Jazz Poetry

I found an article that fits in with our talks about jazz poetry, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat generation. I love love love Kerouac’s quote regarding “beat”: “Beatitude, not beat up. You feel this. You feel it in a beat, in jazz real cool jazz.”

Another section I found interesting was “bop prosody,” a prose poetry style described as words in random bursts and comparable to that of a stream of consciousness, specifically Jack Kerouac, which is exactly what we came up with in class after listening to his work.

This article mentions two beat poets that I am interested in learning more about: John Clellon Holmes (who, according to the article, was a devout lover of jazz musicians) and Leroi Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka. Being an African-American poet, he was able to relate more to jazz musicians).

http://www.litkicks.com/Topics/Jazz.html