The Jazz Poems of Grace Schulman

Jazz has dominated my life and work as long as I can remember, especially Art Tatum’s quicksilver arpeggios, Billie’s high-lows, and Coltrane’s improvisations in Kind of Blue, of which I wrote: “if only my heart could teach my hands to play / and get it right on the first take.” In writing about each one, I hoped that I could capture something of the sound in my words – not how it felt, not even its larger implications, but the amazing sound.

It was Thelonius Monk, though, who changed my life. Before I found my vocation as a writer and teacher of poetry, I covered books for a fashion magazine. I saw around me strangled waists, sleek heads, and breadknife heels. Then one night I heard the Monk play in a club on Astor Place, thumps, craggy runs, one-finger-jabs on keys that were hot pans, heels dug in wood, soles flapping like seals. Suddenly, he snapped his fingers and shaped pain and joy into order. That was form. Not the superimposition of form, unrequired and pasted on, but this urgent shaping out of darkness that came from the welling up of intense emotion. To capture my amazement, I wrote it this way in “Thelonius Himself”:

And all was void, as before Creation
and there was light. I left the job next day.

In short, I’ve been drawn to jazz not only for the excitement of the music but for its impact on people’s lives. Like all great art it has the power of metaphor. In the title of my earlier poetry collection, The Paintings of Our Lives, I intended “our lives” to emphasize human insights, either of the painter or the viewer, occasioned by great paintings. So, it is with jazz. I will listen to jazz as long as I have the privilege of writing poems, and I hope to be doing both for the rest of my days.

Grace Schulman
April 2017

Author of seven books of poems, Schulman was awarded the 2016 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry by the Poetry Society of America.

“Grace Schulman is a poet of great insight into our human capacity for joy and sorrow. There is great praise in her work, of life and death and the trembling in-between, and of solace and grief and faith.

We get Itzhak Perlman’s missing string, Thelonius Monk’s snapping fingers, John Coltrane’s desire to ‘get it right on the first take.’ Let us be grateful for the generous gifts of such a poet.”

Philip Schultz
2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Title: The Jazz Poems of Grace Schulman
Catalog #: W-2-2017

Release date: 2017
UPC: 686751316074
©2017 MEII Enterprises/BMI