And his last poems are in verse.
Well, one other of them is about a musician,
the jazz pianist Bud Powell.
I've written any number of poems about musicians, many of them
jazz musicians or else keyboard musicians
who play lots of Bach.
But I've been most attracted to the jazz musicians
because around them has gathered a body of mythology
of the sort discussed in the Janis Joplin piece, that
is to say the view that because their lives were,
in many cases, I think of as spectacular lives.
Bud Powell had.
Mr. Young had one.
Billie Holiday had one.
We can go through the list, a long litany of people
with early deaths, hard lives, and great talents.
There is a view which holds that these two things are
the result of each other, that the great talent is
the result of a hard life and that some special quality
emanates from the suffering and passes into the work
and gives it a special character.
I don't believe that.
I believe that the work was done in spite of the suffering.
I suspect that most of us would concur
that at least our allotted sum of suffering
comes to us without even looking around for it
and that there seems, therefore, to be no need to send more
in order that we may gain grace and that these myths also
puts you in a bad position should
you be either an artist or a consumer of art.
If you are a consumer of art, you
require the artists you admire to die in order to produce
beautiful work for you.
And if you're an artist, you're on the other end of that,
which is even less pleasant.
If you're a double agent, as many of us are,
you're in a really morally untenable position.
And it might be useful to imagine
that the work was done in spite of the mess
and that, while the pain is extraordinarily real,
it is perhaps not nearly so poetic,
and perhaps it is more ordinary and perhaps even dull,
than we have been led to think by this myth of the artist.
That has only tangentially to do with this short poem, "Bud
Powell, Paris, 1959."
But it's a useful tangent.
"Bud Powell, Paris, 1959."
"I'd never seen pain so bland.
Smack, though I didn't call it smack in 1959,
had eaten his technique.
His whitewater right hand clattered,
missing runs nobody else would think to try
nor think to be outsmarted by.
Nobody played as well as Powell, and neither did he,
stalled on his bench between sets, stolid and vague,
my hero, his mocha skin souring gray.
Two bucks for a scotch in this dump,
I thought, but I bought me another.
I was young, and pain rose to my ceiling
like warmth, like a story that makes
us come true in the present.
Each day's melodrama in Powell's cells bored and lulled him.
Pain loves pain and calls it company, and it is."