Ode On Jazz: I'll Be Your Mirror

Over the last few months, the Ode On Jazz, as was taped at KWH at Penn in April '04 and broadcast on WXPN, has shown up in a few new places and continued to do well in a few others. There's a few things I'd like to say about the poem. The first is this: a theory I have that if the Ode On Jazz has gained a certain amount of popularity, it can be attributed to the poem being not only about music, but intensely musical itself. In the Jazz Ode, as can be the case in Keats' Odal Cycle, the musicality of the language (melopoeia) is the basic purport or gist of the poem's appeal. Just the way that music is meant to act as a balm on people's emotions, the Ode On Jazz is designed to do an analogous task. It can thus resonate with people's emotions in a way that harsher, less musical, or more intellectual poetic material cannot. The musical task of the Jazz Ode, when I wrote it in the fall of '02, was clear: to translate the Bach-level density and richness of musical expression found in the Keats' Odal Cycle (1819/1820) into the forms and specific dynamic richness of jazz music, as manifest in Coltrane, Sun Ra, and the rest.