Lyrical Miracle: Emily Rivera Interviews Kirpal Gordon on His New Book

EMILY RIVERA: In the Preface to Lyrical Miracle: Homage to the Great American Songbook you write, “Since the world’s music library is just a click away, why not play the song while reading the prose poem?”

I did as you suggest; I called up the music from YouTube and listened to the song while I read your prose poems aloud. Wow! The pairing of your words in time and tempo to the musical selection really became an interactive experience. Your prose poem made the song more meaningful, and the song provided another context for your prose poem.

It also re-kindled my love of jazz, as a bandmate (flutist), choir member and listener. How did you come up with this idea? Do you personally see it as an interactive experience?

KIRPAL GORDON: That’s my hope. Reading the prose poems aloud or silently to the song, one discovers the sentence’s line and the musical line end on the same beat, and the paragraph breaks signal a new chorus or a change in the form. So by shifting foreground (listening to music) and background (reading the prose poem), Gestalt-like discoveries are possible.

        I didn’t come up with the idea, but I came of age in 1960s New York when an experimental multi-media synesthesia aesthetic was practiced. Concerts had light shows and dance space, visual art and words combined on the canvas and in sculpture, music and spoken word wedded on the bandstand. I liked what Jack Kerouac did, but Amiri Baraka with his NewArk band took it further. So did a number of Big Apple musicians I got to know and work with over the years. They showed me that making music and poetry together can be a love supreme.

Lyrical Miracle is the result of those collaborations.

EMILY RIVERA: It’s really intriguing to know the roots and processes of the project’s formation. Your poem “A Word's Worth” was my favorite due to the combination of repetition and improvisation. I could hear James Brown’s tune as I read these lines:

I feel good like absinthe curing in wormwood, like troubadour-ing in knighthood, like Steely Dan’s Josie alluring the pride of the neighborhood—so good like Djuna Barnes losing her moorings in Nightwood, I got you.

I feel nice like can you live with the throw of the dice if it’s three blind mice, like Eldridge Cleaver breaking out in Soul on Ice, like if the world is the body of Christ, let love suffice, so nice like paradise, I got you.

When I hold you in my arms, I quaff the wild balm of your love charms & when love hurts I know what curse words do the most harm:

What’s bum but a sound the mouth casts out, spoken without need of teeth or tongue. Spit it out: stumblebum, a hole in a human face only a bottle of rum can reach.

What’s homeless victim but a double trochee’s play-it-as-it-lays phrase to separate them that got from them that not while keeping those expanding catastrophes at bay. 

What’s rat but pink feet & antennae nose sniffin’ through plumbin’, comin’ up outta your throne. Rat: a fink, or raton: what’s left when a species starts to eat its own. 

What’s a word’s worth, William, in a world of sound bite, oath & curse, why in silence we can only bow for there’s nothing left to say now among those stung with no tongue.

KIRPAL GORDON: “I Feel Good” is one of my favorite songs, but by riffing on words like bum and homeless, I wondered about a word’s worth in a world afraid to feel other people’s pain. Again, it’s the yin/yang pairing of the tune’s robust vibe with the prose poem’s woeful blues that sets up the possibilities.

EMILY RIVERA: On a more personal note, the dedication page of Lyrical Miracle you write, “In loving memory to my parents, George & Gertrude Gordon.” By connecting with your folks, were you trying to recreate a feeling/memory?

KIRPAL GORDON: My parents connected me to this collection of American folk songs, one hit wonders, Broadway show tunes, Tin Pan Alley ditties, ethnic favorites and love ballads from the first four decades of the twentieth century. I learned what happened before rock ‘n’ roll dominated the radio waves. I remember quite fondly how on rainy Saturday afternoons my mom would play on the piano some of their favorite songs while my dad sang the lyrics: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Toot Toot Tootsie,” “Sentimental Journey,” “Night and Day,” “Pennies from Heaven,” and their courtship song, “Melancholy Baby.”

They showed me what love looked and sounded and felt like. Their blend of voice and piano taught me the secret of collaboration: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Though one could say that much of the Great American Songbook has been driven by salesmen in suits to please a particular generation of youngsters, I learned that a well-made song has a timeless quality to it as well.

To my ears, the music of Ellington, Basie, Gershwin, Mingus, Miles, Monk, Pres, Billie, Bird, Pops and Ella—the whole shebang—lives in the everlasting present along with those who’ve furthered their investigations. The deeper I dig, the more I find that the best thing that ever happened to the Great American Songbook has been its re-interpretation by generations of musicians. The irony of the Black Lives Matter is that African American music is in our nation’s cultural DNA. It’s an integral part of who we are and our greatest export. So I’m celebrating the songs, their composers-lyricists and their interpreters as our boldest ambassadors on the road to freedom, a lyrical miracle forging individual genius in collective improvisation.

EMILY RIVERA: Your remarks on our shared musical tradition echo what Cincinnati poet Ralph La Charity wrote of your new book, “The gates that open into the Great American Songbook are never not discreet, never not unique. They are floodgates, forsooth, but whoever tackles that mega-frisk adequately?  The particulars comprise so many multi-dimensional resonances, at every turn, that it never was wholly comforting so much as eerily uncompromising, which is the promise of Lyrical Miracle, a book that includes more of America than what its troubled and abundant shores alone bequeath. The Poet begs that whole Further. Along for the ride this Poet limns, we of the readerly cubicle, ears cocked, exult in the Poet’s expansive inclusivity: this book is itself a Songbook that contains multitudes – Rejoice, o!”

His reference to our historical struggles toward inclusivity has the ring of Walt Whitman’s work. In your preface you beautifully take us through your love for jazz, which we can see through your expression of recreating these memories, and that feeling of freedom through a Walt Whitman quote. You carry this throughout the entirety of the book at each new section. What is Whitman’s significance to you and the story? 

KIRPAL GORDON: As our political life becomes more distorted through us-them division, reading Whitman, our first national poet, has helped me keep my eyes on the prize. Despite these hooligans holding democracy hostage, we are nevertheless bending toward a more Democratic Vista and a more perfect union. Certainly, our musical tradition is hybrid vigor at work. It’s the true meaning of an e pluribus unum, that is, out of many, one.

Reading Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” in fourth grade was the medicine that helped me deal with Catholic school. I find that I always return to Leaves of Grass. After I had a band and we made a CD, I accidentally played “Take Five” while reading Walt’s “Song of the Open Road.” Paul Desmond’s alto sax choruses fit exactly into sections 1, 9 and 17. I called the band up and said, “Let’s do a Walt Whitman show.” We created “Whitman Meets the Great American Songbook” gigs. We did a few performances at Hofstra University as well. Here is a review of one of those shows:

https://www.thehofstrachronicle.com/category/arts-and-entertainment/2019/4/22/when-walt-whitman-became-a-jazz-artist

EMILY RIVERA: I am a yoga practitioner and a poet. I couldn’t fail to miss how much the book is a kind of yoga-through-poetry. Did you intentionally tie this into the book? For example, in “You Make Me Feel So Young,” a tune Frank Sinatra made famous, you flip the lyrics into a celebration of yogic wholeness: “You make me feel so Jung, so psychically spun, re-done, atoned & at one. Just when I dream it’s the end again you steal around the bend with that No panic, the deck chair’s organic, blowing a Titanic glockenspiel, amen, singing what a deal it is to be a spinning wheel-in-sentience…”

The yoga reference is even more direct in “Create Me, Baby, Shout” set to “Song of India”:

The bird is in the field as the field is in the bird, lover. Sanskrit grammar won’t have it one way over the other. Yes, no, both & neither: every spoken word wheels true, but moons only rise in skies & glow because the wise lyric it so.

Sound manifests the world our maws mutter, shudder & spout at. A single inflection’s fall separates a seeker from a sunset. Stressed or blessed, elocution’s slippery diphthong admits our own tongue tips to be Shiva lingam, strike-stroking fissures in our yoni-cave mouths where scores of unborn life forms whisper create me, baby, shout.

In Sanskrit birds fly by wildly, but fields only open with the wail of a word or the wink of an eye. If Maya’s veil conceals to us our own divine at-one, then the other is who we seek to entail, reveal & become.

Guttural, palatal, domal, dental, labial: the sutras of Sanskrit elucidate the exact parts tongue & lips play in the art of love—& so exactly the whole of love—yearning to sing & get sung over & over & over again.

Om purnama dahapurnam edam, purnat purnam udachatay, purnasya purnama dhyam, purnat ava vasishatay: This is full & every emanation full for whatever is produced by the full is itself full, so says the bard of the Iso Upanishad.

KIRPAL GORDON: I studied Sanskrit for my foreign language requirement at my experimental undergraduate program, which helped me appreciate India’s yoga traditions. And I learned from my laya yoga (union through sound) teacher from Punjab that it’s the combination and permutation of certain seed syllables repeated in rhythmic cycles that produce altered states of mind. I practiced Sufi dancing and came to see that the 99 names of Allah are also passwords or portals into cosmic awareness. Ditto singing the Siri Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikhs, the chants of the Buddhists, the Hindustani and Carnatic musical trads.

William Blake, among other Romantic poets, and John Coltrane, among other jazz musicians, sought to produce the same effect on a reader or listener. So, if you define yoga as erasing the separation between self and other, subject and object, perceiver and perceived, lover and beloved, then yes: that’s the lyrical miracle that Lyrical Miracle is lyrically miracle-ing.

EMILY RIVERA: How does the cover connect to the overall experience of the book?

KIRPAL GORDON: I love viewing falling water and listening to its sound since I was a little kid drinking from the fountain in the park. As an adult I have built a few meditation gardens with water features. To me, nothing expresses the theme of Lyrical Miracle better than its cover. Like each vowel sound “freed” from its consonant cluster when sung or spoken aloud, each drop of the waterfall “grows” wings on its descent into the pool where it splashes its return.

EMILY RIVERA: My favorite quote by Miles Davis is that “sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” Being a writer for over fifty years, would you consider this book as a representation of your growth? What was your favorite part about going through the journey of writing this book? 

KIRPAL GORDON: When I starting writing poetry in my teens, I was enamored with the possibilities of free verse. It felt so liberating; I could write on anything for any length and not let formal concerns constrain me. Many of the poems kept getting bigger and some became narratives or monologues in my early books of fiction. When I returned to spoken word poetry, I was glad to have a parameter, even if it were just the number of syllables or rhymes that I could fit into a song’s 32 bars.

So, yes, regarding the Miles’ quote, I had to switch genres, absorb a ton of influences and find a way to take the words off the page and onto the stage with first-call musicians helping me find new meaning in jazz standards. Rather than blow endlessly over the changes, I found that I could deliver word solos that enriched the bands’ musical solos. Here’s an example: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xe7N7vjnJ1k9ExOExrX43NYiXXf32tw-/view

The Speak-Spake-Spoke Band: 

Amanda Monaco, guitar, musical director; Warren Smith, drums: Arthur Kell, bass; Kirpal Gordon, spoken word; Frank Perowsky, clarinet; Carlton Holmes, piano; Claire Daly, baritone sax.

Their solos inspired my solos and vice versa; it’s how the first three sections of the book were born. It comes full circle in the last section, “Tales in Performance,” which are the songs the band plays when I read selections from my fiction books.

Poetry and prose, music and words, poet and band meeting and mating: That’s the real story of this lyrical miracle and I’m sticking to it.

EMILY RIVERA: The print and e-book versions are for sale at the Writer page at www.KirpalG.com. Here’s what critics have said of your performances with the Speak-Spake-Spoke band:

His work swings with around-the-corner wit, but also with real gravitas, with a ludicrous tragic craziness that’s at once wild and frighteningly familiar. He chooses tunes that are sweet and heartfelt but also elegant and formally graceful—his voice levitating rich and smooth and right on the rhythm. I’ve never heard the marriage of music and the spoken word done with greater harmony.    

—Bill Seaton, director, Poetry on the Loose

A poet with unstoppable chops, Kirpal Gordon is a spewer of jewels with the baddest ear in the hemisphere and an unbelievably well-hung mother tongue…. His voice is wed to the energy of a singly hearted ensemble.                                                             —Mikhail Horowitz, The Blues of the Birth

Hearing Gordon’s poetry with his jazz band at Sweet Rhythm is like seeing Salvador Dali’s paintings: he’s a shape shifter of the first order.                                    —Lara Pellegrinelli, National Public Radio

Precise of word and rhyme and ready of wit, his pairing poems with pearls of jazz and his erudition in world lit (licks from Eliot, Yeats and the Upanishads flit by like Dexter Gordon’s quotes) add further dimensions to his verbal inventions; at poetic peak he’s internally rhyming, eternally scheming, keeping this hot band dancing on the point of Cleopatra’s needle.                        —Fred Boucher, All About Jazz

Having graced our stage many times with his spoken word collaborations, we call Kirpal Gordon our poet laureate at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.           

—Todd Barkin, proprietor, Dizzy's, Jazz at Lincoln Center

If you think the notion of mixing jazz and poetry is hopelessly old-fashioned, let his swinging scansion and vivid imagery relieve you of that perception. Gordon swings.     

—Steve Smith, Time Out New York

Lotsa people go at it, but it’s Kirpal G who IS it—the Real Deal, the Chilly Willy, the Absolute Rootin’ Tootin’est Poet Qua Non—like the rain out of the blue. When my life is through and the angels ask me to recall the thrill of them all, I will tell them I remember Kirpal!    

 —Bob Holman, proprietor, Bowery Poetry Club

George Wallace's Swimming through Water, poetry book & CD with David Amram: A Conversation

George Wallace

Swimming through Water, George Wallace, poetry, La Finestra, Trento, Italy, 406 pages, 2002; spoken word CD with musician David Amram in back cover sleeve

 

 

JONATHAN PENTON: I love the variety on this CD. It's one of those discs with a consistent, unifying set of themes, but huge deviances from track to track. There's a wide variety of instrumentation, and the flute on "When I Am Old," a track featuring George Wallace reading the poem of David Ignatow, is particularly haunting, striking the right balance between kind and creepy that's essential for such a theme. This track is in contrast, stylistically, to the jazziness of "Contest of the Electric Flowercars," but there's still a steady stream of sensibility and aesthetics that gives the disc a clear focus.

 

KIRPAL GORDON: One reason for the range is George Wallace's command of his craft. It's all there in his warm baritone voice, his musician's sense of time, his surrealist leaps and his emphatic understatements. Like Willie Nelson, you can hear the nicks and crannies of his whole life in his phrasing: he's not hiding anything. He's also quite adept at employing an opening phrase or line that repeats throughout the poem. Sure, that's a trope that many in the Whitman lineage use, but he "makes it new" and with startling results.

 

The other big reason it's steady and clear yet varied in instrumentation is David Amram on piano, tabla and various flutes. He's been around a few blocks as a player, conductor and composer, investigating and synthesizing musical traditions long before the term World Beat came into coinage. I've seen him play flutes from North Africa to Japan and there's no mood he can't evoke. Like so many jazz folks of his generation, he knows how not to get in the way of the words, whether sung or spoken. That's de rigueur for those old cats who came up in big bands that accommodated vocalists for part of the set. Amram started his career on French horn---a majestic, warm and round sound---so you know he knows when to hold and when to fold 'em. He's got that haunting Navajo-like flute in the poem you mentioned for David Ignatow: spooky, arresting, long-toned. Wallace’s last line---"I will ask for red roses, in remembrance of the first loss"---locates the balance you’re talking about between fear of aging and joy of celebrating. Once again, the poem really finds its home in the melody. It's much more moving than when simply read to oneself. Along this line, check out the sixth track, "The Wave," because Amram really plays inside this haunted beauty of a poem. It's only a minute and a half long, but it's magical proof of how music and lyric are one fabric, just like ol' Ez told us. Moreover, it's up to the task of revealing how "great wardrobes of light drape the ancients, dark mending waters after all."

 

David Amram

JONATHAN PENTON: It's real clear that Amram gets what Wallace is trying to do with the poetry. The poems and instrumentation are deeply integrated and highly complimentary; the themes and issues are congruent throughout. And what themes and issues! These are extremely original poems, tackling the quotidian from the most remarkable directions. Consider the opening lines of the second track: "God makes a note to himself / things to permit to occur without interruption." Or that track you mentioned, "The Wave," with its brilliant and moody imagery. What we've got here is a true affection for life in all its parameters, revealed by an absolutely expert pen, delighting in its own words and what those words signify. This is an extremely sophisticated and beautiful book, and Amram gives it additional power in a way that only someone who really "gets it" can.

 

KIRPAL GORDON: You've nailed it and this is the toughest thing of all, that the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. No question, that second track is a gem and truly written in heaven. Here are some typical lines and notice how smartly he spaces his syllables while Amram plays a thoughtful, spacious chord progression on piano underneath: "a bird in flight a child in prayer oceanspray windsong/ the progress of the sun through day" or "old men shaking hands with each other / death cheated vengeance denied / hope luck second chances / good advice freely offered / headlights on an empty road / the reappearance of fireflies in july" and that killer last line that would make a James Wright fan smile: "any soldier who desires to lay down his weapon / and turn his face in the direction of home." By the way, did you know that Wallace, a former reporter for The Long Islander, a newspaper founded by Walt Whitman in 1839, is also a former poet laureate of Suffolk County? So that last line really packs a political punch which, to my ear is as inseparable as the music of Amram to the poetry.

 

For a favorite track, I vote for the title piece, the first track on the CD, "Swimming Through Water," which, by the way, is also the title of Wallace's poetry collection, published by La Finestra Press of Italy, in English and with Italian translations by Anny Ballardini who also interviews Wallace at the back of the book. Amram has great reach on the piano and in this song he reminds me of Edgar Meyer-Yo Yo Ma-Mark O'Connor's collaborative evocation of Appalachia. Amram blends these pianistic kernels of Kentucky and the Mississippi River a la the Gershwin of "Porgy and Bess" and mixes in a quiet, Impressionist reach of "Rhapsody in Blue." He sprinkles these clusters to great effect in and around Wallace's well timed and repeating phrase, "some folks." The piano water-dances through rain pools, and if you check the track against the printed version you will see how much improvising with the text Wallace is doing as well. It hangs so smartly together and it's got lyrical wings!



Geroge Wallace at the Huntington Barn

 

This conversation originally appeared in a slightly different form in Unlikely Stories.

It's All Good: A John Sinclair Reader reviewed by Kirpal Gordon

 

It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader by John Sinclair, published by Headpress, www.headpress.com, 298 pages / ISBN: 9781900486682; with free music-spoken word CD download 

 

Don’t sweat the tautology in the title---It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader is a transcendent, philosophically tough-minded journey forged from one writer’s mating the New American Poetics with America’s blues-jazz tradition and its rock-soul-funk-punk permutations. Published by Headpress (their motto: the gospel according to unpopular culture) the collection celebrates Sinclair’s 44 years on the culture scene with 22 of his poems, 22 of his essays and the ultimate lagniappe: thirteen works in performance with a variety of bands and great musicians from a free CD download. 

 

For those disheartened by the plethora of Sixties-inspired memoirs that are but advertisements for oneself, It’s All Good is powerful medicine. Sinclair (born 1941) is a force of nature, a high-minded, principled Midwestern with the hipster code of a viper like Mezz Mezzrow in one brain’s hemisphere and the political agenda of a leftie like Saul Alinsky in the other. How’s this for chutzpah: while locked up for handing a couple of joints to a narc who infiltrated his poetry class, Sinclair does a lot of his time in the hole for his efforts in organizing black prisoners to advocate for better education programs. Such racial solidarity may seem inconceivable in the slammers of the twenty-first century, but check Sinclair’s roots in “I Wanna Testify”: “I came to Detroit in 1964 as a refugee from white American society attracted to this teeming center of African American culture … the birthplace of the Nation of Islam and the hotbed of bebop, the place where you could hear jazz all night long and cop weed or pills whenever you wanted to. The plight of black Americans was known to me from the street level, as I had the honor of spending a number of my formative years in Flint, Michigan, under the direct tutelage of some of the fastest young hipsters on the set, intense young men and women who held Malcolm X and Miles Davis in equal esteem and who introduced me to the wonders of daily marijuana use as a means for dealing more creatively with the terrors of white America” (p 42).

 

A tale of such enthusiasms needs historical context, and Headpress has wisely arranged the material chronologically which allows Sinclair’s various responses to unfold their own logic. The first essay opens with John Lennon’s 1971 lyrics---“It ain’t fair, John Sinclair / In the stir for breathing air” (p 12) and Sinclair’s release from prison after serving twenty-eight months on a ten year sentence, thanks to the Michigan state legislature re-classifying pot possession as a misdemeanor only days before Lennon’s sold-out concert brought attention to his cause. While keeping eye and ear on the Big(ger) Picture, Sinclair candidly reports, looks back, updates and muses upon his various tenures as a community organizer, arts advocate, cofounder of the White Panther (later Rainbow People’s) Party, manager of the rock band MC5, director of the Detroit Jazz Center, producer of the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Fest, editor of altie newspapers, reviewer of music, well loved disc jockey at WWOZ in New Orleans and presently an ex-pat in Amsterdam. 

 

That’s a lot of hats to wear to a revolution, and Sinclair has equal but separate gifts in prose as well as in verse. So kudos to Headpress for wisely taking a triple-headed approach: the matching poems enrich the essays and vice versa, and the spoken-word-with-music selections are so real-deal-alive as oral expression that they add another meaning to the written verse. For example, these lines in “everything happens to me” may read maudlin on the page---“race traitor & renegade, / beatnik, / dope fiend, / poet provocateur, / living from hand to mouth / & euro to euro / sleeping on the couches / & extra beds of my friends, / a man without a country”(p 105)---but with Jeff Grand and the Motor City Blues Scholars hunkered into a groove underneath him, Sinclair’s gravel voice bends those vowels so ironically, one can’t tell if, like double-masked Papa Legba greeting you at the crossroads, he’s laughing or crying. That’s Sinclair’s true identity: he’s a signifyin’ bluesman, not a village explainer.    

 

Unmetered, mostly unrhymed (free) verse does not lend itself easily to the American songbook, but Sinclair, with his mind on Monk and Muddy---half in bop and its touch of Sunday, half in the Delta and its electric children---has timing to spare. On “Monk’s Dream,” he emits such joy, wit and wisdom in a manner all-of-a-piece with his accompanists Luis Resto, piano, and Paul Nowitzki, bass. On the upbeat blues, “Fattening Frogs for Snakes,” his variable American foot fits like an old brown shoe as he references Sonny Boy Williamson’s lyric to tell the story of the music coming up from out of the Mississippi fields and juke joints traveling north upriver from spooky acoustic to an even spookier electric sound.  With Rockin’ Jake’s encyclopedic harmonica work shading the same unfolding and Kirk Joseph’s sousaphone playing the bass line, the band underscores Sinclair’s lament: “nothing would be returned / to the people of the Delta / … this is what the blues is all about--- / ‘fattening frogs for snakes’ / & watching the mother fucking snakes / slither off with the very thing you have made.” 

 

He produces such oracular momentum and incantatory brilliance---he “sounds” like William Blake draws or the Book of Jeremiah reads---that on “brilliant corners,” with just a single repeating guitar phrase from Mark Ritsema, he held this listener in rapt attention through six pages of verse celebrating the bebop experiments in Harlem meeting the writers around Columbia, especially a “hip football player / & would-be sportswriter / from Lowell … so well known at minton’s / … that the musicians on the set / named a song after him, ‘keruoac.’”  Weaving in the lives and works of Ginsberg, Cassady and Burroughs, Sinclair concludes, “& a road out of the stasis / began to open up / & out / in front us--- / & we followed it,” repeating the last line in a haunting shout. Nothing against the cottage industry that has grown up around these writers, but their actual story is rooted in the music and no one swings that tale harder than Sinclair. Ditto “We Just Change the Beat.” Hearing the song as it changes tempo (genre) is worth a thousand pages of musical essay.

 

As for Sinclair’s essays on music, they are documents of respectful brevity, especially his eye to Iggy Pop, his “audience” with Irma Thomas, his love of the MC5 and his manifesto in “Getting out from Under.” Moreover, the range of the musical material the essays cover in It’s All Good, the quality of his poetry and his remarkable gifts as a performer reveal his immense value to us. This griot is a national treasure, a vital link in a literary-musical lineage from Walt Whitman, through the Harlem Renaissance, into Bebop and the Beat Generation, deep in the Black Arts movement and beyond as our jazz trad weds World Music. If this isn't America's greatest cultural export, then what is?  

 

 

 

An earlier version of this appreciation appeard in print at American Book Review.