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And his last poems are in verse.

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Well, one other of them
is about a musician,

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the jazz pianist Bud Powell.

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I've written any number of poems
about musicians, many of them

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jazz musicians or else
keyboard musicians

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who play lots of Bach.

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But I've been most attracted
to the jazz musicians

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because around them has
gathered a body of mythology

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of the sort discussed in
the Janis Joplin piece, that

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is to say the view that
because their lives were,

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in many cases, I think
of as spectacular lives.

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Bud Powell had.

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Mr. Young had one.

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Billie Holiday had one.

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We can go through the list,
a long litany of people

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with early deaths, hard
lives, and great talents.

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There is a view which holds
that these two things are

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the result of each other,
that the great talent is

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the result of a hard life
and that some special quality

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emanates from the suffering
and passes into the work

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and gives it a
special character.

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I don't believe that.

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I believe that the work was
done in spite of the suffering.

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I suspect that most
of us would concur

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that at least our
allotted sum of suffering

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comes to us without even
looking around for it

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and that there seems, therefore,
to be no need to send more

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in order that we may gain
grace and that these myths also

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puts you in a bad
position should

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you be either an artist
or a consumer of art.

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If you are a
consumer of art, you

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require the artists you admire
to die in order to produce

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beautiful work for you.

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And if you're an artist, you're
on the other end of that,

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which is even less pleasant.

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If you're a double
agent, as many of us are,

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you're in a really morally
untenable position.

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And it might be
useful to imagine

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that the work was done
in spite of the mess

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and that, while the pain
is extraordinarily real,

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it is perhaps not
nearly so poetic,

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and perhaps it is more
ordinary and perhaps even dull,

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than we have been led to think
by this myth of the artist.

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That has only tangentially to
do with this short poem, "Bud

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Powell, Paris, 1959."

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But it's a useful tangent.

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"Bud Powell, Paris, 1959."

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"I'd never seen pain so bland.

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Smack, though I didn't
call it smack in 1959,

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had eaten his technique.

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His whitewater right
hand clattered,

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missing runs nobody
else would think to try

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nor think to be outsmarted by.

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Nobody played as well as
Powell, and neither did he,

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stalled on his bench between
sets, stolid and vague,

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my hero, his mocha
skin souring gray.

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Two bucks for a
scotch in this dump,

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I thought, but I
bought me another.

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I was young, and pain
rose to my ceiling

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like warmth, like
a story that makes

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us come true in the present.

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Each day's melodrama in Powell's
cells bored and lulled him.

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Pain loves pain and calls
it company, and it is."

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