>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Rob Casper: Joy Harjo and A.B. Spellman could not be better suited to be up here with me today. Both are claimed poets but both are also uniquely connected to music. Joy Harjo performed for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and currently tours with Aerodynamics. She has 5 CDs of music and poetry including her most recent award winning album of traditional fruit, Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won the Native American music award for best female artist of the year in 2009. Harjo currently has a commission from the Public Theatre of New York to write, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented, a musical play that will restore southeastern natives to the American story of blues and jazz. Speaking of jazz A.B. Spellman is an expert in the form. He published his first book of poems, The Beautiful Days, in 1964 by working as a jazz music reviewer. In addition to writing reviews, essays and poetry for Metronome, Down Beat and Rhythm Magazine, he published Four Lives in the Bepop Business in 1966. In 1975, Spellman became director of the Arts in Education Study Project for the National Endowment for the Arts where he worked until 2005. His service to the organization is honored by the A.B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy bestowed upon an individual who has contributed significantly to the appreciation, knowledge and advancement of the art form of jazz. Before we begin with the readings and the performances and then our conversation, I want to give us just a little bit of context. In the excellent reference book of Poet's Glossary, Edward Hirsch writes, "Song was originally inseparable from poetry. They were one in the same and poems were meant to be chanted and sung sustained by oral tradition." Poetry is still considered song in many parts of the world whether it is presented with or without musical accompaniment. The musical element is so intrinsic to poetry that one never forgets its origin in musical expression in singing, chanting and recitation to musical accompaniment. With that in mind please join me in welcoming Joy Harjo and A.B. Spellman. [ Applause ] >> Joy Harjo: [Inaudible] It's good to be here and especially to get to present with A.B. Spellman, who is one of the major ancestors of poetry jazz and so on. I also want to acknowledge Michael Harper, poet, whose poetry also led me to poetry and jazz. I'm just going to start with a piece called, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented. I'm a member of the Mvskoke Creek Nation from Oklahoma. Our people were moved from the southeast from Alabama. The Mvskoke homelands were all over the southeast, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee over into Mississippi, and the Mvskokian peoples were even all the way through the southeast, and we were part of the origin story of blues and jazz. We're often left out of the story. We're often left out of the story of American music, of American history. We've been essentially disappeared from the narrative. And yet, when you go to our ceremonial grounds, our dances, you can hear, you hear it, there it is. And if you think of the origin of jazz being Congo Square, where the African Peoples came, got free on Sundays, Congo Square was a Mvskokian tribal village and there it is. So, we were part of that story. This poem is for Jim Pepper Henry, one of the first, and I just lost my read somewhere. Thank you. Jim Pepper Henry, a Mvskoke Kaw, musician, played jazz and he was playing standards and working rock, mixing rock and jazz and his band was one of the first to do a fusion with beginnings. He was also part one of the people who began the world jazz. He helped, one of the originators of world music. Anyway I wrote this poem as a tribute to him and one of his most famous songs is Wichiti Tai To from the song that his grandfather taught him. So here I'll read the poem and it's called We Were There When Jazz Was Invented because I'm working on a story to include Native peoples, our Native peoples in an origin story. Okay, Wichiti Tai To. [ Music ] [ Speaking Native language ] [ Music ] I have lived 19,404 midnights, some of them in the quaver of fish dreams and some without any memory at all, just the flash of the jump from a night rainbow, to an island of fire and flowers-such a holy leap between forgetting and jazz. How long has it been since I called you back? After Albuquerque with my baby in diapers on my hip; it was a difficult birth, I was just past girlhood slammed into motherhood. What a bear. Beyond the door of my tongue is a rail and I'm leaning over to watch bears catch salmon in their teeth. That realm isn't anywhere near Los Angeles. If I dream it all back then I reconstruct that song buried in the muscle of urgency. I'm bereft in the lost nation of debtors. Wey yo hey, wey yo hey yah hey. Pepper jumped and some of us went with him to the stomp. All night, beyond midnight, back up into the sky, holy. [ Music ] It was a holy mess, wholly of our folly, drawn of ashes around the hole of our undoing. Back there the ceremonial fire was disassembled, broken and bare like chordal breaks forgetting to blossom. Around midnight, I turn my back and watch prayers take root beneath the moon. Not that dreams have anything to do with it exactly. I get jumpy in the aftermath of a disturbed music. I carried that baby up the river giving birth to nothing but the blues in buckskin and silk. Get back, I said, and what bird have you chosen to follow in your final years of solitude? Go ahead, jump holy said the bear prophet. Wey ya hah. Wey ya hah. All the way down to the jamming flowers and potholes. There has to be a saxophone somewhere, some notes bear little resemblance to the grown child. Now I've got to be dreaming. Take me back to Tulsa. I'm too young to marry. Take me back to Tulsa. I can only marry the music; the outlook's bleak without it I mean and then I don't. Too many questions mar the answer. Breath is the one and two and dream sweet prophet of sound, dream Mvskoke acrobat of disruption. It's nearing midnight and something holy is always coming around. Take love for instance, and the bare perfect neck of a woman who's given up everything for the forbidden leap to your arms as you lean over the railing to hear the music hopping at the jump pull of the line. She will never be here again in the break of the phrase back before this maverick music was invented. It's the midnight hour and sweet dark love bares it all. I can hear it again; the blue moon caving in to tears of muscle and blood. Birth of the new day begins less than one second after. It's that exact, this science of the holy. So that's where it is, this incubation of broken dreams. It took forever for that bear of a horn player to negotiate the impossible jump. Weh yo hey Weh yo hah, those water spirits will carry that girl all the way back to the stomp grounds where jazz was born. It's midnight. How holy. [ Music ] Thank you. [ Applause ] >> A.B. Spellman: That was gorgeous. This first poem is about aging. Something that happens to all of us and I am in the, I'm in my middle aging period I hope. [Laughter] We're asked to read poems that integrated music and, music and poetry and this poem actually is more about music as metaphor and so not much to tell you about it except that the weird words in the second stanza are technical terms of the drum. I did not make them up. It's called Groovin' Low. Any hipsters in the room will recognize this as a play on the title of a Dizzy Gillespie tune called Groovin' High. Whatever Dizzy was talking about I'm talking about getting older. [Laughter] My swing is more mellow these days: not the hard bop drive I used to roll but more of a cool foxtrot. My eyes still close when the rhythm locks; I've learned to boogie with my feet on the floor. I'm still movin', still groovin' still fallin' in love. I bop to the bass line now. The trap set paradiddles ratamacues and flames that used to spin me in place still set me off, but I bop to the bass line now. I enter the tune from the bottom up and let trumpet and sax wheel above me. So don't look for me in the treble, don't look for me in the fly staccato splatter of the hot young horn. No, you'll find me in the nuance hanging out in inflection and slur I'm the one executing the half-bent dip to the slow slowdrag with the smug little smile and the really cool shades. [ Applause ] This poem is a little dense. All right. I won't interpret it for you. Between the night and its shadow is the music. Between the music and the night is the song. Between the song and the music is the voice. Between the voice and the music is the self. Between the self and its song is the mind. Between the mind and the song is the melody. Between the song and its melody is the rhythm. Between the rhythm and the melody is the mind. Between the mind and its song is the word. Between the word and the mind is the voice. Between the voice and the word is the thought. Between the thought and the voice is the self. Between the word and the self is the shadow. Between the shadow and the self is the light. Between the light and the word is the music The song is the melody in the word in the rhythm. The self holds the mind to the word and the thought of the song. The voice in the song sings the self to the mind. The light lights the shadow of the voice and its melody. The rhythm moves the self through the dimming night's song. The thought in the song is of night's shadow without music. [ Applause ] This poem I wrote in a hotel room one night. Hotel rooms are good places to write poems. It was in Boston I believe, and I was listening to the radio and on one station I heard some of my favorite Johann Sebastian Bach. It was the keyboard concerto in f minor and then another station later I turned to another station and heard John Coltrane playing Trane Slow Blues. The thing about these two poets, these two musicians is that I as a poet aspire to be good. I think if I write enough poems maybe I'll stumble on a couple of great ones somewhere, but with people like Sebastian Bach and John Coltrane you deal with something greater than good, greater than great, you deal with the sublime, which I can't even aspire to. I don't think that there are five musicians on the planet at any given time who achieve that state where it gets to be about more than music, more than beauty, more than power, more than truth. It's something where you feel that you are absolutely changed on levels that you cannot parce. So, this poem. Dear John Coltrane, dead night has me writing poetry in another hotel room. J.S. Bach is on the radio, the keyboard concerto in f minor, the one you also hear on oboe or violin. The largo second movement behings and the book in my hand drops, the room fades, and I put my reason down to trail the bach of endless line along this earthless path. Each note full and bright, a brilliant footprint on the dark, through beauty, past knowledge and into that state that shines too much to be wisdom, is too transparent to be art. I catch a fear of the place where he will lower me when this transporting melody closes. Then it closes on itself, dear John, and I'm back at the beginning better. Later different station, cold room dimming, it's you, John, Trane Slow Blues. Now it's your line that opens and opens and opens and I'm flying that way again. Same sky, different moon, this midnight globe that toned those now lost blue rooms where things like jazz float the mind. This motion, the still and airless propulsion I know as inner flight. This view the one I cannot set with my eyes open. I hear the beginning approach and I know the line I travel was a horizon, the circle of the world. Another freedom flight to another starting place. If I believed in heaven, I would ask if you, J.C., and Bach ever swap infinite fours and jam the sound that light makes going and coming and if you exchange maps to those exclusive clouds you travel through. And do you give them names? You asked for three poems by other people? All right. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Rob Casper: So we're just going to take a second to get mic'd up and then we'll have our conversation. All right. Let's see. Am I live? Can you hear me? Now can you hear me? You can hear me, okay. Thanks to you both for contextualizing our conversation. Your readings made for very interesting contrasts in how poetry can engage with music and specifically jazz, and it made me think of these two quotes I pulled from both of you. In an interview recently, Mr. Spellman, you said I'm still a two-dimensional page poet at heart. That would be interesting to talk about that kind of realm in relationship to music especially when you're reading poems that are so indebted to music as the theme. By contrast, Joy, you say for me music gets into the places that words can't touch. When people ask me how do you do both disciplines by which you meant poetry and song, I say I think of it as one but it's almost like having two lovers. So, I thought we'd begin by just talking about for you, you know, in terms of forming content in terms of this relationship between these two, these two forms of expression how you negotiate that. >> Joy Harjo: Okay. I'm ready. Yeah, I was, I'm thinking what you said about a person of the book, and when I first started writing poetry, I always loved poetry and I came to poetry through music. My mother used to write songs and a lot of ballads, she loved Nat King Cole, and she also often played with country swing musicians in Tulsa, but I came to my education in poetry in the US educational systems and then later Indian boarding school and poetry was in a book. But then as I came to being a poet, I, and I'm a Mvskoke person I went looking for my people's poetry and found out I'm related distantly to Alexander Posey, a very well known Creek poet who was writing and alive during the time that blues and jazz, you know, around the time of Buddy Bolding and so on, and but then I also went back to I think where is our poetry? Most of our poetry, most of the world's poetry, isn't in books. It's part of, it's out of reality, oral traditions. So I went home, you know, home to the ceremonial grounds too and there is where I heard it's this incredible song poetry. A lot of it is announcement and there's a form to it and it's beautiful and that inspired me. Sometimes it's called meko hadjeda [phonetic] or in my pronunciation is horrible, but it's usually announcing, it's setting into place often poetry does, you know, Coltrane is setting into place a place where you can actually can see, hear the divine, you know, he's talking to God. And so in what we're going to hear we'll just play just not very much of it, but you can hear Sherman Franks who was very renowned as a speaker who is calling, talking about calling in leaders from other ceremonial grounds and talking to them about dances and saying come in and sit down. And then there's a whole, you know, calling in different grounds. So there's form, strict form to all of this. So I would like you to play the first it's called, I think it's the very first one, the top one. This is Sherman Franks. We'll just play a little of it so you can hear it. No, the very first link. It's called Stomp Dance. I'm sorry. What? It's the very first one. Yeah, go ahead. [ Speaking Native Language ] Okay. Thank you. So that's just a little bit of that form, that oratorical form, that to me is beautiful, and I'm learning Mvskoke, I don't know it well, but I want to learn it well enough so I can understand the form and exactly how it's put together, but it inspires me to hear that. And that is one form of Mvskoke poetry, yeah. >> A.B. Spellman: Yeah, I guess first of all there are several factors involved in my own inhibitions that lead me on the page primarily, and that has to do with the fact that I didn't come to poetry from the tradition as you did. I came, I came to music that way because I lived in jazz my whole life and later expanded my interest in music as I left the south, but no, it was, that was one world. And then when I became more literate in college when I started being exposed to a wider range of artists or writers, then that commitment to the page was sort of structured into my reflexive system. The poets that affected me most in my formative years in the 1950s were poets who were very concerned with measure, with [inaudible] were going to work with whether the line broke according to breath or according to text and things like that. And that really was my formative period. Now then when the movement began among African Americans or got, not when it began because it was always there, but when it got to be so prominent among African American people in the civil rights movements and the struggles for human rights and the anti-war movements and the movements of people with specific cultures when all of that developed, starting developing in the 60s, I was caught rather off guard. And so I'm confronted with things like meeting Malcolm X and telling him I'm a poet and him asking me, well, what does that have to do with what we're doing and me saying, well, not much. [Laughter] And that hurt. That hurt a great deal. Now the younger poets who came behind me, the younger African American poets, started from a different place because by that time they were, I mean I moved into the movement as a form poet, but the younger poets moved into the poetry and the movement at the same time and they took performance very, very seriously. They were faced with reaching audiences that were not people who sat in small rooms and discussed, you know, finite issues of aesthetics. They were trying to relate to something that was happening in the world that was greater than them, and this was very difficult for me. I never have been good at writing topical poems. I've tried I don't know how many times to write a poem about the killings on the streets of young Black men and never been able to succeed in pulling a poem off. I could write a great essay on it, and I've written pieces on it, but I have never been able to make a poem of it. And that's an ambition of mine. So, as goes to music, I have moved in with musicians. Musicians have found music in my poems and set them to music. And, in fact, I sent, I sent a piece in do you have it? It's called the Passion for John Coltrane and Bach. You don't have it? >> No, sir. >> A.B. Spellman: Okay. So, the composer named Jeff Scott has set several of my poems to music, and I read it with them and that works quite well. It's a good piece that he wrote, and I find myself now writing, I've just completed Legretto [phonetic] on the Great Migration where I could write for singers and for musicians, but as of a matter of performing the way Joy performs, I've read with Ann Halprin in New York this spring and she's working with her young nephew who is an alto saxophonist. She's writing a lot of her pages are sounds. I'm much, I'm just too inhibited to do that. >> Rob Casper: I do though wonder what it's like, what it was like to hear that piece performed, you know, what it was like to see music attached to that piece. And, Joy, I'm wondering when you write a poem that is printed in your new book, what is it like to read that poem as opposed to performing that poem? Sort of the converse of what I'm asking Mr. Spellman. >> A.B. Spellman: Well, for me the thing is I read with the musicians and it's a piece for a wind quintet, string quartet, jazz trio and me. And it's a pleasure because I actually listen, I try to read into the music. It's not background music. I read into the composition and it works quite well and it gives a great deal of satisfaction and it's has had good response so. >> Joy Harjo: Yeah, I started out just reading my poems and that one is the one I read. I haven't started trying to sing it and, but it's very different. What I've discovered is with Poetic Justice, and I'm one of that generation that I came out of Native rights movements part of the civil rights movements and so I started writing poetry out of response to what was going on. I'm terrible at occasional poems. I can't write on command either. I can't do it. I'm very, I can't do that, but the poems, my poems started coming out of the experience of young Native women who weren't often, you know, we weren't necessarily the speakers but we were experiencing what was going on. So one of mine for Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars (for we remember the story and must tell again so we may all live) is a poem for Anna Mae Pictou Aquash and that was the first song that I wrote, but I had the poem first and then I started reading my poems to music and working with a reggae artist and then it moved into singing. But then I found that when I started writing poems to sing it's phrasing, the lines are phrasing, they're like a horn riff, you know, they're phrasing. And so that's how, you know, it's all about rhythm. I think everything goes back to rhythm. I think the world started with rhythm. The big bang, it was somebody, you know, there you go. It started with rhythm and so that's, and so I started, you know, I have to move to it, you know, and it's on the page, you move to it on the page too. We all do, and I think when I heard Linton Kwesi Johnson read in the Netherlands and I thought, whoa. And then I heard Jayne Cortez and I thought there it is, you know, there it is. It's, you know. >> A.B. Spellman: I do think that music does affect my poetry because for one thing I write with a lot of iambics. This is not a conscious decision this just, it's something I discovered about myself that is, you know, there is rhythm. The line has to swing, the line has to scan and -- >> Rob Casper: -- swing and scan. >> A.B. Spellman: It has to, it has to do it. Even if they're not set metric values in there. So, I think that's why this proposal found the poems to be worth writing a piece for. >> Rob Casper: Yeah, yeah. >> Joy Harjo: Isn't the I am kind of a back beat anyway? >> A.B. Spellman: Yeah, it is. >> Joy Harjo: It is a back beat. >> Rob Casper: So I just want to ask one more question and then I'm going to open it up for all of you to ask questions, which is this is different cultural space music and poetry operates right now in America what you think that might say about either the power of either or if it's just a sort of artificial construction? >> Joy Harjo: Sometimes I think we're going back to that. I've felt when I, you know, when I, when I was at home and realized that it's poetry, music and dance are together that I think naturally they're together. They don't like to be apart. And I sometimes I see watching culture evolve from when I started writing in the 70s to the kinds of poetry, slam poetry and even images but and watching how all of that has evolved, I think maybe that's where it's headed or maybe that's where we've always been on some level is that we're, you know, they want to be together. >> A.B. Spellman: It's true you see it more and more and more by poets who are extremely musical and whose, even if they're not working with instruments their own presentation is more musical. I think that, and also you've got to realize things like the influence of hip hop on younger people [inaudible], which also like bridges this whole thing. So, anyway so I think, I think that, yeah, there are pockets where poets and poetry consumers sit in small rooms and deal in the old ways, but then there are lots of, there are larger spaces which draw more people where music and poetry do swing together. >> Joy Harjo: But even then it's important the impeccability of the word is important. >> A.B. Spellman: Yeah. >> Joy Harjo: You know even with performance that word is just as important as the impeccability of the music. >> Rob Casper: Anybody have any questions? Can you just go up to the mic? >> I'll kick it off. >> Rob Casper: Thank you. >> Hi, Joy. It's really good to see you again, and Mr. Spellman. You were talking about poetry and music I mean it's always been there. If you go to the Greek tragedies, you know, the choruses and, you know, the poets in jazz and hip hop and, you know, that's what it's all about. I wonder if both of you could comment on the influence that Black African American poetry in music has affected you in the Native spirit and vice versa, if there's been any influence of that in your production or your writing? Has there been any cross pollination there. >> Joy Harjo: Definitely. I think it's in America. I think it was there at Congo Square when our people were, you know, I can see the whole scene. I mean it was, you know, I think the African people then like our tribes here everybody knew their identity, still had their tribal identities and so I can see what went on. It was a crossover too. It didn't just go one way. There is no one way land bridge that Natives came across, you know. It doesn't, a healthy system, cultural, social, it goes like, you know, it feeds each other. And so for me I think of it beginning there but when I first started writing poetry as a student at the University of New Mexico, I went I thought tribal. Okay, who are the tribal people writing? I went over and started looking at African poets like Ocot Petit [phonetic] from Uganda and I got to meet him, but I started looking there to looking for somebody contemporary who was doing more poetry that was probably closer related to what I would think of as Mvskoke poetry and then, of course, a lot of the African, African American poets, June Jordan, there's just so many. Ishmael Reed brought, he helped start that multicultural poetry movement. He brought a lot of us to New York City in the late 70s and that's when I heard Jayne Cortez and something in her, you know, and we had a friendship through the years and it was like there, you know. It opened up that door for me. >> A.B. Spellman: Yeah, well music and poetry has been there in the beginning. In fact, I've always thought that prosody was an expression of the root of music in poetry that the poets needed a mnemonic to be able to remember so they had to develop forms to go with it and these forms were shaped by song. I've always thought that's been the case, but among African American poets the concern has always been there. Langston Hughes, for example, was very much committed to having, to finding a jazz voice in the poem and several of his poems like The Weary Blues and so forth are attempts to do that. He also worked early with the musicians. In 1958, he had a gig at the Village Vanguard working with Phineas Newborn who was the greatest jazz pianist you never heard of and Charles Mingus which wouldn't you like to have that with you on the stage? And so that's always been there. He also wrote with Kurt Vile and so forth. So, that's always been an element of the music. There's nothing new actually. It all was an expression of tendencies that have been in art from the beginning and so people like Jayne Cortez was the first musician I knew who, first poet I knew who traveled with a band. >> Joy Harjo: Yeah. >> A.B. Spellman: And I thought that was great. Mary Beraca did some great work with musicians specifically Craig Harris. [Inaudible] who died much too young was wonderful, was powerful with musicians. The difference is between this work, the modern work and the work of say the Beats was that you would have when Robert Bly or Kenneth Rexroth or those guys were reading poems with music they'd be at the stage and be some guy plucking along with them on the guitar, and it would be like background. It really wouldn't be very much integrated. The differences now is that it's one thing, that it's one thing, and that's where the power is. >> Rob Casper: You have another question? >> Hi. First off I really enjoyed this presentation, and I have two questions for you, Mr. Spellman. My love for jazz brought me into poetry and you mentioned John Coltrane. The first time I heard Coltrane is like even now it's like having an out of body experience, and I wanted to know when you started out what jazz musicians influenced you, touched you deeply to write and can you tell me why? And one more other question the Miles Davis movie with Don Cheadle. I waited years to see something like that. I was so totally disappointed. I just wanted to know, I just wanted to know what did you think of it? >> A.B. Spellman: Oh, man. [Laughter] Well, frankly they blew it. There's some good things in the movie. >> Joy Harjo: Yeah. >> A.B. Spellman: There's some good things. Don Cheadle did a great job, but there are too many compromises I think that had to be made to get the movie made. >> Joy Harjo: Yeah. >> A.B. Spellman: What's his name, the British actor? Something [inaudible]. Anyway his role was completely artificial through much, much of the movie and had nothing to do with anything Miles Davis ever did. That was a story, there's a lot of stories to be told about Miles Davis and they told just a small fraction of it. So, no, that was disappointing. It's hard to single out musicians who, jazz musicians who affected me because I mean I was so, it was a real pleasure to be immersed completely in music and lower Manhattan during the 1960s. That was a real, real pleasure because the music was everywhere, it was immediate, I knew the musicians, and I could stop by, I could stop by their pads in the afternoon and we'd sit there and then they'd show me what they were working on now. So that was, that was an immersion that I wish everyone could have. There aren't any more scenes like that today. So it's hard to single out people, but Coltrane does stand out. Coltrane does stand out because Coltrane's commitment was total. >> Joy Harjo: Yeah. >> A.B. Spellman: It was a total complete commitment. Someone asked him what is you want your music to do? And he said I would like to make people saints. And that's what he set out to do. He set out to change people. And so it was, that's how I got into writing about music because I would go to hear Trane, I would leave there dripping wet feeling like I had had my soul rinsed out and then I'd read Down Beat magazine and they'd say this is the worst thing to happen to jazz ever. >> Joy Harjo: Oh, geez. >> A.B. Spellman: So I would say either I can't hear or these guys can't hear. So, I started writing in defense of it so. >> Rob Casper: We were lucky enough to hear from both A.B. Spellman and Joy Harjo today. Thanks so much for coming out and please go to their book signings and buy their books. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.