Jazz Poems

Ever since its first flowering, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry; this anthology offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music which inspired them. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat movement, from the poets of the New York school to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force – one that Jazz Poems makes palpable. We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, William Matthews and C. D. Wright. Here are poems which pay tribute to the great voices of jazz, and poems which throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.