Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop ed. by Stephen Cramer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop ed. by Stephen Cramer Eric Plaks (bio) turn it up! music in poetry from jazz to hip-hop Stephen Cramer, ed. Sundog Poetry Center and Green Writers Press https://www.sundogpoetry.org/shop/p/turn-it-up-music-in-poetry-from-jazz-to-hip-hop-edited-by-stephen-cramer 400 pages; Print, $19.95 As I suspect is true of many readers of this anthology, compiled and edited by poet and University of Vermont professor Stephen Cramer, I approach Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop with more recognition of the names and sounds in the music world than in the world of poetry. Since I am a jazz performer and music enthusiast, there are very few musicians referenced in the anthology that I had to google, but almost every poet was a new discovery to me, with the exception of some extremely well-known figures (James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg). As such, I found reading Cramer’s three-part alphabetic-by-last-name anthology of gorgeous words by a vast array of mostly American poets on the topic of music to be an incredibly valuable and pleasurable experience. The title of part 1, “A Shower of Golden Eighth Notes: Poems about Jazz,” comes from a line in Lynda Hull’s poem “Lost Fugue for Chet,” one of four poems by Hull included in the anthology. Like so many of the poets and their musician subjects in this anthology, Hull lived a fascinating and tragically short life, dying in a car crash in 1994. In a sense she lived the crazy life of the stereotypical jazzer, running away from home and college after having been accepted to Princeton at age sixteen and moving from Chinatown to Chinatown in her teen years (it’s a long story worth checking out on its own). Like her subject, Baker, Hull had personal experience with heroin, and the “shower of golden eighth notes” is Hull’s unforgettable word picture of the fatal fall of Baker’s body from an Amsterdam balcony in 1988. While the alphabetical presentation of the poets would seem to be a natural randomizer in terms of thematic organization, themes do emerge. A world of jazz is being sketched out by thirty-five poets in alphabetical order, [End Page 150] each one a giant in his or her own right despite having only one to five poems included in this anthology. It is not the factual world of jazz history, but rather the impressions made on the poets, who are a very diverse bunch although still a bit more recent and a bit whiter on average than the jazz musicians themselves. There is to me a bit of the widespread romanticization of the trappings of jazz—the smoke, the scene, the heroin, Chet Baker and Chet Baker again—but poet after poet more than solves the conundrum of writing about music that Cramer references in his introduction, when he quotes an unknown author (Steve Martin? Frank Zappa? Thelonious Monk?) of the phrase “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” These poets make music when they write about music and, as in jazz, it’s all about the phrasing, and the phrasing is gorgeous. As I learned more about the poets, more direct connections to jazz emerged—for example, Jayne Cortez, the author of two extremely hip poems in the collection—“Rose Solitude” (dedicated to Duke Ellington and getting at his African roots) and “Tapping” (read this poem aloud and you will feel that it is tap-dancing about poetry and not the other way around)—is the mother of Denardo Coleman from her relationship with Ornette. Part 1 has poems about jazz legends such as Bird, Miles, Mingus, Chet (too many), Lena Horne, Trane (many, and many about his heroin and his rotting teeth), Monk (lots), Sonny Rollins, Billie, Dinah, Ella, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, J. J. Johnson, McCoy Tyner, Sidney Bechet, Art Tatum, and Sonny Criss—but also poems about lesser-known figures such as Indianapolis drummer Stan Gage (“Sonnets for Stan Gage...