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.