I’m usually frustrated by the collaboration between musical performers and poets. Often the music is relegated to a mere background role, a vamping behind the words. Much better is when the two sounds are on even terms, when they influence each other: it’s at that point when something new emerges. That “new thing” emerged a few times last Saturday at City of Asylum’s annual Jazz Poetry Concert, as it did for Amanda Fadgen, who did a sign-language reading of one of Heather McHugh’s poems. Vijay Iyer and Oliver Lake played jazz behind Amanda as she signed Heather’s poem, and the fusion of their sound and her movement, and the natural fusion of ASL between motion and language, collaborated in a way arriving at a sort of heightened dance.
City of Aslyum had set up a big white tent next to the National Aviary for the event; a light rain drizzled outside. The evening started off with about an hour-long performance from the Vijay Iyer Trio and followed with several Jazz/Poetry collaborations. Not all of them worked; but the idea did come through for Terrance Haye’s performance, which I’d like to talk about.
Terrance understands a crucial fact about poetry: it cannot, by the casual audience member, be taken seriously. To this end follows Terrance’s masterful poetic voice- at all times when he reads he deals with a troubled sincerity, a slight leaning-back from the honesty many poets make use of, a position which matches the off-kilter images and premises of his work. When he read last Saturday, he introduced his poems as “weird poems”- a kind of warning, a humor to help the audience accept the strangeness of the liberty with language that they were about to hear. What makes Terrance great is the way that these images and premises explode into sincerity: see the aunt from Hayes’ “The Carpenter Ant” who knocks holes into her walls like a carpenter- strange, almost joking metaphor made into sincerity.
The jazz behind Terrance, however, functioned to give his voice from the start a credence that allowed him to shed that premise of humor almost immediately, almost completely. His voice acquired a quality of song; there was an understanding that something as complex and strange as jazz was unashamedly the focus of his work. For me that moment achieved a kind of breakout goal of poetry, to become not the poem anymore, but to instead become something hard to ignore- in the same way that jazz can stop being just discordant noise and tune everyone in into something greater.
Other memorable pieces of the evening: Aja Monet’s reading (last line: “When we were children, we were told to believe in the santuary of peace. They should have told us it was war”), some of Vijay Trio's Jazz, and the reading with some guy in a white jumpsuit standing on his head while slow-frame black-and-white videos of gymnasts played along with the jazz and some light projections. There was also a moment when the event coordinators asked us to hold up our programs, which each bore the name of a persecuted, possibly murdered, writer. At first I felt distanced, but as they photographed us holding up all of those names they played a quote from some writer, and I felt moved: “language has the ability to change the world, and it is for this reason alone that small minds seek to silence it”. Somewhat self-aggrandizing, I know, but it drove the point home. --poetryburgh@gmail.com
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