CIPHERS: a poem

I'm not sure exactly when I wrote this poem, probably some time in 1983. It was published in an English magazine, The Rialto, in Norwich. I sent it to them in March of 1985 and it was published in issue 3, in July 1985. If I find any of my notes or drafts I'll amend this post, especially if I discover what city it was that may have inspired it. At some point in the past couple of years I made one small but substantial change; my buddy August Kleinzahler suggested another more substantial one. I like it much more the way it is now.

CIPHERS

A window, cracked at the edge, bends inward,
Making room for the wind. If it were colder
We might have snow. Until we do
We can sit and wait
For the raindrops to grow smaller.
In the street, the movement takes on patterns.
The sky changes. We are not so alone.

THE WORD (MONTREAL 1976: A DREAM)

I was poking through an old notebook the other day, and found

this. I scribbled it down a year ago, and hadn't thought of it since,

but when I re-read it the actual dream came back to me. I've changed

the words a little, mostly to include details I took for granted in 

my sleep. I couldn't find a photo that looked right, though I did find

one of the building where I lived. The Word was a wonderful bookshop

just around the corner; run by Adrian and Lucy. It's still there, looking

a lot smarter than it does in that relatively contemporaneous photo.

The Star is long gone. I finally met August Kleinzahler at The Word 
one day in 1981, when I arrived to do a poetry reading at McGill,

after years of missing him in various places. He's not the badly dressed guy in the suit.
I do think the dream may reflect as much about my present circumstances in Britain as it does about Montreal in 1976. Though I note April 15th is the day US taxes are due.

The poem is published here for the first time. 

THE WORD (A DREAM, MONTREAL, 1976)

A man in a cheap gray gabardine suit, black

Fedora and a thin black undertakers' overcoat

Hanging off him like a shroud stops me 

As I clump through the icy drifts interred

On the corner of Milton & Lorne, by The Word.

It's 30 below. I'm wearing desert boots, fleece

Lined denim jacket, my Canadiens toque. He asks,

In flat declarative Midwestern American
English, to see my papers. Qui etes vous? I say.

Your papers, he says. I was just on my way,
I say, to pick up a paper. The Star, or maybe

The Gazette if the Star's sold out. He shivers.

You think you're funny? We know who you are. 

15 April 2017

 

RUDY VAN GELDER: A FEW BLUE NOTES

Last night I went to sleep listening to Cannonball Adderly’s Somethin' Else, one of my favourite records, and it reminded me that I hadn’t written about the death of Rudy Van Gelder, the sound engineer on that and so many other great jazz records, most notably for Blue Note, but for most of the specialist jazz labels in the glorious era of hard bop, when between the artists and jazzmen and poets and novelists New York really was the centre of the world.

When I first heard he died I had put Hank Mobley’s Soul Station on, and listened while I read obituaries, and was unable to sell one myself to British papers. There's a nice sidebar by my friend August Kleinzahler, who grew up not far from the Van Gelder ‘studio’ in New Jersey, over at the London Review of Books blog here.  I noticed many of them had quotes from other audio engineers disparaging Van Gelder’s amateurish efforts; another friend, Michael Goldfarb, posted a comment along those lines from the facebook page of one of his engineers from his NPR days: as I recalled the pure sterility of the NPR sound, like voices speaking in a vacuum chamber, this made a certain sense.

There were some musicians, Charles Mingus most prominent among them, who wouldn't record at Van Gelder. Mingus felt what came out on the record was not the sound he was hearing when he made it, and this was more than just an engineer's perfection, it was a composer's sense of what the sound should be.

But Soul Station reminded me of why the Van Gelder sound worked for the listener: it gave you the feeling you were listening to improvisation as it took place, as if  you were in a club environment, hearing the instruments both working with and also trying to better each other. 

Last night as I listened to Somethin' Else, when Cannonball comes in for his solo on the opening cut, 'Autumn Leaves', I realised something else...you could hear quite clearly the open space of the famous cathedral ceiling in the Van Gelder house. It created the tone you might associate with a sacred setting. Not like Jan Garbarek, for example, playing in a literal cathedral, with the Hillard Ensemble or his band, and creating a sound of almost religious nordic meditation. This was like the isolation of inspiration, a moment close to the quiet ideal of an NPR studio after all, but fitting seamlessly into the context of the group energy around him. More important perhaps, it was still music the way you really would hear it in a club, coming and going, the sound not always perfect, but reaching you as it was able to reach you wherever you were sitting. I find Something Else every bit as contemplative as Garbarek, but with a dynamic difference.

Cannonball’s 1958 bop is a way of bringing energy and drive to a staid world that seemed disinclined toward inner vision or peace. Garbarek’s work of the past few decades has been more about bringing some sort of reflective peace to a world of increasing chaos. They blend together well in my mind, and in the end there is not quite as much difference in Manfred Eicher's ECM engineering, which on first thought I would have placed way over toward the NPR end of the spectrum, and the Van Gelder sound, unlikely as that seems.

I hadn’t realised that Van Gelder, after the jazz labels were subsumed into bigger companies, moved on to CTI, Creed Taylor’s ‘mellow’ jazz, which probably should be seen as the forerunner to today’s ‘smooth jazz’ and Kenny G. I remember picking up a Freddie Hubbard CTI record sometime in the 60s, not liking it, and ignoring the label. Now I’m a little curious about how Van Gelder’s techniques worked with the string overlays and lush sound of CTI. But not that curious...

Rudy Van Gelder is probably most important as much as an image of that jazz world, the unlikely optometrist recording the greatest artists of the past century in a makeshift studio in his parents’ house in New Jersey. It’s the essence of what that world was about to its fans, and to a large extent, as an almost cult world today, still is. RIP RVG.

THE MANSION IN FORT LEE: AUGUST KLEINZAHLER & ALBERT ANASTASIA

I was sent an interesting article today, by my friend August Kleinzahler, San Francisco's finest poet, maybe America's. A mansion is for sale in Fort Lee, New Jersey, right by the house in which August grew up. He's written about this before, about when he was a kid, playing with Gloriana, the little girl his age who lived there, while her bodyguard looked on. Bodyguard because Gloriana's surname was Anastasia, and her father was Albert Anastasia, the founder of Murder Incorporated.

Albert Anastasia, of course, was shot down in a Manhattan barber shop in October 1957. The Anastasias moved away, and the house was bought by Buddy Hackett, the zany borderline Tourettes comic, with the help of Del Webb, who part-owned the New York Yankees, and was a developer in the Southwest and a casino owner. The history of Del Webb and Dan Topping, the Yankee owners who bought the team from the beer magnate Jacob Ruppert, is a fascinating one in itself; they sold the team to CBS after the 1964 World Series.

If you haven't read August's 2005 memoir, Cutty, One Rock, you really ought to. In the the meantime, here's a link to the New York Times' article about the house, in which August is interviewed...

AUGUST KLEINZAHLER'S GUARDIAN PROFILE

There was a very fine profile of my old friend August Kleinzahler in yesterday's Guardian review section (here), by James Campbell. Gus is hot right now, not only winning a Lannan award, but generating big heat in the vicious world of poetry by attacking not only establishment poets like Adam Kirsch and William Logan, but also the sainted Garrison Keillor. Campbell is very good in the way he lets his profile take both sides of the story, letting his picture of August answer Kirsch's analysis. Of course the photo of August that accompanies the piece does that too: wearing his Al 'the Blast' Gallo hat he looks every bit the retired Jersey gangster, but the cat he's holding suggests something else.

I've written about August before at IT, (here), when the NY Times asked him to celebrate the election in poetry, and no sooner had I done so than he won the Lannan award, showing the power of influence Irresistible Targets can have. But I didn't really praise his poetry enough (I must like it; I published a few chapbooks of it, and according to the piece, they may be worth something more than chump change now). That's why I was glad Campbell chose such a good example to accompany the article, a segment from 'Before Dawn On Bluff Road' which shows August's amazing ability to weave rhythms out of the most uncommon poetical words, his confident appropriation of language, and most of all, the unexpected emotion that gives the poem its impact.

August has always been the antithesis of the poetasters, the creative writing professors who write poems about chopping wood and walking through the fields, the Oxford-educated grant-seekers, and the rest. He's been critical of them, and it irritated some critics that he would do so when he proved himself somewhat adept at working the business of poetry while refining its craft. Poetic politics are so vicious, to adapt an old saying about academics, because the stakes are so low. But the real stakes is the writing itself, something few poetasters remember.

Since August has turned 60, and has won the Griffin prize as well as the Lannan, I suppose I'll have to stop referring to him as the best young poet in America. But I'm happy to refer to him as the best poet in America, and celebrate him out of the mainstream as well as in it.

IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS SHOWS ITS POWER: KLEINZAHLER WINS LANNAN AWARD

No sooner does Irresistible Targets plug the work of August Kleinzahler, than the Lannan Foundation awards him their literary award for his poetry, a cool $150,000 which is good news if you're August, his bookie, or a long-lost relative fallen on hard times. See the Lannan website announcement here, but be warned about the photo and the flowers! Sadly, I can't capture the picture and put it here.

This site has been less than totally kind about the Lannan awards before, but let's just say that this time they got it right, and it's long overdue...

SPEAKING POETIC TRUTH TO POWER: KLEINZAHLER TAKES TIMES

The New York Times said, some months ago, that August Kleinzahler was pugnacious, had charm, and could write poetry. The LA Times called him the bad boy of American poetry. All of this is true, although the pugnacity is probably more evident to critics, professors of creative writing, and poetasters than it has been to me since I first met him some thirty years when our paths finally crossed (after much build-up by mutual friends) in Montreal.

So imagine my surprise when the NYT invited the pride of San Francisco, via Ft Lee New Jersey, to comment on the election, alongside John Ashberry and three others, and guess what, August's isn't the poem set among rolling wheat fields...in fact you can check it out right here.

It sure is an improvement over Tom 'The World Is Fat' Friedman, or Maureen 'Edwards Spends Almost As Much On Haircuts As I Do' Dowd! Check out his poetry, and his essays; in fact the NYT must dig his act, because he's in this weekend's book review with a fine appreciation of James Merrill, find it here (though I might contend Richard Wilbur, among those writing in rhyme and metre, is at least Merrill's elegant equal)

But Augie's the real deal, if not quite as pugnacious as Mike Singletary. But we are talking poets here...