Please enjoy these poems from J.R. Solonche and Katharine Diehl that examine intensity through art and thought. —The Editors
Coltrane on Soprano His eyes are so closed they're op en. From the top of his he ad, he sees the music coming at him eleven notes at a time. He must squee ze them all thro ugh this narrow tongue flick of a horn, this squeal er, whiner, sopra no, diva of a high pitched saxophone. Flurries of fingere d-key-fingers indis tinguishable from eac h other, strike the honey from the stone. O, blurry pain and slurry sorrow suck the merci ful marrow from this brass-gold bone. Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Driving in the Highlands
What catches the tongue in the throat like a loss of meaning?
What I speak of came into being
By means of brutal necessity.
What is not bartered or consigned.
Whose arc does not bend.
My subject is not the unsayable but the unsaid.
Now curse, now clearing.
Katharine Cortese lives in New Jersey and has published chapbooks with Dancing Girl Press and Typewriter City.
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The Latin phrase was Carl Jung's personal motto, which to him "represented the idea that archetypal forces or the "divine" (the autonomous power of the unconscious) are always at work in the human psyche, whether an individual acknowledges them or not. He used it to remind himself and his patients of the objective reality of spiritual forces in everyday life."
I'm sorry but as a jazz fan, I have to throw the red challenge flag here. Coltrane did not have specific notes in his head and then play them extremely rapidly- that was Charlie Parker, and he played alto, and if you slow the recording down, the precision is more easily discernible. Coltrane's "tower of sound" solos were deliberately chaotic- he sounded all over the place and frenetic because he was. He was a great arranger and gave McCoy Tyner a chance to shine, and when Wayne Shorter heard that, he knew he had to have Tyner on Night Dreamer / Armageddon. So, very influenttial and popular player, great arranger, but there was no precision in the solos - nor did he intend there to be.