Jazz and American Poetics: From The New American Poetry to Contemporary Verse
The Charles Olson Society and the Amiri Baraka Society will co-sponsor a session at the annual American Literature Association Conference, to be held in Chicago, May 23-26. This year, our two societies are pleased to announce a collaboration around the theme of jazz and its relation to the development of experimental American poetry. As Charles Olson once stated in a series of talks titled “On Black Mountain”: “Boy, there was no poetics. It was Charlie Parker. Literally, it was Charlie Parker.” Olson was thinking back to his 1950s correspondence with Robert Creeley, who consistently wrote to Olson about the importance of Parker’s bop rhythms for his own poetics. In the talk, Olson equates the entirety of the New American Poetry with just Charlie Parker.