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The new Everyman's Library Pocket Poets collection, JAZZ POEMS, selected and edited by Knopf poet Kevin Young, offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music that inspired them. In his introduction, Young writes:
At its best, jazz also offers a kind of redemption, evoked in this book's closing poem, "The Journey." Written by Lawson Fusao Inada, it is a fine poem by a poet too often overlooked—not only is he the first Asian American poet published in the States, but he has consistently written about jazz. His poem, picturing an afterlife of music, is one that the blues may not often invoke but that jazz seems to require and insist upon. Soaring in a spiritual, moaning like the blues, rolling along like justice or the rock'n'roll it inspired, jazz challenges us to hear the world anew, even though Billie Holiday sang, it "don't explain.""The Journey" is below, followed by Kevin Young reading one of his own poems. 
TODAY'S PODCAST:  Listen to a recording of Kevin Young reading "The Grift"Excerpt from JAZZ POEMS. Originally published in BEFORE THE WAR by Lawson Fusao Inada. Copyright © 1970. Excerpted by permission of Harper Collins. Recording from BLACK MARIA. Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Young. Recorded by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of these excerpts may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publishers. We welcome your feedback. Please send any thoughts or questions to knopfwebmaster@randomhouse.com You received this issue because your email address is in Knopf's Poem-a-Day mailing list. To unsubscribe, send a blank email to unsub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. Or if you received this poem as a forward and wish to subscribe, send a blank email to sub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. |
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