Like a Poet Saying Yes

J. B. Spins calls attention to the collection Jazz Poems, edited by Kevin Young, and even quotes from Dana Gioia’s “Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931)”:

He dreamed he played the notes so slowly that
they hovered in the air above the crowd
and shimmered like a neon sign.

Ian McCluskey, meanwhile, is a self-described “Mad angel-headed hipster in the starry dynamo of night,” as well as a blogger-poet. His May 13 entry, “Hitchin Desert Blacktop,” uses Bix in an unexpected juxtaposition:

Brakemen and Bix Beiderbecke. Long lonesome
and bald tires. Pintos and bays, sorrels and dun.
If you say the names of the desert it’s a letter
you type, old Smith-Corona chatter and click clack
of the Santa Fe.

Bix appears in other poems, as well, including Michael Longley’s “To Bix Beiderbecke.” It begins this way:

In hotel rooms, in digs you went to school.
These dead were voices from the floor below
Who filled like an empty room your skull,

Poet Rod Jellema, in 1999, wrote the epically titled “Bix Beiderbecke Composing a Suite for Piano, 1930–1931, mist, candlelights, cloudy, flashes, dark.” It ends this way:

Shaded from morning stabs of light,
he got back to where he was going all along,
the dreaming mind, the diamond-making dark.

Other poets have been content to merely celebrate Bix’s moniker. There is, for instance, Hayden Carruth’s “The Fantastic Names of Jazz,” which reads, in full:

Zoot Sims, Joshua Redman,
Billie Holiday, Pete Fountain,
Fate Marable, Ivie Anderson,
Meade Lux Lewis, Mezz Mezzrow,
Manzie Johnson, Marcus Roberts,
Omer Simeon, Miff Mole, Sister
Rosetta Tharpe, Freddie Slack,
Thelonious Monk, Charlie Teagarden,
Max Roach, Paul Celestin, Muggsy
Spanier, Boomie Richman, Panama
Francis, Abdullah Ibrahim, Piano
Red, Champion Jack Dupree,
Cow Cow Davenport, Shirley Horn,
Cedar Walton, Sweets Edison,
Jacki Bvard, John Heard, Joy Harjo,
Pinetop Smith, Tricky Sam
Nanton, Major Holley, Stuff Smith,
Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berigan,
Mr. Cleanhead Vinson, Ruby Braff,
Cootie Williams, Cab Calloway,
Lockjaw Davis, Chippie Hill,
And of course Jelly Roll Morton.

Finally, Bix’s shadow can be seen in Philip Larkin’s 1954 ode to another early jazz legend, “For Sidney Bechet”:

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.

This sounds suspiciously like the wisecracker Eddie Condon’s 1947 description of Bix’s music, which, he attested,  “came out like a girl saying yes.”

Comments

[Mike Smolinsky]

I read somewhere that James Merrill's "The Victor Dog" name checks Bix.

I just googled "bix beiderbecke" and "donald justice" and it turns out they died on the same day. It looks like Beiderbecke died when Don was just a kid, so I'm sure they never crossed paths, but it seems somehow like they should have.

[Brendan Wolfe]

Thanks for the heads up, Mike. Here's the beginning of "The Victor Dog" by James Merrill:

Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez,
The little white dog on the Victor label
Listens long and hard as he is able.
It's all in a day's work, whatever plays.

***

I don't know anything about Bix & Donald Justice, but there's a Bix & Donald Hall connection. This is from "The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon" (1995):

Jane Jennifer Kenyon was born on May 23, 1947, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her father played the piano for a living. Reuel Kenyon (1904–1982) grew up the son of a butcher, and his mother was the fierce Methodist grandmother of Jane’s poems. When he was only fourteen, he played for fraternity dances at the University of Michigan. After high school, he studied architecture, more his passion than music was, but could not afford to take a degree. Instead he sailed to Europe, where he spent the 1920s playing le jazz hot in Paris and on the Lido; he recorded hundreds of sides in these years, with Lud Gluskin et Son Jazz. (A discophile presented Jane with an LP after her father’s death; we listened to young Reuel’s barrelhouse left hand.) He returned to the United States as the depression began, when his father was dying. Then he toured with big bands like Eugene Goldkette’s, living out of a suitcase, playing dance halls one night in Cleveland and the next in Akron. In 1930 he jammed with Bix Beiderbecke in Walled Lake, Michigan, a wild Prohibition town north of Detroit. His first marriage was childless and ended in divorce. During the war he was performing with a dance band at a hotel in downtown Detroit, where he met Jane’s mother Polly, who played cocktail piano and sang in the hotel’s bar.

[Mike Smolinsky]

Dude, how fast do you type?