Back to Back to Back, a Variant:
The first poem below was likely the inspiration for the two that follow, although there are surely many elegiac poems written in honor of Billie Holiday and/or smokey jazz clubs. What I see in the three are some rather subliminal but shared interests and sensibilities, but also some striking generational differences and differences in sensibilities.
Most curious to me is that at one time or another in my life I could have written either of the first two poems, albeit not as well, and that I did write the third and last poem at this time in my life.
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
The way I imagine it, Louis Jenkins read the Frank O'Hara poem back in his days at the university. He then let it slip into his subconscious mind to percolate. The poem, the prose poem, that emerged, years later, is called:
Jazz Poem
By Louis Jenkins
I always wanted to write one of those jazz poems. You know the kind, where it's three a.m.in some incredibly smokey, out of the way, little club in Chicago or New York, April 14, 1954 (it's always good to give the date) and there are only a few sleepy people left in the place, vacant tables with half-empty glasses, overturned chairs... and then Bird or Leroy or someone plays this incredible solo and it's like, it's like... well, you just should have been there. The poet was there and you understand that jazz is hip, intellectual, cool, but also earthy and soulful, as the poet must be, as well, because he really digs this stuff. Unfortunately, I grew up listening to rock and roll and decidedly unhip country music and it just doesn't work to say you should have been in Gary Hofstadter's rec room, July 24, 1961, sipping a Pepsi, listening to Duane Eddy's latest album and playing air guitar.
So, sometime within the last couple of years I read both of these poems, and liked them both a lot. They percolated in me, as good poems do, until about three months ago when, late one night or early one morning on 10/8/21, the following poem entered my mind. It addresses the two preceding poems and how they mesh, unavoidably, with my own experiences and sensibilities. The poem is called:
Outside the Five Spot Cafè, NYC
By Fred Staal
Not for me,
hiking into the tall timber,
pushing across the icy scree.
Nor, for that matter,
the tinkling ice
in a glass of scotch,
the smokey saxophones, and
Thelonious.
Yes, I stood outside the Five Spot Cafè
(2 St. Marks Place)
one cool night in 1965
(no way to even guess the specific date),
and listened a while,
as the notes filtered through the door
But I didn't go in...
