This last poem I'm going to read is, again,
like I said, a long poem.
It's about John Coltrane.
And it's about that moment in John Coltrane's career
where he's about to experiment-- starts
experimenting with his sound, takes a bit of a chance.
Now the thing about Coltrane at this point is that--
I always tell people, if he never
had played another note after he played
with Miles Davis's Quintet, his reputation
would have been solid.
He'd still be influencing Branford Marsalis.
And all if he had never played any else beyond Miles.
But he went on.
He played with Thelonious Monk.
And then started his own quintet, and then quartets,
and quintets, and list goes on, and on, and on,
and gets really, really out there.
I mean, he's starting to do something that--
trying to pull out some kind of spiritual
or reaching for some kind of spiritual,
and in some way social, truth or declaration.
And that's what this poem is trying to deal with,
declaration of voice.
It's called "The Sheets of Sound."
"One.
He says what do I have to lose actually by coming right out
and saying what I mean to say like this,
and like this, and like this?
Breathing rickety steps to the heart of the matter.
Loose a black spirit around the joint.
Mr Coltrane floating a line like this, pushing its muscle.
Hell, discovering its sweet worth.
The sweet worth of pushing any damn wall.
This is a necessary lesson.
You can make an art out of sailing right over the top.
Spin a hard clean, if only for these brief seconds.
Close the world, its silly wounds and hard manners
with a yell.
I hear you push it, a quote, a necessary lesson.
There are gifts, aren't there?
You ask.
What do I have to lose if I come right out and test it?
Peel back the romance and a breath as you reach for what?
Surely, this love, I hear you sing.
This sort of love will ruin me.
A wonder operates here, pushes away the dam wall as you leap.
Dresses the shadows in the corners of the room.
Speaks for you, breezes up your throat opens.
How many times can you do this?
Push your losses open, map the blues currents.
I hear what if color the air with the danger of asking?
Two.
A man who gives himself a right to speak.
A fine spray of what he knows of where he's been.
What has happened to him?
An ax which cuts impatient allowed
humility, a spiritual science.
Hear it?
In the skirt of the fine African-American mother.
Hear it?
In the squeezed life of the Black civil servant.
Ask the harlequin or the man with the jackal's face.
Ask a schoolgirl sharpening a mental knife.
Or the king of the margins with the strength of nations
etched by minimum wages.
Or little Johnny Volcano spacing in and out of whatever world
will have him.
Or a long, tall, cool who sparks up only after he folds away
his chauffeur uniform.
The dark scholar obscured by his teeth
diminished each time he laughs.
A fine spray of what goes on, who gets
swallowed, who takes it, who jumps.
A concentration of who gives in, who shakes it off.
A fine spray of water might sound
like if they could open their lives,
if they could blow it out.
Three.
I hear proof, survival take a verse.
I hear proof, claim, swing, associate itself.
I hear proof declare the outer layers slough off.
I hear proofs beat.
Its wide fingers roll seconds on its tips.
I hear proofs laugh, a deep glide from the stomach's pit.
This is who I am and this is who I am.
And this is who I am.
I hear proof's river, the deep bass spring which feeds it.
The trance of keyboard light upon water.
I hear proof's memory, a torch of calfskin lighting a cave.
This is who I am.
And this is who I am.
I hear proof gather the sweet sour berries of its name.
I hear proof, survival take a verse.
Four.
I try to imagine the first attempt on the bandstand,
try to figure out how that first breath grew wild, troubled
the curve with the mouthpiece.
Chance's sweet flavors as he leaned toward the microphone.
What would you do if a man fell to the ground
and in that moment decided that this act was
sung, decided as he fell?
Not to mind the falling, to name it something else.
Think of it, both of you locked in that first grand
inarticulate slur.
What to say to a man who was shredding decorum, blowing it
across the club and streamers?
Imagine the spectacle as it shakes down
the slant of those first notes.
The announcement as it bumbles against a cocked ear.
Five.
I heard a story once told on Miles Davis and the young pup
John Coltrane, who was seeking out
the master's wisdom sort of sitting at his feet
so to speak.
And he asked Mr. Davis to reveal to him the secret
of how to finish a solo.
And Miles sort of grunts like a Baptist mother.
And he tells Coltrane, take the damn horn out of your mouth.
Six.
He has discovered the only way to pose
the question, the only language that might fit the equation.
This will be his.
This yearning to tell all.
The bomb against a soul's distraction.
He knows this can be the only canvas supple enough
to take it.
After years of exploring the cafe standards
at the gigs and the studios, beautifying
each and every possible nuance.
This is his only way out to decode what nags at his breath.
To have his tongue on the name of what it chases.
Seven.
I am driving with a friend in New Jersey.
Two poets discussing jazz in a moving vehicle
when the conversation somehow floats over to Coltrane.
And for the first time, our talk develops holds.
The long and the short of it, you confuse him, John.
Come on, is the world really like that at the core
all the time?
The fee for the search so high?
He's referring, of course, to those moments when
the only thing between you and dissolving.
The only thing that can win you back
is McCoy hemming you in a loose blouse of notes.
What about this?
My friend wants to know.
What do you call it, jazz?
It's the spin he puts on the word that sinks everything.
Eight.
A Love Supreme, but how long can anyone
listen to bullets hitting sanctified tin?
You can believe what it must cost him, these thin sheets
of hard translation.
A black tongue is a coiled danger,
is trouble, squared trouble.
A black tongue is a trick mirror, lightening,
and the fuse.
And this beauty is a danger, as a sound called when the water
breaks called what if after murder,
after terror, after servitude after disappearance,
after displacement, after short change,
after guff, the child's portion, the revised story.
The wake up call got through anyway.
Nine.
I tuned my ears to my name.
I dream what I carry.
I taste what can't be swallowed.
I shake to what I cry.
I come from a long line.
My mother canned the fruit.
My sister used her beauty.
My niece inherited my impatience.
My brother never found his mind.
How do I sing them?
We are not sweet.
These are lives one walks around yet locked in the throat.
The angels of our gods, claimed and unclaimed choirs.
How to admit their song?
Against the world, against the facts,
the acquired urge to gaze down.
Ten.
Once I listen to you recreate the world.
It was one of your later gigs.
You made a few statements.
I heard it only once years ago.
And I still remember the way the horns
blew primeval slop, which cricketed
into gills, wings, fur.
Roared into a new language, declared itself,
reared on its cool black limbs.
You were close to being spent.
I heard it only once.
An outrage stretched over two sides of a four sided record.
I remember the way the cymbals spat the weather out,
seas percussed against the piano's terra firma.
I have carried this for years.
How we tumble with it.
How we can never get it all out."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]