THE JAZZ-POETRY FUSION: MY PERSONAL TAKE

Since I considered myself a fiction writer until my mid-30s, I never thought I'd perform jazz poetry. The first time I heard the idiom in the mid-1960s, it sounded like two clashing acts performing simultaneously. The poetry and the music needed to fit together to be effective.

In too much of the jazz poetry I've heard, a booming voice recites an impassioned tirade of social-issue cliches that lack a connection to the tempo or texture of the music. Even brilliant poets who read powerfully when performing solo can sound maddeningly off-base when their declamations lose track of the music's pace and pulse. Musicians, in turn, can diminish a powerful recitation by arranging for a subdued instrument, such as a bass, to solo at the time the poet is reciting the poem's climactic segment and needs more powerful support to heighten its excitement.

Some of the most highly-regarded jazz poets I knos of perform in the manner just described, and their audiences seem to love it. For some people, it's a matter of taste. For me, however, it violates a personal aesthetic I developed and formed strong opinons about during the years when I performed jazz poetry on a regular basis, 1984-1994. To me, the performances I've described don't enhance the idiom; they perpetuate the inability of poets and musicians to recognize and explore the close relationship between jazz and the American vernacular.

Jack Kerouac had a gut-deep grasp of the relationship. The syncopations of bebop and poetry found parallel accents in his recitations. The first time I heard him read with music, the idioms fit. His approach influenced my thinking when I began my own attempt to fuse the idioms .

My approach differs from many other poets because playing a musical instrument has given me a deeper understanding of music than many poets bring to the fusion. In creating my own bassline for my first attempt, my training helped me find the most appropriate musical context for the poem. Once I laid down the bassline, I recited the poem in tempo, using space in my recitation the way an instrumentalist would in a solo.

When I recite, solo or with music, I try recite more slowly than my normal speech pattern, to give the audience time to grasp them. The music fills the spaces between phrases. When I completed “A Slick Set of Wheels, the bassline and recitation fit together far better than I thought.

The reception the poem received led me to create others. Soon I was selling home-produced cassettes, whose pieces I later recorded on The Sex Queen of the Berlin Turnpike, in 1987. I was fortunate enough to know sensitive musicians who needed minimal direction or none at all, such as Thomas Chapin, Brian Johnson, Joe Fonda, Steve Davis, Richard McGhee III and Mario Pavone, to name just a few.

When I scheduled a party for the record's release, all my accompanists on the recoridng had gigs scheduled in Manhattan. Since I was the only bassist available that I could afford, I spent two months teaching myself how to play and recite at the same time. The multi-tasking made me a less effective reader, but still more than adequate, and playing bass in the band helped me control the flow of the music. The record party led me to form my own poetry band and to perform as a single or duo wherever I could find a gig.

I told my band members: play anything you like in any key, so long as it relates to the poem, in effect challenging them to play with freedom, but at the edge of their comfort zones. If, for example, a poem contained a phrase about a bouncing ball, I expected the musicians to find phrases that recreated the ball's bounce musically, not a pat musical phrase.

Over the past decade, my poetry has become more abstract. “Talking monkey grinds to curvature polish” defies literal representation, although a musician could mimic or repeat sounds that might relate to an aspect of the phrase, e.g. a pattern of growls for “grinds” or a smooth glissando for “curvature polish.” The difficulty of finding musical counterparts to abstract phrases allows much more room for improvising. But the same principles apply; the recitation still has to fit within the band's tempo or pulse, however free it may become at any moment.

Once I started my poetry band, I practiced my recitation and basslines every night so that I'd be prepared to work with any unexpected musical situation that might develop during a performance.

This thumbnail sketch of my aesthetic and my working methods may appeal to some jazz poets or it might not. I'm offering an opinion, not a treatise.

Personally, I recommend that poets who want to work with musicians learn something about music and vice-versa. The poet Ottone M. Riccio put a fresh spin on Ezra Pound's famous dictum when he asserted, “Poetry is music made with language.” To make an effective fusion, poets and musicians need to know something about the idioms they're trying to fuse. A poet doesn't need to be a musician to work effectively in the idiom, but he needs to understand basic rhythm and pay attention to phrasing the lines of the poem. The musicians should recognize that a poet can't recite comfortably at certain tempos and count off tempi that don't twist the poet's tongue in mid-performance. It should also build its tunes so that the musicians are playing at peak intensity during the poem's climatic moments, instead of winding down. Knowing the poem will help the musicians create the appropriate dynamics. Grasping the rudiments of the other's idiom helps both execute the fusion more effectively.

I suggest that poets recite their work to recordings or a metronome to sharpen their sense of time and tempo, and, with increased practice, syncopation. The English language has a number of built-in syncopations. The word “idiom, for example, has a built-in triplet rhythm, i.e., three beats superimposed over two notes played in the same tempo. If repeated several times, it can sound like a musical phrase.

In certain situations, poets walk onstage and recite a piece cold---at a jam session, for example. The band has never heard the poem and the poet has never worked with the musicians. Trying to make specific poetic and musical phrases fit will be very difficult to accomplish under the circumstances. But reciting a poem with a sense of musical rhythm over a tempo that allows comfortable recitation will bring the poem and music closer to synthesis.

Poets who I believe fuse the idioms effectively include Barry Wallenstein, David Meltzer, Kirpal Gordon, Steve Dalachinsky, Jim Cohn and Jack Foley I recommend that you listen to their work wherever you can find it. Some have released records, others have performed on YouTube or other online venues. They don't necessarily employ my approach, but they know how to make their verbal music fit with the band.

That's my take. Feel free to disagree.

NGC-4594 (the sounds we missed in the sixties)

In college, several friends and acquaintances formed NGC-4594, an early psychedelic rock band whose 45 RPM single “Going Home” made Billboard's Top 100 and who played opposite the Doors, the Mothers of Invention and other celebrated rock bands during their short-lived career. Personal and artistic problems broke up the band in the late sixties, before they could release the fourteen songs they had composed for an album. Fortunately, Steve Starger, the band's organist and, later, the keyboardist in my poetry band, had a copy and made a cassette for me twenty years ago. The tunes, joyful, lively and unabashedly psychedelic, sounded a few steps ahead of other bands that became better known in their time. I'd always thought NGC-4594 a deserved better fate.

Over the past fifteen years I've occasionally surfed the net to see how much attention, if any, other people were paying to NGC-4594. In used vinyl circles the band had gained a reputation as a precursor to many well-known psychedelic bands. One correspondent said NGC-4594 was playing Ultimate Spinach before Ultimate Spinach arrived on the scene.

Several days ago, on a “whatever happened to” surf, I discovered that a British label has released NGC-4594's 1960s recordings under the title Skipping Through the Night. If the release didn't promise the former band members the heady stardom and nonstop kicks of sixties rock stars, it gave recognition four-decades delayed to a half-dozen talented musicians who had moved on, some in the music business and some in other fields, while at least one had died.

It also gave the diehard fans of psychedelic rock a document that would broaden their knowledge of the music's development. NGC-4594 differed from other rock bands of the period because of the jazz influence several members brought to it. Since many of the members composed music, poetry or fiction, their lyrics were stronger than what I heard in many other bands of the sixties. Although the band lacked a celebrity lead singer, the vocals shared by Dan Shanok, Dave Bliss and Chaz Mirsky blended well, with each of the vocalists singing to their strengths. The combination of captivating vocals and sophisticated instrumental backing enticed more than one listener.

With the release of Skipping Through the Night, online commentary on NGC-4594 has increased. I've yet to read a negative comment. Most listeners appreciate it as a “precursor” or an “underground” band ahead of its time.

I've listened to Skipping Through the Night several times since I downloaded it to my iPod a few days ago. Forty-four years after its creation, the music still holds up. Although I have my personal favorites, this is one of the few occasions when I can say that I like all fourteen tunes almost equally. I recommend this recording to anyone who likes good music and especially to anyone who wants a greater sense what the sixties could have been.

I've lived long enough now to “witness history,” and give a little more respect to the reality of my experience. Although I've been out of touch with most of the members of NGC-4594 for almost as long as the band has been apart, I've watched several of its members make the best of their lives, personally and artistically, with no expectation of seeing their best work released. If the band's remaining members can't receive the glory they might have experienced in the sixties, they have the satisfaction, maybe even a tear of joy, of knowing that what we call history finally has corrected itself in their favor, and that every now and then over the course of a life, justice finally does come your way.

I recommend this record very highly.

For further information, check out:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=110356325655127

DISCOVERING MY IDEA OF A VACATION

Picking up from where I left off at the last entry, STYLING SANPAKU has just received its first review, from Michael Parker in the Unlikely 2.0 blog:

http://www.unlikelystories.org/blog/index.shtml

Parker approaches my work a little differently from other reviewers, digging deep into the poems with more referential qualities and experiencing “fun” while trying to interpret them. For most of my writing life, I've believed that literature could be fun, that play can be an enjoyable way of moving in a direction with serious implications. Perhaps I read Catch-22 before I was too old to become somber. I'd like to thank Parker for his review. I'd also like to thank him for introducing me to Michael Harold's Red Moon, a cross-genre work that fuses binary theory, poetry and fiction with undeniable brilliance and originality. My discussion with Parker about Harold's work led me, in turn, to contact painter Harvey Bialy, a highly-regarded painter who drummed in a memorable free form jam session I played bass in forty years ago in Connecticut, at a time when free jazz players were hard to find in the area. While introducing me to a writer whose work seems geared to future generations, Parker also put me in touch with my distant past.

Sometimes the world is even smaller than we think.

In my attempt to enlarge my audience, I've just published a print edition of * on Lulu.com, for those who would like a hard copy:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/%2a/14459449?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/1

Those who want to browse or just have a free read can find the online edition of * at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34761363/

Several months ago, Chalk Editions published THREE LONGPOEMS, which I wrote during my "transitional period" in 1999-2000. FREE FALL originally appeared as a Potes & Poets Press chapbook. Note that I wrote GROUND ZERO at least a year before the World Trade Center site acquired the name after the 9/11 attack. In this poem, Ground Zero refers to the nuclear testing grounds in the southwestern United Stales and to trumpeter Bill Dixon's approach to free improvisation. You can read them at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/47458357/Vernon-Frazer-THREE-LONGPOEMS

Ganick has also published several batches of my strictly textual poetry in his experiential-experimental-literature blogzine:

http://ex-ex-lit.blogspot.com

Odds Against Today, my most recent collection of textual poetry, is now available through Argotist Ebooks:

http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/odds-against-today/10302902

Its cover ranks as one of my personal favorites among the covers of my books. The blurb seems a fair description of the content:

“In Odds Against Today Vernon Frazer's linguistic techniques force language beyond semantic limitations to produce poems that become events rather than meanings, although his lexical admixtures do not necessarily preclude perceiving or experiencing meaning.”

My textual poems have appeared in a number of other magazines as well:

RED CEILINGS has published “Switch and Bait:

http://redceilings.blogspot.com/2011/02/switch-and-bait-vernon-frazer.html

and “Over Time and Over:”

http://redceilings.blogspot.com/2011/02/over-time-and-over-vernon-frazer.html

Although my experience with RED CEILINGS has been limited, I find that I'm keeping good company with Felino A. Soriano's work published as a Red Ceiling Chapbook.

BLUE AND YELLOW DOG has published my texto-visual poems, “Stasis Quo” and “Anchor What” at:

http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com/winter-issue-3-2010.html

OTOLITHS has also published my poem, "Parchment Grudge:"

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2011/01/vernon-frazer.html

My visual poetry represented me, after a fashion, during National Poetry Month, when P 667 Series C of PANELS FROM IMPROVISATIONS became part of the Angel House NationalPoetryMonth.ca at:

http://nationalpoetrymonth.ca/index.php?id=14.

The poem appeared April 14. But a look at the calendar will reveal a new page of visual poetry every day from such artists as Camille Martin, Matthew Stolte, Reed Altemus, Satu Kaikkonen, mIEKAL aND, andrew topel, Bob Grumman, Joel Lipman, Gary Barwin, John M. Bennett, Geof Huth, and Sheila E. Murphy, among others. Amanda Earl deserves high praise for assembling this impressive and innovative commemoration of National Poetry Month.

In addition, Jim Leftwich's TEXTIMAGE POEM has published a batch of my visual poetry:

Aficionado Transfers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/5331135871/

Double Move: http://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/5331135595/

Pentatonic Scaling: http://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/5331135813/

Since I consider Leftwich one of our most diverse and innovative writers, I'm always honored when my work appears in one of his publications.

When I started this update, I wanted to explain that I'd been slow to post because I've been taking a vacation from writing and publishing in recent months, trying to rest after getting a significant portion of my backlog of work published and to recharge my verbal batteries. If this is my idea of a vacation, the thought of seeing myself at work might exhaust me.

Back to the mirror.

SURFACING TO ANNOUNCE . . .

Several days after my October post, STYLING SANPAKU, a collection of my texto-visual poetry, came out under my imprint. Another publisher held onto it for two years, after which I decided to self-publish it, using Jonathan Penton's Make It New Media as the POD printer. It hasn't been reviewed as yet and I'm looking for prospective reviewers. If you're intersted, plesae contact me at vfrazer@bellsouth.net. Prospective readers can purchase a copy at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%22styling+sanpaku%22&x=20&y=15

Sanpaku is a Japanese term that describes a condition in which the whites appear on three sides of a person's eyes. A Wikipedia entry describes the myths surrounding it:

“When the bottom part of the white part of the eye known as the sclera is visible it is referred to as 'Yin Sanpaku' by the Chinese. According to the myth, it represents physical imbalance in the body, and is claimed to be present in alcoholics, drug addicts and people who over consume sugar or grain. Conversely when the upper sclera is visible this is called 'Yang Sanpaku'. This is said to be an indication of mental imbalance in people such as psychotics, murderers and anyone rageful. Stress and fatigue may also be a cause.”

Since the reader may consider the perceived meaning of any of the collection's poems as being within the range of Sanpaku behavior, my wife, Elaine Kass, painter Ed Rubin and I gave the book the above cover, which should address the Yin and the Yang of it.

Chalk Editions has published an ebook of ANY MOMENT, one of the manuscripts that's helped to keep my file cabinet full the past few years. Until recently, the publishers experienced difficulties while posting it to their site, so I've delayed my publication announcement. I'm not sure, but I think the notion of Chalk Editions officially announcing of its publication has gotten lost in the electronic shuffle, so I'm announcing it and providing the link:

http://chalkeditions.blogspot.com/2010/11/vernon-frazer-any-moment.html

Chalk Editions is one of the major ebook publishers now giving exposure to cutting edge writers and I'm very pleased to be on board. I've often credited Peter Ganick, one of Chalk's editors, as an importantliterary influence. As editor of Potes and Poets Press in the late 1990s, he exposed me to Language and Visual Poetry, which opened the floodgate of ideas I'd stored in my head since studying bass with Bertram Turetzky and reading John Cage in the mid-1960s. Thirty-five or forty years is a long gestation period, but I'm pleased with the results that have finally emerged over the past ten or eleven years. Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, the co-editor, has given my work strong support over the years, as well. He deserves credit for the cover art, as well as for guding the work into print through uncooperative software.

ANY MOMENT was an attempt to open my use of poetic form so that its structural fluidity would allow readers to determine their own sequence for reading the work moment by chosen moment, as it were. While preparing it for Chalk Editions, I discovered I had already done a number of things with text and graphics that I was telling myself I should try in the future. Once again, cliches about forest and trees apply. I didn't realize I was a “visual poet” until Michael Rothenberg told me two months after the 2005 Visual Poetry exhibit curated by Carlos Luis in Miami in 2005, where many of my colleagues had work on display. So, now I'm open to trying things I haven't tried---if I can say for certain I've haven't already tried them.

I want to give special thanks to Matina Stamatakis for her beautiful presentation of “Anchor What” in her Venereal Kittens blogzine. Presenting it as a photographic negative was a touch of genius:

http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2010/04/vernon-frazer_11.html

To me, the page seems more vivid than the white background I used when composing it. Stamatakis also published several of my other poems there:

http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2010/04/vernon-frazer.html

and the magazine features a plethora of other accomplished poets, some whose names are new to me. Stamatakis herself is a poet worth paying serious attention to. If you haven't visited Venereal Kittens at

http://www.venerealkittens.blogspot.com/

Check it out. It's a treat.

One of my nicer critical surprises came via Jefferson Hansen's blog:

http://experimentalfictionpoetry.blogspot.com/

In a commentary on the work of Debra DiBlasi, Miekal And and me in the latest Moriapoety, Hansen say this about the work that appears in the issue (click on link):

3) Vernon Frazer

Writing about nonrepresentational language is also difficult. How do we contextualize a line such as “salmon feet" in "The Future Brings"? Obviously, we can't, if we try to look at it from a representational point of view. Instead, we have sound and rhythm.

How do we say this piece, and these pieces, work, as I think they do? How are they different from a child randomly putting magnetic poetry words on a refrigerator? What skill does it take?

It has tremendous energy, coming I think from all the active verbs, including some interesting ones such as "mottle." The energy itself is excessive, pushing the language and spilling beyond semantic limits and into alternative spaces. It's exciting. Finally, the poem is an event, not a meaning. It's about this excessive excitement, together with the rhythm and sounds riffing throughout.

This is the answer to why it's better than magnetic poetry: there's a controlled excessiveness, that breaks the taboo of "making sense," but does so in a musical way that keeps the poem from spinning apart.

And I don't think there is any more to say.

This explains my own work to me in what I consider a very perceptive way. A writer deeply rooted in free jazz, Hansen recognizes the role free jazz took in shaping my work. In 1966 I became deeply interested in listening to and playing “energy music,” so explaining my work as a kind of “energy poetry” sounds and feels pretty right to me.

I'd like to thank Jeff, with whom I've had infrequent contact at best, and say a few words about his own fine work. As a poet, Jefferson Hansen is one of the few practitioners who can capture the rhythms of jazz effectively in his own poetry, as he did in his excellent Lyrical Eddies, a series of poems inspired by the music of Marilyn Crispell. As a fiction writer, Hansen's And Beefheart Saved Craig incorporates elements of John Dos Passos and Raymond Federman as well as his own techniques of juxtaposition to create a fiction with visual and documentary overtones about the life of a dysfunctional family and one son's efforts to survive it. I recommend both books highly. Hansen is a fine writer whose work just came to my attention in the past year. It's been a very welcome discovery.

I would also like to thank Michael Jacobson, editor of the New Post-literate” a Gallery of Asemic Writing for publishing “Bordered Question.”

http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com/2010/10/bordered-question-from-vernon-frazer.html

Jonathan Penton and the staff of Unlikely 2.0 deserve high praise for their anthology, Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind, a collection of the quality fiction, poetry, visual poetry, photography, essays, music and videos that have appeared in Penton's magazine over the years. Penton and his staff, in particular reviewer Gabriel Ricard, have given my work strong support. The anthology also keeps alive my 1988 jazz poetry recording “Sex Queen of the Berlin Turnpike (,” which also features the late and legendary saxophonist-flutist Thomas Chapin, bassists Mario Pavone and Joe Fonda, and percussionist Brian Johnson.

(http://www.vernonfrazer.net/music/TheSexQueenoftheBerlinTurnpike.mp3)

Unlikely Stories of the Third Kind also features work by Belinda Subraman, Martha Deed, Steve Dalachinksy, Jim Andrews and Jim Leftwich among the many writers worth your time and attention. The following link will bring you to a sample of the anthology's offerings:

http://www.unlikelystories.org/u3.shtml

Enjoy!

NEW WORK, EBOOKS AND FELINO SORIANO

The appearance of online publishers struck me rather suddenly. Probably I was too busy reshaping my schnozz on the grindstone to look up and see them looming over me. Once I looked up, though, I saw that a number of presses were publishing ebooks by many poets whose work I enjoy and respect tremendously, but never find in bookstores, new or used. As fond as I am of the book, and the feel of bound paper in my hands or on my lap, I realized I had to update my toy collection so that I could read the books published online. Now that I've invested in an iPad, I can read writers I've enjoyed in the past and discover new writers whose work brings me fresh discoveries. I've also learned that electronic publishing is a useful publishing vehicle for my own work. Andrew Topel's Avantacular Press has published two books for me, and I took advantage of Scribd's open publishing policy to post a copy of IMPROVISATIONS

http://www.scribd.com/doc/38013484/IMPROVISATIONS-by-Vernon-Frazer

so that more people could read it.

One of the presses that made a strong impression on me was Jeffrey Side's Argotist Ebooks, a publishing arm of Side's excellent literary magazine The Argotist Online. It has an impressive and diverse roster of contemporary poets. A few days ago, Side made me part of his roster. He published Margin L, a collection of poems in which I write from the left margin instead of a variety of positions and angles on the page. The books's blurb reads:

“The roots of Vernon Frazer's textual poetry lie as much in the free jazz of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and their successors as they do in language-centered poetry, Surrealism, Dada and abstract expressionism. In Margin L, Frazer's words and concepts play over the page until they create a sense that something has happened during each poem’s movement. The poems, however, leave their interpretation of what precisely has happened up to the reader.”

You can read Margin L at: http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/margin-l/13042003

While reading Argotist's Ebooks, I discovered the work of Felino Soriano, a poet whose ekphrastic poetry captures the mood of the jazz tune and the style of the musicians playing it with perfect poetic pitch.He writes with an ear finely tuned to the jazz idiom, employing space on the page the way Miles Davis employed it in his solos or Keith Jarrett in building complex lines and tone clusters. Soriano captures the music with an accuracy that many poets aspire to but don't achieve. I recommend his Portions of Conversational Assemblies very highly. Here's the link

http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/portions-of-conversational-assemblies/12105086

After reading Sorianos' work, I discovered he had previously published my work in his ezine

Counterexample Poetics

http://www.counterexamplepoetics.com/2009/04/information-contents_23.html

When I submitted new work, he asked me for additional material so that he could present me as a featured writer. Naturally, I'm very pleased to find someone who regards my work highly enough to feature it. You can read it at:

http://www.counterexamplepoetics.com/2010/10/vernon-frazer-featured-artist.html

I'm not ready to discuss the question of ebooks in depth, although their presence has made me start to reassess my earlier comments on self-publishing. But when I notice that exponentially more readers are looking at—if not actually reading—my work, I have to consider electronic publishing a positive event, considering the quality of the work Publisher's Row produces in its endless quest for a fast buck.

RECOMMENDED READING

To attempt to catch up on an overload of old business and learn how to handle some new business, I've had to refrain from reviewing a number of writers whose work I admire. Although enough time has passed to prevent me from bringing more detail than fuzz to the discussion, I'd like to comment on the work I couldn't review. It's worthy not only of mention but of critical attention, as well. The writers might not be household words, but when the next generation of literary households appears they should be part of the updated decor. My comments appear in order of occurrence, not importance; the works are all highly recommended reading.

Several years ago, I accepted Ghost &Ganga, Kirpal Gordon's trio of intersecting novellas, for publication in Big Bridge Magazine's fiction section. Ganga was one of the most captivating characters I've ever seen portrayed in print and each of the book's pieces revealed a new, unexpected aspect of her character. During a long delay in Big Bridge Magazine's production, Gordon found a publisher. I had to accept, with some regret as an editor, but also considerable excitement for the author, that Ganga and her magical fusion of song, spirituality, beauty and sensuality would breathe first life as a publication of Leaping Dog Press, an important publisher of innovative fiction. Ganga, an Indian-born vocalist, teams up with Ghost, her pianist, in this magical realistic celebration of the jazz mystique, and easily recreates the styles of Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and almost every other renowned vocalist in jazz history. Ghost, a gritty jazz mentor, knows her voice possesses a power with origins in deeper sources, philosophical and spiritual, and continually urges her to harness the power throughout their journey through the jazz night, creating a tension between master and diva that moves the work forward to resolution on a ringing tonic note.

Gordon knows his subject first-hand from living the jazz life with his partner, Claire Daly, a baritone saxophonist who deserves Down Beat's Talent Deserving Wider Recognition Award for her full tone and fresh phrasing. Gordon, a gifted poet/spoken word artist, frequently recites with Daly's ensembles. He's the only jazz poet I know who can recite a free verse poem so that the bridge of the tune has relevance to his recitation. Neither Kenneth Rexroth nor Kenneth Patchen could do it successfully.

Several of Gordon's earlier books, such as the phantasmagorical Jazz Tales from the Ghost Realms, set the tone for his haunting tale of Ganga's journey toward the ultimate promise of the jazz night. Gordon takes his verbal music all the way out in Ghost &Ganga, a superb orchestration of style and substance. For me, the book was a joyful read, a brilliant combination of sensuality, sensitivity and advanced spirituality, all coming together under the haunting latenight shadows of the jazz life.

I suggest that you read Gabriel Ricard's inspired review of Ghost &Ganga and his interview with Gordon in the latest Unlikely Stories at http://www.unlikelystories.org/10/ricard0510.shtml. If my own words don't inspire you to read Ghost &Ganga, Gabriel Ricard's will.

Turning to poetry, Ric Carfagna's work has excited me ever since I first read it a decade ago, when a mutual friend in Worcester introduced Carfagna to my work and vice-versa. Carfagna's sense of linguistic and visual adventure combined with his sure-footed explorations into metaphysics (from the Philosophy Department not the New Age bookstore) not only impressed me, but pushed me to take my own work a little further. His tasteful fusion of text and graphics challenged my sense of how to lay out the page.

In his extended work, NOTES ON NON-EXISTENCE, Carfagna delves beyond the binary paradigm of existence and non-existence as opposites to contemplate non-existence as pure void. From the work's early chapbooks, Carfagna has embraced the paradoxical nature of Being and non-Being with an alchemist's attempt to catch lead at the precise moment it transforms itself into gold. FRACTUS CORPUS, possibly the final volume of this extended work, is a substantive longpoem in itself. It's a 383-page powerhouse of poetic exploration, the verbal alchemist at work with concepts that his grasp paradoxically captures as the same instant they elude him. As a work of metaphysical poetry, FRACTUS CORPUS explores not only Carfagna's continuing philosophical concerns, but the integration of text and graphics, with stanzas appearing on the page from different angles to comment on the main thread or supplant an alternate possibility. Challenging the manner in which the reader experiences the page underscores Carfagna's postulations on the nature of existence, its opposite and its absence. His asymmetrical graphics, tastefully rendered, sometimes resemble musical clefs that establish different tonal ranges for reading each page. As I read the work, my hands felt its power. FRACTUS CORPUS is a longpoem that commands your attention---not to mention serious critical consideration.

If FRACTUS CORPUS isn't the conclusion of NOTES ON NON-EXISTENCE, Carfagna has nevertheless turned his linguistic musicality to a new format in Symphony No 1, an ebook published by Chalk Editions (http://www.scribd.com/doc/32170981/Ric-Carfagna-Symphony-No-1.) Since my own projects and personal matters prevented me me from giving the work my full attention, I intend to reread it in the near future. But I maintained enough focus on the work to see that Carfagna has

employed a degree of restraint and returned to more orthodox techniques, using them in unorthodox ways.

Carfagna's sensibilities extend beyond the traditional symphony form, creating a work more typical of a contemporary composer. He limits the range of his literary motifs, then rearranges them to express a variety of perspectives. For the first time in my years of reading his work, he employs repetition, which gives an unexpected power and an authoritative tone to his language-centered phrases. He has, for this work, at least, eliminated the visual element, concentrating instead of the incremental climactic power of his textual materials. His departure from past practice may lead to a new stage in his creative evolution.

Argotist Ebooks has recently released his Symphony No. 2 as as ebook (http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/symphony-no-2/12297253). The publisher describes the work as follows:

“Symphony No. 2 by Ric Carfagna (and a follow-up to his Symphony No. 1) is a work not to be construed as a symphony in a strictly classical sense, as is the case with the symphonic forms of works by Mozart or Haydn, but more along the lines of works by obtuse unwieldy 20th century composers such as Norgard, Nystroem, Segerstam and Pettersson. It comprises not so much of thematic elements as it does the repetition of images in differing contexts. It starts off with a burst of dissonance then settles down into a placid, surreal, disjunctive utterance. It also attempts to conjure up the ghosts of cubist poetry (a short lived and little known poetic phenomena) with Carfagna’s own idiosyncratic spin on it.”

I haven't read Symphony No. 2 yet, but knowing the consistently superlative quality of Carfagna's work, it will be high on my list as soon as I load my iPad—and reread Symphony No. 1 to pick up on what I've missed.

You shouldn't miss Barry Wallenstein's new book, Tony's World. Over the years, Wallenstein has produced an impressive body of poetry that fuses technical excellence with gritty spirit and an urbanity

that exudes hipness while poking fun at it, as well. Tony's World focuses on Tony, Wallenstein's literary alter/ego, who appears in many of Wallenstein's superlative recordings of jazz poetry. As a jazz poet, Wallenstein works from a visceral connection to the jazz idiom. His voice, sometimes grainy, sometimes high, exudes the spot-on timing that separates him from the idiom's less successful practitioners. And Tony, as narrator or subject of the narration, cruises, crashes or amuses in his efforts to live the night life of the jazz subculture or deal with a day world that sheds more light on his vanities than he would like.

In Tony's World, the protagonist experiences enough twists of fate to form a spiral. An act of vanity dyes his hair red, then he parades his revitalized image blithely through the streets until he remembers a newspaper article whose dose of bad news dampens it and even threatens the safety of his stash. When “Tony Takes a Hammer to his Head” he ponders his klutziness until he recognizes his arm as the agent of damage and determines in a mock-egocentric epiphany, “He needs a new agent.” Tony travels through a world of family with strained relations, and a life on the margins, preferring it to its upscale alternative. At one point his travels among the night's small-time hustlers and lost souls brings him to the brink of a long stay at the “The Hotel Splendide,” but he opts out because

Hotel Splendide, come by on a whim,

gave me armfuls and respite

---not cold truths. . .

The truths Wallenstein offers in Tony's World aren't cold and aren't always comfortable, but they are essential to understanding our lives, in which our vanities and the realities of life carom off each other in a never-ending quest for resolution.

Not to change the subject, but Stephen-Paul Martin's latest work, Changing the Subject, reaffirms my belief that he is the American master of the short story. Although I've often compared his work to Borges and Calvino, to try to give readers unfamiliar with his work a frame of reference, Martin's style and vision are entirely and uniquely his own. His discursive style enables him to move from topic to topic, using long, tightly-woven sentences that offer lists of analogies that encircle each while guiding the reader to the next, and smoothly segueing from one level of reality to another. Martin routinely juggles multiple elements in his work, so that the starting subject becomes one of a number of incidents leading the reader to discover the fiction's ultimate subject near its conclusion. The suspense of his work lies not in the truth of plot, as in the suspense genre, but in the dips, whirls and shifts of reality and circumstance that leave you suspended in a state of disbelief until the last sentence---and continues after you finish reading, as you look on the world with a little less certainty and a lot more curiosity than when you began. Martin leaves you with answers that provoke more questions. In the basic narrative of “Stopping,” a story I accepted for BIG BRIDGE MAGAZINE, the restless Honey Stone searches for a place where she feels comfortable, and makes a decision to come to a stop in a park near the Brooklyn Bridge. She encounters Harry Knight, who becomes a part of her life, then vanishes. She continues to live in his apartment. At a restaurant, she encounters in passing a waiter named Lance Boyle, who believes she's interested in him. Literally, Boyle tries to pick up Honey Stone's scent, and it leads him to Dawn Wakeman's apartment. They begin a relationship that continues until she gets up from her seat in the restaurant where Boyle works as a waiter. In her place, Honey Stone takes the seat and senses something in the waiter that makes her think of Harry Knight. When she returns to the apartment she's taken over, Harry Knight steps out of the bathroom and they greet each other with feelings of blankness where one expects recognition. This bare description of the narrative thread doesn't include the characters' past relationships and their attitudes about them, the depth of Honey Stone's discontent, the sense each character experiences of stopping before some moment of recognition, just at Honey Stone did near the Brooklyn Bridge, or the many other elements that add thematic depth and atmosphere to the work. Martin weaves complex tapestries of plot, character, texture, ambience and intellectual underpinnings into fluid narratives that explore the deeper possibilities of reality while stretching the aesthetic boundaries of fiction in a sophisticated style that rivals such past masters as Henry James. Martin takes the deep, the difficult, the absurd and the ridiculous and synthesizes them into eminently readable entities that challenge our assumptions about the reality of the world we inhabit.

I hope my superficial descriptions of the superlative work of Kirpal Gordon, Ric Carfagna, Barry Wallenstein and Stephen-Paul Martin will encourage you to read them. Why wait for the future of literature when you can read it today?

*

Circumstances have rendered the title of today's entry appropriate in more than one way.

Immediately after I posted my new publications and recordings, I learned that Andrew Topel's Avantacular Press had published my longpoem, *, as an ebook.

* is a longpoem I wrote in 2006. Except for one page, recently published in Epidermis, the work went unpublished until yesterday.

You can read it at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/34761363/