“Your heart will always make itself known through your words.
Lucky Numbers 34, 22, 13, 7, 11, 30”
Fortune Cookie
hat do we want our poets laureate to do? We want them to support progressive causes, of course: to speak out about the environment, for instance. If they sense corruption in government—and when is there not corruption in government?—we will want them to talk about that too. Primarily we want them to talk about the situation of poetry—about the fact that so many Americans have been alienated from the art and what we can do about that. We want them to suggest ways of introducing poetry to our children.
But most of all we want the poet laureate to turn us on. We want him or her to bring us to that space where only poetry happens—where only poetry is possible: to that “place” where it is no longer necessary to “understand”—to be argued into something; to a condition in which we are feeling so intensely that we forget all about argument. Gertrude Stein once insisted, “If you like it”—if you feel something—“you understand it.” Which is not to say that poetry wishes to put the intellect or “understanding” to sleep. It is only to say that poetry wishes to remind the intellect that it is not the only thing going on in our heads and hearts. There is a world in there, or several worlds, and they are full of passionate, disparate, insistent entities. And these entities all want to have their say.
California’s poet laureate Al Young performed with The Dartanyan Brown Trio (Brown on bass, Sly Randolph on drums, Jorge Molina on piano and percussion) at the Larkspur Café Theater, 500 Magnolia, in Larkspur on July 8, 2005. The evening was called, in conscious recollection of the great John Coltrane LP, A Love Supreme. The publicity stated that “the words/voice of Al Young and the vocalese and acoustic bass of Dartanyan Brown come together to create the unique bond between music and poetry, a performance art spawned in the hipster 50s.”
One might expect some good poetry, some good jazz licks—perhaps a bit of nostalgia for the old days, before “Spoken Word,” when poetry and jazz was something to get excited about. A pleasant evening. I admire Young’s work and I was curious about Dartanyan Brown—who I knew was a teacher—so Adelle and I decided to go.
Good decision.
From the very first moments we got an evening which had nothing to do with nostalgia. The opening “sounds” made by pianist/vocalist Jorge Molina were amazing. It was the first hint that the evening was not about nostalgia but about transformation. You couldn’t ignore Molina’s voice—loud, caustic even, and what in the world was he saying with such passion?
And then Young and Brown began—Young, riffing on the standard, “April in Paris,” spoke of two people moving to France “from the loveless edges of that country we both fled with a shiver.” We, the audience, were suddenly in another country, and the country had nothing to do with France or even Larkspur. It was a country created at that moment at that place. “You are the music while the music lasts.” Young was not “backed” by The Dartanyan Brown Trio: he stood next to them; the poet too was an instrument. And oh, how he played. He read poems that connected with music in various ways and constantly drifted into singing when he did so. (As a young man, he was in fact a singer.) His singing initially wasn’t that great, but it was obviously from the heart. People were amazed that he was doing it at all! And then he started doing it well. His duets with Dartanyan Brown were a constant delight—and Brown’s little riffs and solos were wonderful: full of interesting things, unexpected, witty, creative. One felt he could do even more but wished to keep the show in Al’s hands. (Brown told me later that indeed he wanted to keep the focus on the words, and he did.) Sly Randolph, the drummer, was good too and played a fine solo—though he was a little eclipsed by the amazing Jorge Molina, who is a show in himself. Molina is from Peru and sang with more duende than I've heard for years—marvelous. Head thrown back, long hair streaming—in contrast to the always natty Young—Molina sang in Spanish but you got the message. One song was in praise of Che Guevera, who was a hero of Molina’s youth: extraordinary. You could feel his piano metamorphose into a guitar—a guitar playing flamenco. And you could hear definite echoes of Arab Spain in his singing. I suddenly realized what his opening sounds reminded me of: they were like the calls to prayer I had heard in Syria. Afterwards, I spoke to Molina a little, and he gave me a copy of his CD, Project Tierra. Young got in some excellent, needed propaganda for poetry—I told him he did more for poetry that evening than a thousand English courses laid end to end could ever do—and he read his work beautifully, as he always does. The evening was a wonderful balance of forces: we were always surprised by something, always delighted. At the end, someone shouted “Encore”—an unheard of thing at a poetry recital. Nobody wanted to leave.
Does this mean that our poets need to learn to sing? In some deep sense, perhaps they do, but no, that isn’t quite the moral. The moral is that words are not merely black marks on white paper: they are sounds and as sounds they are music. Written poetry is fine: no one would want to be without it. But poetry has two traditions. At the heart of Western poetry is a split, a confusion, a multimedia situation which is never resolved but which remains in a continual, and at times enormously creative, state of tension: poetry can be either aural/oral (as Father Walter J. Ong put it) or written, and these two things are not necessarily in sync with one another. Of course “Spoken Word” poetry is deeply aural, but too often it simply abandons the intellect in an unfortunate attempt to turn poetry into a rock concert. When it “says something,” it often says something we already know. Al Young’s always intelligent, deeply polished verse is in no danger of doing that. He is a fine written poet. But the evening at the Larkspur Theater was an indication that no one knows the other tradition of poetry—the tradition of the aural/oral—better than Al Young. Poetry is not a simple, single, easily definable thing: it is full of diversity, voices, variety. There is even a sense in which T.S. Eliot is a little bit like Jelly Roll Morton.
California is extremely fortunate to have a poet laureate who embodies all the traditions of poetry—and knows how to let them sing.