by Ted Taylor

A few years back, renowned guitarist Joshua Breakstone came up with the idea of doing some jazz and poetry nights, where local poets could join his band on stage.  We’d start in Kyoto, and if it went well, we’d try to expand it to other cities in Japan, and liaise with local creatives there.  Pandemic restrictions delayed the event for a while, but the first one was held last December, before a sold out audience.  WiK members Mayumi Kawaharada and Robert Yellin gave terrific performances. 

I reflected afterward that poetry is a medium that is better spoken than simply read, for it is in performance that verse really comes alive.   Test this theory for yourself, as we will return to Kyoto’s Bond’s Rosary on July 1st.  A Tokyo event will hopefully follow later in the year.  

Below are the haiku I read at that December event.  The Kenneth Rexroth essay was edited together from a few sources.  The haiku were split into two sets, Autumn and Winter.  

REXROTH INTRO:

“What is jazz poetry? It isn’t anything very complicated to understand. It is the reciting of suitable poetry with the music of a jazz band, usually small and comparatively quiet. Most emphatically, it is not recitation with “background” music. The voice is integrally wedded to the music and, although it does not sing notes, is treated as another instrument, with its own solos and ensemble passages.  […] It comes and goes, following the logic of the presentation, just like a saxophone or piano… 

…Poetry and jazz gain new and different dimensions in association. Poetry has always gained by association with music . . . ancient China, Japan, India, Greece, the troubadours and minnesingers and scalds. […] Jazz poetry reading puts poetry back in the entertainment business, where it was with Homer and the troubadours. […] Poetry gains from jazz an audience of widely diversified character, people who are seriously concerned with music, but who do not ordinarily read verse and who care nothing for the conflicts and rituals of the literary scene. […] Jazz poetry gets poetry out of the classrooms and into contact with large audiences who have not read any verse since grammar school.

…[Here] the voice [becomes] another instrument in the band.  […] The reciting, rather than singing voice, if properly managed, swings more than an awful lot of vocalists.  With a poet who understands what is going on, they are not at the mercy of a vocalist who wants just to vocalize and who looks on the band as a necessary evil at best.  [The] emotional complexity of good poetry provides the musician with continuous creative stimulus, but at the same time gives him the widest possible creative freedom… 

… This poetry and jazz combination is harder work than either of the arts taken separately. 

 Jazz poetry is an exacting, cooperative, precision effort, like mountaineering. Everybody has to be perfectly coordinated; […] everybody has to be as socialized as six men on a rope working across the face of a cliff…

…[Thus] the combination of jazz and poetry requires good poetry, competent recitation, everybody in the group really digging what everybody else is doing, and, of course, real tasty music. Then it’s great, and everybody loves it, ‘specially you, baby.”

AUTUMN:

1.
Shinadani’s Treasures 
Lay scattered on the ground 
Crimson and gold.


2.
Yellow leaves 
Shown no regard
By men in grey suits.


3.
All that ripens
Must eventually fall.
Deepening autumn.


4.
Under a stone Buddhas sixth century gaze,
The temple’s lunch bell
Rings from a microwave.


5.
Trees speak of autumn. 
But winter too has a voice, 
Whispered on a slate grey sea.


6.
Under autumn’s perfection, 
My feet follow the ancient road, 
Bound-up in concrete.


7.
Gray obscures the edges,
As winter bides her time.
Days away, days away...


WINTER:

8.
Double-helix of steam
Rises from my coffee,
DNA of the day ahead.


9.
Across a gentle canvas of
A soft winter sunset,
I spilled my ink.


10.
Nothing growing   
In winter paddies  
But the shadows of running boys



11.
Sitting in the mountains,
Giving my life away
With every exhale.


12.
Wild grasses
Grow from cold moss
On Iwabune’s stone lantern.



13.
No rain,
But the clouds are daring you
To make plans.


14.
Flickering warmth
Helps stave off up to
12 centuries of cold.


15.
Old man in white mask
Covers his mouth
When he coughs.


16.
Resolution found,
The bickering weather gods
Settle on snow.


17.
In old Kyoto,
What is the 'kigo'
For tourist season?



18.
Young cut cedars, 
Thick as my leg,
To be used in the New Years celebrations.



19. 
Of a year on the wane,
Traces washed away by 
Sake and rain.


20.
Counting syllables
Will certainly cause you to 
Leave a haiku un...