Red Letter Poem #285

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #285

 

 

 

 

Harmolodic Duende

 

for Maria Golia

 

 

Infant Ornette Coleman heard everyone speaking at once.

The hubbub opened his eyes to the skies of America.

At twelve he told his teacher the books he read did not satisfy

his ear but fed his singing like an evening turning pages

at the piano for Beethoven. When his mother brought home

an alto saxophone he cried like a spanked newborn, like

the girl of his dreams said yes then took a Greyhound to Dallas.

When Ornette Coleman called a tune at the Hillcrest the babes at the bar

put wax in their ears and strapped themselves to their stools.

The guys on the bandstand closed their eyes and prayed.

When out of Ornette’s white plastic alto swirled a kaleidoscope

of monarch butterflies the band painted the melody

yellow and black. Would you spend your life

in Fort Worth, Texas? is not a blues song but a memoir

Ornette played backwards on the banks of the river

of his baptism. At the Five Spot Ornette’s horn

flowed, flowered, flamingoed. Hear red roses opening

in time-lapse to mating calls of sperm whales. Next

a mournful ballad to the tune of Jackson Pollack but with more

color and strange fruit. No one blinked when García Lorca,

dressed in black, his pomade fragrant as lilacs, eased his way

to a front table. He had missed the adoration of a live audience,

the kindness of strangers. He could dig a band that cooked

in their own cauldron, everyone soloing at once.

A gruff yawp set off squeals and honks. Lifting his glass, García Lorca

proclaimed Ornette Coleman duende’s Prince of Peace. A tidepool formed

on the beach of the Five Spot. Ornette closed his eyes and blew.

 

                                                         ––Kenny Likis

                                   

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s start with terminology.  Harmolodics is a word coined by the late- (and certainly) great jazz master Ornette Coleman.  Blending the words harmony and melodic, this concept embodied Ornette’s theory of improvisation, which did away with the idea of lead soloists rotating into the spotlight, and replaced it with an ensemble of musical equals.  Every element––harmony, melody, and rhythm––was ripe for spontaneous invention.  His musical vision encouraged a daring sense of freedom and overlapping improvisational voices which––by being wholly-present and acutely attentive to each other––would somehow become a unified expression.  It also allowed various band members to play in different time signatures and keys at the same time––unheard of at the time!  This sense of ‘sonic collage’ is clearly in the mind of today’s poet, Kenny Likis, as he concocts his own harmolodic offering.  I like imagining this poem as a raucous lyric for one of Ornette’s wordless songs. 

 

Duende is perhaps a more commonly understood term.  Arising from the culture of flamenco song and dance, and rooted in Spain’s Andalucia, it has been called "a state of tragedy-inspired ecstasy.”  Its aesthetics were defined by another immortal talent, the poet Federico García Lorca, and centered on a deeply authentic and unbridled emotional expression, surpassing rational understanding.  In this vision, mortal vulnerability and life’s fiery beauty could be wholly interwoven, elevating both performer and audience into a revelatory experience.  And, rightly so, Kenny sees a kinship between what Ornette Coleman pursued and what generations of flamenco artists have prized.  Perhaps you and I need to take a moment, put a copy of The Shape of Jazz to Come on the old turntable, and prepare to dance ourselves into rapture.

 

And, to my mind, rapture is precisely what Kenny is after in this piece, the realm where time and space will warp around us, and a sense of the glorious all-at-once harmolodics will carry us away.  Like some raucous jazz club of the mind, why shouldn’t Coleman be playing for Garcia Lorca, a small glass of absinthe raised in the Spaniard’s left hand?  Why not invite the imagination’s pantheon to share the moment, snag a few tables near the stage?  Beethoven and Jackson Pollock, nodding along to the saxophone?  Just consider what their conversation would be like!  Is that Walt Whitman sitting alone in the back (the word “yawp” is enough to conjure the Good Gray Bard)?  Perhaps he’s bought a round for Billie Holiday, perched at a high top, whose “strange fruit” tempers the celebratory mood.  And the musical bacchanal becomes so intense, the painted ladies at the bar have to borrow a page from Homer and stop their ears with wax for fear of succumbing to temptation.  Kenny has done all this, while sketching the jazz great’s cultural background, and singing of an America in which artists like these might all feel at home––where our cultural centers will not be used as tools for tawdry political propaganda and remain, instead, the temples in which we are reminded of who we truly are.

 

Long ago, Kenny wrote his master’s thesis on Robert Creeley and has been a student of contemporary poetry since.  But it was not until the forced isolation of the Covid pandemic that he got the urge to write poems and, as he told me, “began making up for lost time.”  His work has begun appearing in fine journals like: ONE ART, Paterson Literary Review, Riddled with Arrows, Duck, and the Birmingham Poetry Review. He lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife Lori, where they have “stuffed their home with books, records, folk art, and baseball gloves.”  Sounds like a scene where life’s ephemeral beauty can be celebrated, and Ornette himself might feel quite at-home.  I’m delighted to welcome Kenny’s wild riffing to the Red Letter bandstand.

 

 

   

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

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