At times last night I was surprised to find myself in the middle of a large university auditorium, because the music felt much more intimate—like it came from the floor of a Midwest ball room. Sonny Rollins’ alto sax and Bobby Broom’s hollow body guitar complimented the other with a rich, velvety timbre. Clifton Anderson’s trombone textured the sound with more mid-range color. Victor See Yuen and Kobie Watkins kept beat and Bob Cranshaw handled bass. Rollins’ command of the stage was marvelous as he transported attention to new places. The spirit of the sound coming from his instrument grew through the evening. Nearly 80, Rollins is a master of form and limit. What I tried to reconcile during the show was how within set boundaries so many possibilities present themselves. That tension between melody and disintegration, between pulse and erasure, was the most instructive thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Rollins possesses the same spiritual flexibility as someone like Luis Bunuel: the range of emotions shift, collapse, return. The thought or knowledge of the spatial environment repeats and renews other orders of possibility.
In many ways (in most) the New American poetry can only really be understood in relation to bebop. Dorn and Creeley particularly in the 1950s worked within similar notions of spatial and temporal development: established limits were resisted, transformed, restated. Timbre registers as vowel (Dorn: “I was thinking in that moment / Newman Illinois / the Saturday night dance”). The warm, Midwest range of Coleman Hawkins swings behind these New American Rhythms.
I'm reminded too of David Meltzer and the sense of the music in his lines. What comes to a poem, like what comes through a sax, is all that one remains open to: the terms of experience arrive and vanish, only to resurface, changed--invoked by the presence of new forms. Textuality eventually gets fleshed out unless some pure machine sequence erases the body completely. Rollins, Meltzer, and others of their generation pushed the limits of knowledge to include what they could not possibly know until the conditions of the form required it. It comes as method of complete surrender in a moment after hours and hours of quickenings and turnings of thought through the compost. Meltzer says it so well:
Organizing these myths these trends these
traditions these rituals
this history this pattern
this secret this hope
Organizing these stars into one bright dot of hot
white light
As simple as that
2 comments:
Ah David! Thank you for reminding me of these poems. And how David has taught me how Poetry is a Two-Way Mirror, and Life is Synchronicity! And this is what happens in the poetry/music/art that moves us. We are several places at once, drifting & anchored, new born & as old as wisdom itself. David's poetry explodes the heart as song and empties all the reverberated left over things throughout the body-mind, perches the knowledge tree into the identity, until we are so self-consciously One, we aren't reading, thinking, hearing or feeling anymore. But everything we know, we know because the body tells us so.
Hope everyone knows about David & Michael Rothenberg's current Rockpile project! Look it up & check them out!
marina
Thanks Dale and David. One hot bright dot of
Artificial Lightmight even do the trick.
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