Jazz Poetry

We've focused our attention of poetry during the Harlem & Jazz ages. At http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/jzpoem.html, there is a beautiful selection of poetry and art from this time period. I encourage everyone to check it out, it really is spectacular.

According to this site, the works of poets began to show an increasing lack of formality and conventional style.The innovations taking place in poetics were juxtaposed with the evolution of jazz music in the early twentieth century. The simultaneous evolution of poetry and jazz music was apparently not lost upon musicians and poets of the time. Amid the chaos of the 1920s, these two art forms merged and formed the genre of jazz poetry. The site states that the earliest poets coined as "jazz poets" simply referred to jazz music in their works. Although the early "jazz poets" were influenced and intrigued by jazz, they were not all true "jazz poets." Many critics are still arguing about the definition of jazz poetry, yet most scholars acknowledge that jazz poetry must imitate jazz music in its rhythm and style.

It would be interesting to approach a poem in our Harlem Reader to see if the poetry has the same rhythm as jazz music. It would make sense to assume that most poetry from this era would sound like jazz. I thought this was just an interesting site with great information about the poetry that emerged from this time.

Billie Holiday, Queen of Jazz

I remember sipping diet Pepsi from a tall glass on the veranda outside my grandparent’s home in Slidell, Louisiana. The melancholy notes of Billie Holiday would float from the record player into the humid summer nights, mingling with the sound of crickets and the smell of heavy southern spices from dinner. My grandfather would sing the words perfectly along with Miss Holiday, taking my hand and dancing me around the plastic porch furniture. I can still hear grandpa’s voice singing Billie Holiday on those hot summer nights. I realize that Billie Holiday didn’t sing during the Roaring Twenties, but she did surface shortly after in 1933.

Billie Holiday became the queen of jazz just after the Jazz Age. The first song she ever recorded was “Your Mother’s Son-In-Law” released November 27, 1933. This song is considered important because it was Holiday’s introduction to the world and her signature song in the early thirties. The song could be classified as a love ballad, but it is more of a silly tune about a woman wishing the man she is singing about would be her mother’s son-in-law. I chose this song because you can hear the fun and light-hearted attitude Holiday had while performing the song. Many of her recorded songs talk about the tragedy of love and the longing she had for a great and memorable love. I found “Your Mother’s Son-In-Law” a nice change to such serious lyrics. Besides Holiday’s unique voice, the song is accompanied by jazz musicians Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden on the trumpet and piano. It is a great song, I encourage everone to listen to any of Billie Holiday. She was fabulous. I found the lyrics and the song information at www.billieholidaysongs.com.

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

When we began reading Fitzgerald's "The Beautiful and Damned" I was curious as to how Anthony Patch and Gloria reflected the author and his wife, Zelda. My first post demonstrated the wild couple. For my paper, I wrote a biography of Hemingway through his novels, for his personal life greatly reflected in his works. I've read "The Sun Also Rises" and was delightfully surprised by the information I found concerning the storie's origons. Here is an exerpt from my paper. May you find it helpful when you begin reading Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises."

""During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, the same year as The Torrents of Spring.. “F. Scott Fitzgerald described Hemingway’s book as ‘a romance and a guidebook.’ It also became, in the words of critic Sibbie O’Sullivan, ‘a modern-day courtesy book on how to behave in the waste land Europe had become after the Great War’” (2). The Sun Also Rises successfully portrays its characters as survivors of a misplaced and confused generation.
The material for the novel resulted from a journey Hemingway made with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and several friends to Pamplona, Spain, in 1925. Among them was Lady Duff Twysden, a beautiful socialite with whom Hemingway was in love and the inspiration for the novel’s Lady Brett Ashley. There was also a Jewish novelist and boxer named Harold Loeb, source of Robert Cohn, whom Hemingway threatened after learning that he and Lady Duff had had an affair. Lady Duff’s companion was a bankrupt Briton as is the character Mike Campbell. The trip ended poorly when Lady Duff and her companion left their bills unpaid. The ending of the novel is only slightly more heartbreaking, yet it recovers that precious value which makes life livable in a war-wearied world: friendship (5).""

2.) "Hemingway: An Introduction." eNotes: Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Penny
Satoris. Seattle: eNotes.com LLC, 2003. 2 October 2007.
http://www.enotes.com/hemingway-masters/47396.

5.) The Nobel Foundation. Ernest Hemingway: A Nobel Prize in Literature 1954.
10-2-07.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html