free jazz,” which I have never truly appreciated, to abandon it altogether– or, more accurately, to redefine it.

I tend toward formalism in my poetry, though rarely do I use received forms, and often enough—like Max Roach?—I use unusual meters. That is, the formal properties of my work (like the heptameter in the poem above) are often enough only semi-obvious. I like that. I savor the sensation of language pushing against the constraints of form. As Frost wryly noted, we often refer to musical strains. Even a self-invented form provides a rubric within which to riff and fill, and such maneuvering ranks very high among my satisfactions in writing poetry, surely a good deal higher, than any syllogistic attempt at “meaning.”

I think Thelonious would understand. Money too–RIP.