Japan, Jazz, and North Carolina; or, The geography of Lenard D. Moore's poetry

“nothing but chops/ baby, yes, chops/ nothing but chops/  yes, yes, yes/  chops, nothing but/ chops, baby, yes” – Interlude, a poem from Lenard D. Moore’s The Geography of Jazz (Blair, 2020)

Three things would seem to define Lenard D. Moore as a poet: North Carolina, jazz, and haiku and other forms of traditional Japanese poetry. And in an interview with Moore, Jazz Poetry as a Message of African American Culture (Mississippi Quarterly 75.1, 2022), John Zheng, poet and professor of English since 1996 at Mississippi Valley State University, will focus on Moore’s jazz poems in The Geography of Jazz (originally published by Mountains and Rivers Press, 2018).

To Moore, jazz is part of the fabric and part of the quilt of America: “As an expressive form it is so important that it emerges in the way we talk and walk.” A celebration of African American life and culture, it is appreciated all over the world: “Jazz has a way of bringing everyone together.”

“Jazz is the reason I write jazz poetry.” Moore remembers that he began listening to jazz as a teenager, mostly Herbie Hancock, whose album ”Feet Don’t Fail Me Now” Moore’s uncle played over and again. “Hancock’s jazz tunes are memorable. His jazz expression compels the audience to listen, to snap, to sway, to swing, and to dance … it makes the listener move. If you don’t move, then you cannot be alive.” And from his early twenties Moore would listen to jazz on a daily basis.

Another early influence was the poetry of the late Michael S. Harper (1938-2016) and his book, Dear John, Dear Coltrane (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970 – “A friend told me,/ He’d risen above jazz./ I leave him there.”). Harper incorporated much history as well as music into his poetry. And Moore, too, wants to document African American life and culture in his jazz poems.  

An early poem, Raleigh Jazz Festival, 1986, for example, commemorates jazz in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina and Moore’s home base (“pigeons peck peanuts,/ drum beaks/ on the sidewalk),” the most often reprinted of Moore’s jazz poems collected in The Geography of Jazz.

North Carolina jazz greats. Even as Moore states that “there is no way a poet can mention all the musical influences on his or her poetry,” in The Geography of Jazz Lenard D. Moore never the less manages to mention 28 jazz musicians (the poem Lenox Lounge, Harlem, NY alone will add the names of another 12 musicians jamming at the historically renowned jazz venue to the list).

Moore will focus on three jazz greats born in North Carolina (“I, too, am from North Carolina”): John Coltrane (1926-1967), Thelonious Monk (1917-1982), and Max Roach (1924-2007).

A John Zheng favorite poem is Max Roach Speaks to an Audiophile (“I can hear the drumbeats”): “I bebopped bass drums,/ didn’t want to keep my sticks// to beat regular,// …// I wanted fan’s ears/ filled with something new,// a different sky/ each day. …/ …”

One of my own favorites is Ascension: John Coltrane: “…/ I had to escape anything too strict,/ take ‘Giant Steps’ all the way/ from Hamlet, North Carolina./ …/ I wanted to play on and on,/ sail as long as the horn could/ and eventually come back again/ as if I had never left./ …”

At the Train Stop. In the autumn 2007 Lenard Moore took a train trip from Raleigh to New York. The train made a stop in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Thelonious Monk’s hometown. Along the way Moore wrote one of his most memorable and evocative jazz poems, At the Train Stop.

One stanza long, all 23 lines are reprinted in Moore’s interview with John Zheng. It runs in part:

“I imagine the quick hand:/ Thelonious Monk waves/ at red, orange, yellow leaves/ …/ Alone in this seat,/ I peer out the half-window/ at the rainbow of faces/ bent towards this train/ that runs to the irresistible Apple,/ …/ I try so hard to picture him/ until his specter hunkers/ at the ghost piano, foxfire/ on concrete platform./ Now I can hear the tune ’Misterioso’/ float on sunlit air./ …”

Some of the other jazz artists given a poem of their own are jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis (Sunday Evening, the first ‘jazz poem’ Moore wrote after listening to a concert in Raleigh in 1989), Ray Charles, Miles Davis (Blue in Green), Dizzy Gillespie, Oliver Lake, and jazz singers Nancy Wilson (The Idea of Elegance), Carmen Lundy, Casandra Wilson, Nneena Freelon, Dianne Reeves, and singer/pianist Nina Simone (1933-2003), another major North Carolina born jazz musician.

And there are poems on poets Langston Hughes (Moore listening, with others, to Hughes's 12 Moods for Jazz on the record player), and New Orleans born ‘beat’ poet Bob Kaufman (see Index).

New Orleans Suite. Honing his jazz chops, for 25 years, since 1999 Lenard D. Moore has read his jazz poems with jazz musicians and other artists across the country. Believing that “experimentation has a way of bringing about discovery,” one of his innovations is ‘jazzku’, a variation of traditional Japanese forms like haiku and tanka. As in American Jazzku (96^th Street Library, New York City):

“We sit in a hush so deafening/ it tingles my ears/ for what will burst/ into talk,/ into poems.”

But we must turn now to the last, and at eight pages also the longest jazz poem collected in The Geography of Jazz. New Orleans Suite is a poem in seven parts. But even as you have to read the first six parts to fully appreciate the seventh, printed below, each poem will stand on its own, in a suite for New Orleans that represents the best in the art of Lenard D. Moore as a jazz poet.

7. On Bourbon Street. “Windy throb of night./ We stand in long coats,/ facing the open door./ Glistening gold in obsidian hands,/ rhythmic horns persist,/ an eruption./ The sweet, metallic sound/ we seek: trumpets/ flaring harmony./ We linger. Stars/ punctuate the indigo sky./ This is how jazz allures:/ a brilliant movement,/ voluptuous music,/ spreading, molten,/ fluent/ as a trail of smoke./ Blue birds blaze/ midnight air./ We take flight.”

UFI // 24 July 2024     

Note: Conversations with Lenard D. Moore, edited by John Zheng, consisting of 16 interviews conducted between 1995 and 2023, will be released later this year by the University Press of Mississippi in their Literary Conversations series. It will include two interviews by Zheng, the above mentioned Jazz Poetry … and a 2017 interview focused mainly on Moore’s haiku writing.

See also the Reading Black article on Lenard D. Moore’s Long Rain (Wet Cement Press, 2021).

READER FEEDBACK

On 30 July 2024 Lenard D. Moore wrote:

Dear Uffe,

Wow! I am so grateful to you for your insightful article on The Geography of Jazz. Your excellent article is so well researched! I am delighted to know that you have sent a copy to John Zheng, and have included information about the forthcoming book, Conversations with Lenard D. Moore, edited by Zheng, in your article. Thank you so much.

And I really like the title for your article!

A few days before uploading the article on my website, I had asked Lenard D. Moore if he remembered what year he took that train trip from Raleigh to the “irresistible Apple” (New York), making a stop in Rocky Mount, Thelonious Monk’s home town. He did! Moore wrote back:

As to your request, I wrote the poem At the Train Stop on November 30, 2007. I finished writing the poem at 1:52 P.M. For decades, I have written the date and the time at the end of my poems or at the bottom of the page in my notebooks as soon as I finish writing them.

All the best, Lenard