HALF NOTE
since poetry is the only nightclub
where anything can happen
let's take a look at it
if you go to the right you're wrong
if you go left you're incorrect
if you go straight you're a fool
poetry is a swimming pool
no it's a diving board
this drink is so good I could dive right into it
you've got to avoid
......................the ice cube
- Howard Hart from "The Sky of Orange Whispers"
mr. hart
jazz drummer
mentored by kenny clarke
left for paris in '46 and met django
who asked him to audition but howard let it slip as
he found baudelaire's flowers of evil at a kiosk by the seine and wasted the hours
in epiphany then and there poetry was as important to him as music
returned to nyc in 47 studied composition with mills and bernstein
hung with charlie parker and delmore schwartz
roomed with and read alongside kerouac and lamantia
wrote plays
wrote poems
blew some wigs
shuttled twixt coasts
between arts
passed through worlds in 2002
over to the other side
Howard Hart wrote poems of unusual subtlety and color and I'm having trouble putting down
"The Sky of Orange Whispers" which is in a slender pocket-size volume that i take everywhere
check www.emptymirrorbooks.com
amazon.com and your local inter-library loan to get hold of his others
4 comments:
I must get my grubby,translucent paws (pause? Yeah,take a load off.Put yer feet up.Relax,man,relax.) on a copy of "The Sky of Orange Whispers."
Apologies -
As per my claim that "Sky of Orange Whispers was pocket-sized - i was mixing it up with Kaufman's "Golden Sardine" published by City Lights...
Golden Sardine fits easily into a pocket along with
a matchbox
marble pouch
dental floss dispenser
subway token
and a small tin of Finnish liquorice drops
...it's the lack of a smooth whipping-out motion of "Sardines" for a moment of poetic interjection that proves the snag
thus the cultivation of
short
snippets
set to memory
Would "Golden Sardine" fit easily into my pocket along with my prize possession: A McHale's Navy Captain Binghampton trading card?
irascibly, so!
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