Poetry with a beat

Jazz and poetry have long had a relationship, though sometimes it seems as if neither quite knows how to get in the trenches with the other, like two people looking at each other across a room who don’t know what to do when they finally meet. After the Beats, the jazz/poetry combo became a popular cliche, and everyone has probably seen a movie in which a hipster with a goatee and beret reads a free-form poem over the sound of a jazz group in the kind of bar or café your parents never set foot in.

The Beats had a strong and deep rapport with jazz, at least in an intuitive sense; Kerouac’s descriptions of jazz musicians in books such as “On the Road” and “Desolation Angels” are wonderful, and it’s clear he had a layman’s—and a poet’s—appreciation of the music and the men who made it. (At one point he was criticized for an impressionic article he wrote about jazz that was, perhaps, not entirely accurate; the publication held a contest for best pro and con letter received about the piece). He also set the standard for working with poets when he recorded an album of his haikus accompanied by the tenor saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn. The soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy set well over a hundred poems by writers such as Kerouac, Robert Creeley, and Brion Gysin to music, and others have tried, with varying amounts of success, to blend the forms.

So it was interesting to see two major poets, Robert Pinsky and Charles Simic, at the Jazz Standard this week, with a trio of top players—the vibraphonist Mike Manieri, the drummer Andrew Cyrille, and the bass player Lonnie Plaxico—behind them. What would transpire?

Both poets have strong voices and a sense of cadence, something many poets lack. Most poetry readings, in fact, are marred by poets who mutter, mumble, and rush their lines, reading their work as if it were a 30-second pitch on a night of speed dating. It’s usually a blur, and a bore—and it’s why I prefer poetry on the page, not the stage.

The evening at the Standard didn’t start out auspiciously. Pinsky introduced Simic and spoke briefly about how much they both loved jazz. He then read three poems, and Simic followed with three. Then the trio played a Monk tune, “Well You Needn’t.” It was all good, I guess, but I’d hoped for some kind of integration, not just a shift rotation every five or ten minutes. After a second tune, Pinksy came back and read a poem that mentioned Monk, and I began to sense that he and Simic were at least trying to weave a thread through the evening. Later, they both read with the trio playing behind them. It was getting interesting.

Occasionally lines from their poems stood out, as when Pinsky referred to the saxophone as a “twisted brazen clarinet,” or when Simic spoke of the “delicious melancholy” of Monk. Both have a sort of frumpy theatricality. Pinsky is more flamboyant, like an inspired professor; Simic comes off as reserved, but slyly and wryly lights up when his poems veer into the profane. The musicians, thankfully, seemed to be doing their best to remain engaged. A call and response, in which Pinsky read couplets from various poets and Cyrille responded with short drum solos, was probably the closest thing to real interaction between the words and the music. In the end, the couple looking at each other across the room at least made it through a dance before they separated at the end of the night. Let’s hope they meet again.