Epistrophies: poems celebrating Thelonius Monk and his music.

In the movie Straight, No Chaser, Thelonious Monk enters a recording studio for Columbia Records, where he is greeted by producer Ted Macero, who bobs and weaves with the excitement of having Monk's quartet ready to play. To make conversation, Macero amiably asks Monk, "What is that, a new hat?" and Monk pauses, takes in the question, and replies, "Oh yeah. This was given to me in Poland." "Poland?" Macero asks, and Monk responds, "Yeah," and then, quietly, muffling the first part of the phrase, "That's the name of this hat." Nobody catches the line.

A few moments later, Macero notices that Monk's spectacles are actually only rims. "Oh man," he says, "let me see the glasses! Oh, you are jiving me!" Monk informs the studio that these are "invisible glasses," and the footage breaks before we can get a response. But it's likely that not much more was said about those glasses, just like nothing more was said about his hat, because these idiosyncratic details obviously made absolute sense for Monk, and who besides a fool would challenge his sense of himself or his music? Years ago, for example, a lecturer in jazz at Columbia University made the mistake of asking, "Would you play some of your weird chords for the class?" and Monk, quite annoyed, responded, "What do you mean weird? They're perfectly logical chords" (qtd. in Hentoff, Jazz Life 188).

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1917, and "he made his escape," explains William Matthews in his poem "Well, You Needn't," "by turning himself into a genius" (36). By the early 1940s, he was working and recording with major jazz figures of the time, and in '47, just after his thirtieth birthday, he recorded sessions for Blue Note records that placed him at the center of modern jazz. (As Monk himself says in the documentary, "Yeah, I am famous. Isn't that a bitch?") No one performed quite like Monk, either in terms of sound or in presence and musical technique. To quote Matthews again:

Rather than hold his hands properly

arched off the keys, like cats

with their backs up,

Monk, playing block chords,

hit the keys with his fingertips well

above his wrists,

shoulders up, wrists down (36)

In '57, Monk founded a quartet with John Coltrane, who would become a legendary figure himself but at that time was absorbing what Monk had to offer. "Blue Cooper 5 Spot / was the world busting / on piano bass drums & tenor," wrote Amiri Baraka in the poem "AM/TRAK." "This was Coltrane's College" with "Master T Sphere / too cool to be a genius" (334). From '59 through '70, he worked primarily with the saxophonist Charlie Rouse, but from 1973 until his death in 1982, Monk rarely performed. For the last several years of his life, he didn't even practice at home.

Monk's phenomenal mood swings sometimes resulted in bizarre concerts. The one time my father saw Monk in New York, for example, the pianist refused to play more than three or four notes. At a performance on the West Coast, when Monk was similarly disinterested with the event, a man in the audience stood up and said, "Hey Monk! I paid a lot of money to see you," and Thelonious replied, "Well--here I am" (Feidt).

But on most nights, Monk would dazzle and enthrall his audience--whether or not they understood his music. In 1964, the jazz critic Martin Williams described a set with Monk's quartet like this:

Just before the bridge, Monk leans to

his left and looks under the piano,

almost as if the next notes were down

there somewhere. Then a break takes

them into tempo for the second chorus,

with tenor saxophonist Rouse walking

onto the bandstand as he plays, and

Monk really working behind him with

a clipped distillation of the melody in

support.

Halfway through the chorus,

Monk gets up, leaving his instrument

to undertake his swaying, shuffling

dance. Half the crowd seems to be

nodding knowingly about his eccentricity.

But a few in the audience seem

to realize that, besides giving the

group a change of texture and sound

by laying out, Monk is conducting. His

movements are encouraging ... [the

musicians] to hear, not just the obvious

beat, but the accent and space around

the one-two-three-four, the rhythms

that Monk is so interested in. (97)

In this brief portrait, Williams captures two qualities of Monk that have inspired and engaged all kinds of listeners, including poets. First, he alludes to Monk's musicality, which combined a brilliant sense of time with textured, dissonant harmonics that made him one of the most demanding and exciting leaders in jazz. But in addition to his genius as a piano player, Monk's personal eccentricities--dancing in performance, donning an array of traffic-stopping hats, and so on--magnetically attracted a range of followers, from adulating hipsters to humorously charmed intellectuals. This combination of genius and eccentricity has made Thelonious Monk one of the most attractive figures in the history of jazz-related poetry.

Poems about Monk frequently describe his delight in dancing, and Monk's dance should be regarded as a direct extension of his music. Often, he shuffled and twirled spontaneously, spiritually moved by the music. Sometimes he danced, according to the producer Orrin Keepnews, when "deciding which take to issue for an album." "It's his way," Keepnews explained, "of being sure the number is swinging right" (qtd. in Hentoff, razz Life 202). Other times, as Williams has pointed out, Monk would dance in order to conduct the other musicians. "At one record date," explained the alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce, "some of the musicians were laughing as he danced without realizing that meanwhile, by following his rhythmic pulse, they were moving into the rhythm he wanted" (qtd. in Hentoff, razz Lite 202).

By describing Monk's dance, or Monk in motion, poets have strived to capture the essence of his personality and his music, and these visual cues afford one possible way to describe music, an invisible art form. In the poem "After Listening to Monk," for example, Tom Dent offers the refrain, "dance, dance away the day / watch the sun dance" (Feinstein and Komunyakaa 50), and in Ron Welburn's "Brake's Sake," a poem (like many) that borrows its title from a Monk composition, we watch Thelonious "sway around the piano / in italian suede wheels" (46). John Sinclair's poem "Humph" shows how Monk dismantled his critics through the comedy and brilliance of his performance:

... [he] shoots a grin

from behind the piano,

wiggles his ass on the stool,

lays down another few bars

of utter genius,

turns it over to the tenor player

& rises to dance beside the piano,

some more of that old north carolina 

boogaloo (Feinstein and Komunyakaa 202)

Michael Harper's more politically governed poem "Bandstand" begins with an image of music and gesture--"Monk's dissonant hat / willing every change of direction"--and closes with a union of family history and cultural heritage, while maintaining the dance imagery:

You learned to appreciate the pews,

the cooling iron,

the cooling board where the bodies,

guns in the recording studios,

became the tuning forks,

meals eaten while running in place

for Mother and Dad

who could dance. (67)

The majority of isolated Monk poems have been narrative and anecdotal, but poems written as a series responding to Monk's music--such as those in Dave Etter's book Well You Needn't and Art Lange's The Monk Poems--tend to concentrate on the abstraction of jazz and the rhythmic jaggedness of Monk's musical lines. In these cases, the poems offer associative imagery inspired by individual Monk compositions. "There is not meant to be any other specific reference to the music in the poetry," Lange explains, "neither in terms of content, subject, or form.... The poems are in no sense an attempt to explain, elucidate, illustrate, or translate Monk's music in words" (Feinstein and Komunyakaa 263). Similarly, Etter writes, "These poems [in Well You Needn't] are not my attempt to put words to the jazz compositions of Thelonious Monk, but are merely word pictures created while listening to his intoxicating music" (3).

Many poets have used Monk's music to create what Etter calls "word pictures," and others have responded to the music as a memory trigger, as in Christopher Gilbert's poem with the long title "Listening to Monk's Mysterioso [sic] I Remember Braiding My Sister's Hair," or Belle Waring's "Refuge at the One Step Down," where the speaker's in a bar hip enough to have Monk on the jukebox. Other times, the poems invoke actual experiences of witnessing Monk in performance, such as Charles Simic's "Crepuscule with Nellie," which begins:

Monk at the Five Spot

late one night.

Ruby My Dear, Epistrophy.

The place nearly empty

Because of the cold spell.

One beautiful black transvestite 

alone up front,

Sipping his drink demurely.

The music Pythagorean,

one note at a time

Connecting the heavenly spheres,

While I leaned against the bar

surveying the premises

Through cigarette smoke.

All of a sudden, a clear sense

of a memorable occasion ...

The joy of it, the delicious melancholy ...

This very strange man bent over the piano

shaking his head, humming ...

Misterioso. (15)

The actual writing of this poem allowed Simic to relive those remarkable evenings listening to Monk. "Between the years 1958-1970," he explains,

at least 2-3 times per week, I could be

found in some jazz club in New York

City tapping my foot and nursing a

beer. I once stopped Mr. Monk and

told him how much I loved his playing.

The great man looked past me in

the direction of the bathroom and went

off without even a nod of acknowledgment.

Still, these were the happiest

times in my life. (Simic, Letter)

Monk had more poems written in his honor during his lifetime than any other jazz musician in history. He has also, of course, been the subject of numerous posthumous tributes, including Yusef Komunyakaa's "Elegy for Thelonious," which begins with grief--"Damn the snow. / Its senseless beauty / pours a hard light / through the hemlock. / Thelonious is dead"--but moves through the history of Monk's music ("Crepuscule with Nellie," "Coming on the Hudson," "Monk's Dream") until the speaker can imagine Monk himself, can pull the poem out of elegy and into the comfort of jazz:

The ghost of bebop 

from 52nd Street,

footprints in the snow.

Damn February.

Let's go to Minton's

& play "modem malice"

till daybreak. Lord,

there's Thelonious

wearing that old funky hat

pulled down over his eyes. (40)

Elegies for Monk--unlike the elegies for most other jazz musicians--tend to focus on celebration rather than grief. But there has also been an urgent desire on the part of many poets to give Monk a still larger audience, a desire clearly reflected in Al Young's "Thelonious: An Intro." "Now is the time," it begins,

to

listen to Thelonious Monk

a man who

for more years

than many of us

have been alive

has been making his bid

for recognition (293)

Young wrote this poem in 1964, the same year Time featured Monk on its cover, and certainly Monk's recognition has expanded considerably since then--including his influence on contemporary poets.

How will Monk and his music influence poetry of the future? I don't know. When I'm asked questions like that, I think of Monk talking about his own craft to an interviewer from Down Beat magazine: "Where's jazz going? I don't know where it's going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens" (qtd. in Hentoff, Jazz Is 128-29). I do know, however, that his extraordinary music and mythic personality continue to inspire an enormous range of poets, even those who were born too late to hear him perform. "You were in retirement then," one of my own Monk poems concludes,

dying before I could see you

though I've heard so many gigs

in my mind: it's late, you look past

the whole room, your silence

inviting everyone into

your world like the talk

we never had, or those months

when performing didn't matter.

It's how I see you even now: not wanting

to play, just nudging the piano

like a rush-hour New Yorker--

hit a stray note, stare at it, wait

for the leftover sound to tell you

what tune to fall into, or who'll

survive your patience, who will leave--

wait for some polyester jacket to say,

Mr. Monk, it's really t/me to begin--

Those were the moods that kept us

keyed into you more

than the elbow dances off

the stand. Because so much

decision pressed itself into each

small move, because we wanted to say

We're listening, man, we've got the night,

and you, with your black fez & shades,

everything you didn't play. (Feinstein

and Komunyakaa 60-61)

Work Cited

Baraka, Amiri. Selected Poetry of Amiri Barake/LeRoi Jones. New York: Morrow, 1979.

Etter, Dave. Well You Needn't: The Thelonious Monk Poems. Independence: Raindust, 1975.

Feidt, Thorpe. Interview. 10 Oct. 1992. New York City.

Feinstein, Sascha, and Yusef Komunyakaa, ads. The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Gilbert, Christopher. Across the Mutual Landscape. Port Townsend: Graywotf, 1984.

Harper, Michael S. Healing Song for the Inner Ear. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985.

Hentoff, Nat. Jazz Is. New York: Random, 1976.

--. The Jazz Life. New York: Da Capo, 1978.

Keepnews, Orrin. The View From Within: Jazz Writings 1948-1981d New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Copacetic. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1984.

Lange, Art. The Monk Poems. New York: Frontward, 1977.

Matthews, William. Time & Money. Boston: Houghton, 1995.

Simic, Charles. The Book of Gods and Devils. San Diego: Harcourt, 1990.

--. Letter to Sascha Feinstein. 5 Sap. 1994.

Waring, Belle. Refuge. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1990.

Welburn, Ron. Brownup and Other Poems. Greenfield Center: Greenfield Review, 1977.

Williams, Martin. Jazz Changes. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Young, Al. Heaven: Collected Poems 1956-1990. Berkeley: Creative Arts, 1992.

Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser. Dir. Charlotte Zwerin. Perf. Thelonious Monk, Charlie Rouse, Filmography Larry Gales, and Ben Riley. Warner, 1988.

Sascha Feinstein is the author of Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. He is also co-editor, with Yusef Komunyakaa, of The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume The Second Set. His jazz-related poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including New England Review, The Southern Review, Paideuma, and The North American Review. Feinstein teaches creative writing and literature at Lycoming College, where he edits Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.