Sherry Chandler » Poetry Everywhere
Poetry Everywhere
eek! How could I have missed this feature at PBS: Poetry Everywhere.
One place they find it is at Wynton Marsalis’s keyboard. Wynton reads W. B. Yeats’s “The Wild Old Wicked Man.” He sees jazz in them thar words:
“Like all the greatest artists, Yeats never got locked into one time. Instead, he addresses all ages and times. In a few words, with intense lyricism like Lester Young’s or Miles Davis’s, Yeats captures how one thing leads to another thing leads to another thing, and the relationships between them. Like, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.’ If you really let that into your mind, it’ll be a long time before you stop thinking about it.”
They found it at the Dodge Festival, where Tennessee poet Coleman Barks reads a translation of Rumi that brought tears to my eyes. Gotta love an accent like that doing a 13th century Persian poet. Sort of beats the hell out of “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”
And speaking of Yale Younger Poets, here’s Adrienne Rich asking the question, “What Kind of Times Are These.”
Check it out.
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