Chris Selvig wrote a few days back:
Is there a single person on this list who likes Cecil Taylor's poems, or
zanier still prefers them to the piano bits? Jazz guys doing poetry
are right up there with actors deciding they want to make rock
records. Or worse yet, blues records.
I don't know if you're looking for a date or what, but even though
I'm not single, I do like Cecil Taylor's poetry, a lot. It's not
typical workshop poetry about how he felt when his mother died or
when a lover left him, but it's well within a couple of strands of
American avant garde poetic traditions. (Just as Taylor's music
doesn't deal with standard song form, but has roots in various
strands of avant garde musical traditions.)
For those with an interest in an academic look at this, Aldon Nielsen
has a very good book called Black Chants: Languages of
African-American Postmodernism that discusses Taylor's writing (& Sun
Ra's) in the context of contemporary Black poetry by writers like
Russell Atkins, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Stephen Jonas, Nathaniel
Mackey, Norman Pritchard, AB Spellman & others.
I'm not disagreeing with you about your general thesis on musicians
and poetry, or actors and music, though frankly, I don't think much
of a lot of music by musicians, poetry by poets, and/or acting by
actors. (Feel free to put "irony" quotes on any verbs or nouns in
that last sentence to make it more palatable to your own tastes.)
--
Herb Levy
P O Box 9369, Forth Wort, TX 76147
herb(a)eskimo.com
