In this poem, Peter Balakian attempts a stream-of-consciousness mood riff on the color blue, an improvisation that mostly succeeds.

He signals his intent in the very first line, with a reference to Bob Dylan’s “multi-dimensional” song, “Tangled Up in Blue.” From there he goes on to Delft jugs, the blue-and-white glazed pottery made famous in that Netherlandish town. Its “seeping glaze” reminds him of the “liquefaction of the Virgin’s silk / as it spread in Titian’s cobalt,” one of the more startling descriptions in this poem. And then the silk reminds him of a “fleshy embrace and green meadows / in the distance.” I like that combination of romance and verdant nature.

Then the mood begins to change. Those romantic green meadows “fade to hammered light,” hammered being a perfect word choice to reflect a disintegration.

Balakian repeats the word “light” as something “we pulled into a string of glass.” Perhaps this is a reference to inhaled cocaine, which might suggest the next kind of blue, that of Miles Davis’ song, Blue in Green.

The mood change is now complete. Instead of blue’s beauty in pottery and Titian, we now have blue’s melancholy in “the empty lot / after soot and rain and rush” (after the rush of coke?) The Ferry that would take the narrator home is “out of sight,” while he is left to deal with coming off a coke high as well as a musical high, still remembering Miles’ song, co-authored by jazz pianist Bill Evans, a one-time member of Miles’ sextet.

my bones electric* with the hum
of the cable of the Bridge at 3 a.m.

and the dying lights of the Bowery,
Bill Evans making the rain thin

to a beam of haze before the
horn comes back from underwater.

I love all these lines, but particularly the last, combining the sounds of Miles’ horn, Evans’ piano, and the bridge cables’ hum with his solitude on a New York City pier in the middle of the night. Balakian’s poem ends where it began, “tangled up in blue.” The poem vividly conveys, for me at least, a delicious urban sadness, one I remember and still yearn for from time to time.

* And let me make a tip of the hat to Balakians's references to Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" and his "Brooklyn Bridge."

Balakian is most well known for his writings on the Armenian massacre, including a book of poetry, a memoir about his grandmother and a book of non-fiction. Here is one of the poems --

WHAT MY GRANDMOTHER SAID WHEN IT RAINED by Peter Balakian

We knew they were coming.
All night we could hear machetes
whirring in our ears.
The Turks gave themselves away;
they drank all night,
and in the morning beat the horses.

So Papa took all the money and jewels:
the fat gold coins, the turquoise,
braids of gold chains we'd wear once
a year, rings silver and almost soft,
and the brooches from Greece, topaz,
onyx, jade.
There were stones of colors
you cannot name,
I can still see them...

He packed them all
into the ceiling,
into the dark space above the house.
I always thought the devil
lived there.
Papa hid them all
in the ceiling,
and told us someday,
someday we'll return
and be rich again.

Sometimes when it rains,
when the sun shakes behind the clouds
and the summer air cools
so the windows darken,
I hear God with a fist full
of coins in his big wild hand —

I hear them spill in a mountain
over the floor of dark air
above the clouds--
the shaking gold pieces,
the gems deep green
like my husband's eye.

THE JOURNEY by Lawson Fusao Inada

Miles was waiting on the dock,
his trumpet in a paper bag.

Lady was cold —
wind lashed the gardenias
I stole for her hair.

We were shabby, the three of us.

No one was coming so I started to row.

It was hard going —
stagnant, meandering...

The city moaned and smoldered.
Tin cans on the banks like shackles...

To be discovered, in the open...

But Miles took out his horn
and played.
Lady sang.

A slow traditional blues.

The current caught us —
horn, voice, oar stroking water...

I don't know how long we floated —

our craft so full of music,
the night so full of stars.

When I awoke we were entering an ocean,
sun low on water
warm as a throat,
gold as a trumpet.

We wept.

Then soared in a spiritual.

Never have I been so happy.

Hi MA,

all that happened for me, too except for the coke buzz and the appreciation of the poem. Instead, those strings of glass lines brought to mind the disappointment I felt when I went to see Dale Chihuly demonstrate glass blowing.

The demonstration itself was wonderful--- the glowing cobalt cabochons pulled into into threads of blue light. It was disappointing in that Chihuly never touched the glass or the tools or the oven. He just bossed around his indentured servants and yelled "change the radio station!!!" and played with squirt bottles of paint.

Back to the poem: I found it manipulative. Another poster charged Balakian with product placement. That seems like a good description to me.

THis poem supports a personally held observation: for the most part, poems about jazz usually fail. They're often distractingly self-conscious. Ted posted one once about a trumpet player (I think.) It worked. To my thinking, poems about jazz rarely do.

Mar -

I did not like the poem. I was, however, very impressed with your analysis. Very skillfully done, lad.

I posted here two excellent examples that work, but the line breaks went wacky and I deleted the post.

They were Doty's "Almost Blue" and Lynda Hull's "Lost Fugue for Chet." Both on the same topic (mostly). The link between jazz and poetry is very strong. I am not actually a big fan of Jazz, but there is a long, strong and deep tradition between the two that has had a strong influence on poetry in this and the last century.

Thanks for the praise, Savory Goodness, but my nic and name is Mary Ann and I'm a lass, not a lad.

Please forgive me, I remembered having read otherwise, obviously in error.

Jazz is a a vernacular that's both the entity and the expression.

It's not a language that I find evocative. Nevertheless, much gets lost in the translation from the jazz vernacular to the language of written word.

Sure, there are good poems that appropriate jazz qualities-- improv, joyful rebellion, sultry introspection-- but the poem in which the theme is "this is how jazz makes me feel"? Aack Phooey.

Blue perpetuates that non-illustrious tradition, I think.

OneArt, black Pulitzer Prize winner Yosef Kumunyakaa as well as good old Billy Collins have also written jazz poems. Perhaps Langston Hughes as well. Here are 2 more --

HEARING PARKER THE FIRST TIME by B. H. Fairchild

The blue notes spiraling up from the transistor radio
tuned to WNOE, New Orleans, lifted me out of bed
in Seward County, Kansas, where the plains wind riffed
telephone wires in tones less strange than the bird songs

of Charlie Parker. I played high school tenor sax the way,
I thought, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young might have
if they were, like me, untalented and white, but Ornithology
came winding up from the dark delta of blues and Dixieland

into my room on the treeless and hymn-ridden high plains
like a dust devil spinning me into the Eleusinian mysteries
of the jazz gods though later I would learn that his long
apprenticeship in Kansas City and an eremite’s devotion

to the hard rule of craft gave him the hands that held
the reins of the white horse that carried him to New York
and 52nd Street, farther from the wheat fields and dry creek beds
than I would ever travel, and then carried him away.

THELONIOUS MONK by Stephen Dobyns

A record store on Wabash was where
I bought my first album. I was a freshman
in college and played the record in my room

over and over. I was caught by how he took
the musical phrase and seemed to find a new
way out, the next note was never the note

you thought would turn up and yet seemed
correct. Surprise in 'Round Midnight
or Sweet and Lovely. I bought the album

for Mulligan but stayed for Monk. I was
eighteen and between my present and future
was a wall so big that not even sunlight

crossed over. I felt surrounded by all
I couldn't do, as if my hopes to write,
to love, to have children, even to exist

with slight contentment were like ghosts
with the faces found on Japanese masks:
sheer mockery! I would sit on the carpet

and listen to Monk twist the scale into kinks
and curlicues. The gooseneck lamp on my desk
had a blue bulb which I thought artistic and

tinted the stacks of unread books: if Thomas
Mann depressed me, Freud depressed me more.
It seemed that Monk played with sticks attached

to his fingertips as he careened through the tune,
counting unlike any metronome. He was exotic,
his playing was hypnotic. I wish I could say

that hearing him, I grabbed my pack and soldiered
forward. Not quite. It was the surprise I liked,
the discordance and fretful change of beat,

as in Straight No Chaser , where he hammers together
a papier-mâché skyscraper, then pops seagulls
with golf balls. Racket, racket, but all of it

music. What Monk banged out was the conviction
of innumerable directions. Years later
I felt he'd been blueprint, map and education:

no streets, we bushwhacked through the underbrush;
not timid, why open your mouth if not to shout?
not scared, the only road lay straight in front;

not polite, the notes themselves were sneak attacks;
not quiet-look, can't you see the sky will soon
collapse and we must keep dancing till it cracks?

for Michael Thomas

Thanks for that Dobyns poem. I'm really impressed. Ford5SpeedTruck was asking a question about the relationship between music and poetry; hey, Ford, did you catch this one?

Gosh, I must've left my ear out in the sun too long. I didn't hear a single note. I disliked almost everything about the Monk poem except for these lines:

I felt he'd been blueprint, map and education:

no streets, we bushwhacked through the underbrush;
not timid, why open your mouth if not to shout?

Every other line was just telling something at me. There was so little to see in that poem, I could have read it with my eyes shut.

I don't think I get the blues and I definitely do not understand jazz. And I tried to understand it, that is, I watched it and listened to it and studied it in a jazz club some years ago as I sat waiting for my girlfriend to complete a waitress shift. Many times that summer. And I remember thinking how surreal a world is this and tried to follow notes that would never join up, or at least not join up in any way I could fathom. And just when it kind of made sense some dude would burst into the melody with the most shrill concoction of really insane riffs like it was an expected solo, then the whole ensemble would hurricane a refrain of what seemed like opposite extremes of newly discovered chords. And then it would get quiet, brushes on a snare drum, really sweet saxaphone, sultry French horn and twinkling hi c's on a piano that sounded filtered from a cave entrance. Nice I thought. Then all hell raining down icicles of confusion, loud argumentative chords and trumpet howls. I always equate jazz with schizophrenia now. Because it seems to be normal, melody of immense skill, then chaos that seems to try to explain insanity or profound joy or abysmal depression. But one thing I did see there amongst the faithful in that club was an intense camaraderie, bordering, not so much as a cult, but a cabbala. It seemed a little creepy, but I was young. Anyway, I needed your interpretation of Balakian, MaryAnn, to get to the meat of the blues and jazz in the poem, an excellent read on it. Because, as just a poem, it is a very good one. As is the one about his grandma. Very nice.

* And let me make a tip of the hat to Balakians's references to Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" and his "Brooklyn Bridge."

I might also suggest at least an indirect reference to Dylan's "the ghost of electricity howl in the bones of her face" -- which I often suspected owed some debt to Whitman.

Nice analysis, BTW.

I really had to blurt out how much I liked that poem. Now that I'm not sitting at work, I'd like to add: It was written by someone who, like me, has spent hours over years listening to Monk, someone who has appreciated and internalized the rhythmic and structural idiosyncracies of a truly idiosyncratic, and original, artist. Like Waltz and Capsize says: I could have read it with my eyes shut.