The Reader_010925_Coltrane

Program Introduction

A poem for Coltrane, the melodist poet

Three years ago, City Light Books published Will Alexander’s poetry collection titled “Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane” It was a must read for fans of Coltrane and radical poetry. For Will is never the kind of poet to write for popular accessibility. He challenges and explores, just like what Coltrane exemplifies in his playing. This episode of The reader begins with a live rendition of Coltrane’s most popular Rogers and Hammerstein classic “My Favorite things”, a live recording of a performance in Belgium back in 1965; and ends with another live recording made in France the same year, one of his more progressive iconic work “Ascension”. The two pieces marked nails a paradox of human artistic desire to advance in the substantial sensibilities of art, in Coltrane’s case, modern jazz. We have included a clip of his explanatory quote on music, at the beginning of “My Favorite things” that we’ve taken from an interview he did in 1966. The sound is the voice of the soul. In between the two live recordings, is the body of a verse scraped from impressions reading Will Alexander’s collection of poems, for the poet of a melodist, John Coltrane.

Will for John

Hey John,

your notes are parallels to nanograms

as dazzling wattage

as light on its feet

a billionth of a gram

how do we respond?

Your lines, images, and

appropriation of vocabulary

from sciences, mathematics and

world dialects

adoration unwithheld

yours a kinetic explosion of language

it emanates the love-making of

the surreal and the futuristic

black and afro

you are the crossoverer

you free the jazz from its

music conventions

you climbed the stars

cosmic as ray-guns shoting

blasting your dedication

there is no google search

for the vocabulary of your verses

your stanzas your sonic bitches brew

you challenge everyone

your disquiet journals of notes

tailored your preference of

beauty in its integrity

flowing with your persona

and lingual maturation of high art

into the realm of the commoners

with its

itinerant breathing codes

and juxtapositions of inaudible nuances

there is multitudes of voices

in your verses

you did away with all the formalities of dress-codes

for the bourgeoisie of the language

no

capitals

no puncuation

no standards of syntex

even wrong spellings

and non-cordial vocabulary

the voice glisten to themselves

and the void

continued to blaze

as eccentric and courageous

they are literary

you invents new selves

new meaning

new words

they are at times chemical

the chains of metaphors derailed

prejudice and judgement

the utterance

sonically blinds with grace

as a melodist

an obsessive scribbler of

a non-definable language

as quantum

as perpetual

as inter-dimensional kindling

it was your sonic grammar that climbed

and now registers

as sonic echo far beyond gregarious misnomer

not as a dazed mercurial haunting

or as plague

or as sound that roams as superstitious poltergeist

as profoundly philosophical

altering of itself

not as linguistic drama

but the breakdown of conventions

of thoughts on expression

and expansion of new frontiers

for ideas and words

to rub shoulders

but as a prophetic anthem

of oneself