Ghost notes / Ralph Burns.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burns, Ralph, 1949-

Series:

Field poetry series

Language:

English

Physical Description:

67 pages ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oberlin, Ohio : Oberlin College Press, [2001]

Summary:

In his deeply innovative and beautifully human Ghost Notes, Ralph Burns explores the vivid relation between American jazz and American poetry. His book embodies the movement of jazz. In the long title poem he plays wide open, without a mute, as Red Allen advises. The result is inclusive and exhilarating, a structure that keeps on opening and opening.

"I think a good poem," says Burns, "like Charles Mingus's 'Chair in the Sky,' carries the possibility of alighting anywhere. There is nothing it denies prior to its first impulse, but as Dizzy Gillespie suggests, one of its projects is to 'learn what not to play.' Zutty Singleton played drums, and somebody showed up, then more people, including selves he may have come to recognize as a community, sometimes an argumentative one. That's what I want to happen in this book."

It does. Ghost Notes delivers on all of its promises.

Selected from over 500 manuscript entries, this is the fourth winner of the annual FIELD Poetry Prize.

Contents:

For My Father-in-Law, with a Last Line from Dante 41

Food for Death 42

Boyish 45

Back 47

Wildflowers of the Western World 49

Comfort Inn 55

Lamentations 57

Swamp Gas 59

Oil Well, Oklahoma 61

Orphans Eating Sugar 63

We Are Seven 64.

ISBN:

0932440886

OCLC:

46786782