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Hot rhythms
Sean Singer’s jazz poetry and more
BY WILLIAM CORBETT

Discography
By Sean Singer. Forward by W.S. Merwin. Yale University Press, 82 pages, $25 (cloth), $12.95 (paper).


Sean Singer’s Yale Series of Younger Poets winner Discography is good enough so that it need not be hedged round with " promise " or any of the other ahem words that often greet first books. Singer has arrived on his way to somewhere, and the future we imagine for him is based in the pleasure he gives in Discography. Yale Younger Series judge W.S. Merwin has chosen wisely.

Discography opens with " The Old Record, " a knockout poem arranged like constellations over two pages to embody the art of improvisation at the heart of jazz and to introduce a book of poems " rolled out of the hot machine " of Singer’s imagination. The first part of Discography gives us public poems that concentrate on jazz subjects. These poems are both about jazz and seek to deploy word-structures that will approximate jazz improvisation. The former is easy; the latter is difficult because the poems are not based on standard tunes.

But the poet who gives himself this assignment does not improvise out of thin air. He can take off, as Singer does, from jazz gods like Coltrane, Ellington, Armstrong, and Billie Holiday, gods whose music is familiar enough that the reader can hear what Singer is working to embellish and extend. To my ear he is successful in his Coltrane, Armstrong, Holiday, and bluesman Robert Johnson poems and less so in the Ellington, in which the music gets obscured by wordplay.

Jazz as inspiration is alive in part two of Discography, but here the poems open out into a wider world that includes the Congolese pygmy Ota Benga and draw in to love and sadness where " such sweetness, overpowers dark places. " Overall, these poems seem private and involved with " [t]wo absolutely slow horses in a field/just as the night sky moves away from earth. " But the poems in part two are not obscure; nor do they sustain a single note. What is most powerful about Discography is Singer’s ability to go from smooth to rough, from whisper to whoop:

Sometimes jazz is numb lust, meshing,

I can smell it, O rolling specters.

I’ll cast my crown and scepter

Into the Charles River, into the pulse,

Apples floating. Thistles, umbrellas, bright

Stones. Without them, I no longer jingle

With broken speech. I immensely roar.

( " Poem " )

You can hear the joyous playing in this, the tight cutting loose that brings to this ear Armstrong’s great late-1920s recordings. But jazz is an analogy, a parallel universe, for Merwin is surely right that in Singer’s poems, " it is ultimately the quality of invention in his language that is the base. " This oft-used and thus oft-abused formulation is true in Singer’s case.

At the end of his acknowledgements, Singer thanks his teachers Yusef Komunyakaa, Carol Frost, Carl Phillips, and this poetry workshop and that writers’ conference. These days this is how and where our poets build their chops. As an apprenticeship, the creative-writing class has been much savaged and cursed for the pyramid scheme of which it is surely the building block. (I mean, won’t we one day run out of students to feed our creative-writing programs?) But it is also true that real poetry gets written for such classes. As Ezra Pound liked to remind us, it doesn’t matter who writes poems, it matters that they get written.

Singer’s biographical note says that he teaches in Waltham. I have not noticed his giving readings hereabouts, but when I see him advertised, I plan to be in the audience. I am eager to hear how he blows the various tunes in his fine book. Singer is certain to have a sound all his own.

Issue Date: February 13 - 20, 2003
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