Analogous Soul

The Jazz Poems of William Matthews (Part 1 of 2)

At the start of a chapter in Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, the Director tells his assembled students, “You know that our work on a play begins with the use of if as a lever to lift us out of everyday life onto the plane of imagination.” He then points to a wall on which a painting of an arctic scene hangs. “Who would believe,” he asks, “that this was painted by a man who, in all his life, never stirred beyond the suburbs of Moscow?”

The reason William Matthews could write so well about jazz was because he had led the working poet’s life so fully. All those years giving readings, all the visiting poet gigs and conferences—the whole artist-for-hire song and dance—afforded him knowledge of some of the essential aspects of jazz life: the glamour (the tedium) of travel, the companionship of comrades, nights in hotels and long rides to shabby rooms, late hours, fans who love you or want a piece of you for mostly all the wrong reasons. The Po Biz, as he affectionately called it. The rest he learned from books.

And let’s not pass over his ability to listen closely to a record. Or his going out to countless live performances, both as eager young man and knowing middle-aged gentleman with the graying moustache and the money for a good bottle of wine (say, the ’89 Pinot Noir right here at the bottom of the list). Nor his knowing something about that strange, bitter stalemate that gets called race relations in this country, and his having the courage to say something about it. Even to perform a little ventriloquism for the sake of hearing somebody other than himself do the talking.

Matthews wrote well about jazz because he took what he had learned from its masters—Louis, Duke, Bird, Prez, Lady Day, Coltrane, Mingus, Miles, Evans—much of what he knew as cool. Because he spent years working diligently to hone a craft that demanded that he spend the entire wealth of his skills. Because he had the nerve to take the structures and modes (and stories) of jazz music and incorporate them into his own voice, and had a good enough ear to carry its rhythms in his own verse. And, damn it, because he had soul.

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In his talk with my father on jazz and poetry in The Georgia Review, Yusef Komunkayaa says, “Historically, the African American has had to survive by his or her sheer nerve and wit, and it often seems as if we have been forced to create everything out of nothing. Music kept us closer to the essence of ourselves.” He goes on to say, “Music is serious business in the African American community because it is so intricately inter-woven with our identity.” If this is true, as it most certainly is, then how does someone like my father—in his own words, an over-educated white guy—get the nerve not only to write about jazz but also, at times, take on the voice of a Black jazz musician? Is it from all the hours he spent playing league ball, “the only white guy in the gym”? Or from growing up in Cincinnati, one of those strange half-southern, half-Midwestern cities, where the racial divide is as narrow as a single street and as wide as the Mississippi?

Of course, none of this is enough to warrant a white man putting on black face. So maybe, more importantly, it is the poet’s imagination he possessed, that fishing-hook of empathy cast out so often and so earnestly into the Black musician’s experience—though it may not speak directly for anything but his own sense of things, or any white man’s alienation from his black brethren—that allowed him to speak authentically in another man’s voice. My father wasn’t pretending to be Black. No more than Gerry Mulligan was when he stepped up to his solo beside Coleman Hawkins. Though it’s too easy to say he was just allowing some of the history and truth and energy of that great musical legacy flow through him. For that matter, so was Elvis. If he’s not lost in misplaced fantasy, then what exactly is he doing? When, if ever, is appropriation more than out-and-out abduction?

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Matthews’ early jazz poems were written from the grimy platform of grief: he wrote to cry out his melancholy love for a fallen hero. Ode to John Coltrane. Ode to Coleman Hawkins. Ode to Bud Powell. This necessary grief is at its most potent in “Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41,” a short poem almost entirely constituting Matthews’ emotional response to Coltrane’s early death. Sascha Feinstein writes in his essay “An Enormous Yes” that the poem, “concerns itself less with the genius of the performer and still more directly with despair.” He goes on to say that “Matthews seems unable to present portraits that transcend grief.” In other words, many of his early jazz poems are more about the poet than the music or the musician.

In mid-career, Matthews’ jazz poems begin to retell histories (as in “Alice Zeno Talking, and Her Son George Lewis the Jazz Clarinetist in Attendance”) or work as an avid jazz fan’s inspired listening (in “Bmp Bmp” or “Listening to Lester Young”). Matthews begins placing himself in his poems in new and more complicated ways. In “Bud Powell, Paris, 1959,” for instance, which appears in his fourth book Rising and Falling, he allows the young poet to become a character in the older poet’s poem:

I was young and pain

rose to my ceiling, like a warmth,

like a story that makes us come true

in the present.

As the poet grows up and gains distance on his emotive self, he steps back from his own volcanic outbursts. He becomes his own translator.

In “Listening to Lester Young,” the jazz-loving persona doesn’t show up until the third and final stanza. We’ve already seen late-career Young, bitter and “spraddle-legged” in pain with an eager reporter following him around. Matthews ends the poem by jumping forward twenty years, the narrator listening to old LPs “on stereo equipment/ so good I can hear his breath rasp.” In “Bmp, Bmp,” Matthews places himself further outside the musician’s experience by creating a disembodied persona. The knowing awareness of the connoisseur’s wisdom animates the voice and provides passionate engagement that links the reader to both the music and the musician. Matthews seems to be speaking for both Bechet and himself, for poets and musicians alike, when he states knowingly, “Life is fun when you’re good at something/ good.”

The speaker in these poems isn’t there—as he was in his grief or at the club—but present in his analysis. Geoff Dyer talks about this act in the introduction to his lovely book But Beautiful:

Throughout, my purpose was to present the musicians not as they were but as they appear to me. Naturally, the distance between these two ambitions is often very great. Similarly, even when I appear to be doing so I am not describing musicians at work so much as projecting back onto the moment of the music’s inception the act of my hearing it thirty years later.

The empathetic “take” becomes a link, a two-way street: the poet jumps out into the other in an imaginative act of empathy and brings what he discovers back into himself. When he “speaks” the poem, he is both himself and more than himself.

It’s not until his later jazz poems—most famously the ones starring Charlie Mingus—that Matthews begins to not only bring back the body of the speaker but also to jump back and forth between bodies. Sometimes the poem is spoken by the poet, other times by a musician, and still other times by a strange hybrid voice (as when Steve Martin is inhabited by Lily Tomlin’s spirit in All of Me).

In an interview, the poet David Budbill described his method of writing poems: “Like an actor, I’m always hiding behind something. I write from back there behind the persona.” The italics on “back there” are mine; for me, the physical placement of the Self behind the mask of the persona is exactly the point. The poet hides behind the mask of the narrator as a way to step onto the stage of the poem. The task is to create, as my father once remarked in an interview, “an occasion for speech.”

In Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, the Director asserts that the actor’s task involves not merely presenting the external life of the character:

He must fit his own human qualities to the life of the other person, and pour into it all of his own soul…. You must live by actually experiencing feelings that are analogous to it.

This is the “Method” in a nutshell: to inhabit the other you must first draw deep from inside yourself. The material you mine becomes the stuff from out of which you build the emotional life of the Other. You body, your voice, become vehicles of transmission.

But my father was more Brechtian than Method, more like Nabokov than Chekhov. He seems most happy when exposing the puppet show behind the story being staged. He wants you to briefly see the man behind the curtain (maybe one of his Italian shoes) before he slips back into the voice. The way, in be-bop, the soloist pulls out a snippet of “Send in the Clowns” and knits it to another melody fragment as he winds his way through the solo.

“Jazz gave me the permission to begin composing a poetic language based on the rhythms of the speaking voice,” Matthews says in the above-mentioned dialogue with Komunyakaa. By putting on the mask of a persona, my father has freed himself to speak in a fresh voice. The remove—the thrown voice—is what gets him there. Is what lets him sit in.

Two poems come to mind that display the empathetic voicing Matthews achieved in his later jazz poems: two instances where the speaker of the poems is not solely the poet/narrator but also, and in large part, a jazz musician; and where the line between narrator and speaker, writer and subject, autobiography and historical anecdote gets continually (and continuously) blurred. In both “The Accompanist” and “Every Tub” Matthews develops a persona in order to tell a story. In both, he steps “back there” to achieve analogous soul.

…to be continued…