A successful example of such an interaction occurred in Canberra in August this year where the Chicago-born performance poet, Miles Merrill, collaborated with the Gai Bryant Quartet in a concert held at the Street Theatre. Merrill is one of the country’s most accomplished performance poets and Gai Bryant is a strong saxophone player in the bop and post-bop tradition. The music was, for the most part, closely arranged to suit the poetry performance and convincingly reinforced the various moods established by the poet. Once, a more ad-lib approach was used and this too (though inherently risky) worked well. The whole event was reminiscent of Charles Mingus’ 1957 album The Clown, which featured improvising spoken word artist, Jean Shepherd. It’s worth noting here too that Bryant’s group also played several pieces without the poet — implying perhaps that such collaborations have their natural limits.(...)
In the work I (and sometimes fellow poet, Lynn Hard) have done so far with musicians including (...), I have tended to strike a different balance. In a performance Lynn and I gave with the Luke Sweeting Trio (piano, bass, drums) at The Loft in Canberra in June this year we viewed the music as a support and an intensifier to the poetry rather than the poetry’s being an addendum (or introduction) to the music. Several of Lynn’s poems were written as responses to well-known jazz standards such as ‘Whisper Not’ and ‘Milestones’ and began with a complete chorus of the tune played first by the trio, followed by the poem which was timed to take up one or two choruses. On this occasion all of our poems were about jazz in one way or another – though I have performed with jazz musicians (eg. Eric Ajaye on bass) some of my poems on other themes with, I hope, equal effectiveness.
The author (Geoff Page) has added tracks so that you can hear the performances and how they work together. I listened to one and thought it was fairly successful, although the poet spoke over the background music, and that seemed to confine him (or at least, strongly encourage him) to speak in a cadence I don't know if the work would have otherwise required/suggested. The other audio clip was of the poem Parable in 4/4 by Geoff Page as well, with the text accompanying it. The sound bite for this poem was, I felt, much more successful for showcasing the poem, since the music was less distracting, but I imagine a musician may disagree with me. (It was also gratifying to hear the audience's reaction in the second clip).
This article comes from the Australian poetry review Cordite: "Published four to six times a year (and with various special issues in addition), [it] is dedicated to showing off new and established Australian poets to the world. The journal posits the immortal phrase ‘words are bullets’ by promoting irreverent and experimental poetics." It also features guest editors for each issue, which I thought was interesting. The review features art, essays, interviews, and translations in addition to the poetry. I browsed through the issue, and found a lot of interesting pieces (and the accompanying artwork was enjoyable) but many of the pieces were heavily formatted, and it would have been too tough to recreate here (I guess I should have expected that with experimental poetry). I would of course suggest reading them anyway! This one, Dropstitch amused me particularly as I like to knit.
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