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@eskimo.com