Jazz Poems

A vital and surprising hardcover collection of poems about, and inspired by, jazz music. AN EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY POCKET POET. Selected and Edited by Kevin Young.

Ever since its first flowering, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry; this scintillating anthology offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music that 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 that pay tribute to jazz’s great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.

Includes:

• “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret” by Langston Hughes
• “God Bless the Child” by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog, Jr.
• “Jazz Fantasia” by Carl Sandburg
• “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” by William Carlos Williams
• “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks
• “Chasing the Bird” by Robert Creeley
• “Victrola” by Robert Pinsky
• “Pres Spoke in a Language” by Amiri Baraka
• “The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara
• “Art Pepper” by Edward Hirsch
• “Snow” by Billy Collins
 
Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.