...LISTEN (a poem after Jan Garbarek/Thomas Transtromer)

I started this poem between August and October 1985. That was the time when I had just moved into my flat in Belsize Park, alone. I was listening to Jan Garbarek's new album, It's OK To Listen To The Gray Voice, in which each of the tunes is based on, and titled with a line from, a Tomas Transtromer poem. There is a lot of inward looking in there, and it was resonating with me at that time, for reasons I got then, but understand a lot better now. It wasn't based strictly on either the title track, nor on "One Day In March I Go Down To The Sea And Listen", which is why the title has its ellipsis at the start. I know I have made notes for both those other titles, but I haven't found them yet.

...Listen was published in December 1987, as part of 'Five Jazz Poems' in Hollands Maandblad, which, as I've said before here, was one of my favourite of my all poetry publications. I've continued to write poems when the jazz music takes me. I was putting some together, maybe for a 30th anniversary at Hollands Maandblad, or for this blog, or something else, when I started looking at this one again. And when I did I reworked it considerably. In fact, what I hear in it now is a lot of 'Witchi-Tai-To', the Jim Pepper tune, in Garbarek's later version, not the one with Bobo Stenson in 1973. It's got the feel of a ritualistic chant, which is an approach to a feeling of aloneness from another side. It was a gray voice I was hearing, and I was not sure it was OK.


...LISTEN
                   after Tomas Transtromer via Jan Garbarek

 

You're learning

something you've known

long time gone

crazy with rain

falling in waves

driving away

wipers beat

blinking not

crying but

trying to

make her repeat

what you don't

want to hear

but you think

needs to

appear & fill

spaces

between you

still

.

so you'll feel

pain, know

enough to

push her

away, though

she's not

there in the

other seat

so push instead

the last dry

grain of love

to a place

beyond care

you'll never

find again

not in this

rain & then

.

you can

drift

& drift away

away with

& drift away with

the rain

drift

away.

GRAY VOICE: A POEM

I wrote this poem in December 1986, in New York City, though the particular circumstances escape me. That may have been the time I did a reading at The Ear Inn; I'll have to find my old diaries to check. It was published in New York, in a New York poetry magazine called Giants Play Well In The Drizzle, and in December 1987 (in English) in a special jazz issue of Hollands Maandblad, published in den Haag, which remains one of my favourite poetry appearances. Its inspiration was the Jan Garbarek song/album called It's OK To Listen To The Gray Voice, which takes its title, as do all the songs on the record, from lines in poems by Tomas Transtromer. So it's a third-generation inspiration. I was particularly looking to reflect the sheet-like wave of sound David Torn's guitar makes on this album, the only one on which he played with Garbarek.


GRAY VOICE

The bright recurring dream whose wings glow with fire finds
A place behind your hands, moving as they begin to move,
Shadowing every splash of light their flapping reveals.
You are the surface of a mirror that has started
To fragment, a single crack reaching out to all
Four corners of the glass, without disturbing the reflection:
Either you, or me, or parts of each, or either, scarred.

THE CROSSING PLACE: TRANSTROMER VIA GARBAREK

In 1984 Jan Garbarek released a record called It's OK to listen to the gray voice, whose title I recognised as a line from a Tomas Transtromer poem. I'd been reading Transtromer for a long time, and I had already written poetry inspired by various jazz tunes, including some by Garbarek and Eberhard Weber. Listening to this music prompted a couple of poems, a second-generation pass-the-parcel regeneration. I find they're closer to the music than to the original poem, though not a shade on either, but I am pleased I can still find echoes of music and poetry in them.

I wrote this poem in July 1986. As it happened, the next summer I met Garbarek and Weber on a flight to Oslo for the Bislett Games, and I got them to sign a chapbook of mine called Mucho Mojo which I happened to be carrying, and which included a poem written after a tune by Weber. I sent the two Transtromer/Garbarek poems to him ('just put Jan Garbarek, Oslo,' he told me. 'That's all the address you'll need') but I heard no more.

Now Tomas Transtromer has died. I'll likely write more on him soon, but for now I'll share one of those poems. 'The Crossing Place' was published in Hollands Maandblad in 1988, and in The Windhorse Review (Yarmouth, Nova Scotia) in 1993. I was intending it to be the title poem of a short collection...


THE CROSSING PLACE

Empty borders extend
All the way into the center of the night
I could be
Driving a heap through downtown Bridgeport
At 3am snow falling & wipers
Rocking me to sleep. I know
If I sleep now, with this image in my mind
I will have dreams, & I may never wake
Again. They may take
Me across the ocean which divides me
From myself, never again be there
On the other side, where you were
Waking, sleeping, peacefully where
Falling snow makes a blanket, sparkling
Then melting, to keep us warm.