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Subterranean Night-Colored Magus (3 Moods in the Mode of Miles) -- D.J. Renegade
Subterranean means undergrounddeep, profound
and Miles was one deep brother
deep like a shaft
decrescendoing to the motherlode
blue blowing undersongs
Miles was a tenor trumpet
ten or eleven levels deeper
than the next cat
painting all up under the canvas
making it bluebleed out the other side
Blowing subterranean solos
underground rhythmic resistance
virtual virtuoso
battling musical mafiosos
burrowing under they skin
Miles, son of a dentist doing rootwork
with a hoodoo horn hollering bebop toasts
He was Petey Wheatstraw
Satchmo's son-in-law
a Signifying Junkie jumping cold turkey
out the lion's mouth
Shine below the deck of the Titanic
blueing up the boilers
Miles could blue like Bird
freight like Trane
early like Bird
night like Trane
wing like Bird
rail like Trane
Rumbling underground.
Nightcolor is blacker
than a million miles of fresh asphalt
Miles was one deep black brother
black and fluid as floating smoke
black as the sky round midnight
black as a tire turning for miles ahead
black kettle stewing a Bitch’s Brew
so black, he was Kind of Blue
Miles, slick as black ice
cool as snow
sweet as black cherries
On the Downbeat like a blackjack
a black jackhammer
black Jack Johnson
black Jack of all trumpeting trades
Miles, the Jack of Spades
was our Ace cuz he played / nightcolors
Deepblack, tripleblack
shinyblack
cinderblack
ashyblack
quarterblack
multi-meta-megablack
All shades of Miles
shifting harmonic gears
in his chromatic Ferrari
Blowing Blue Moods
with his black turned
to the audience
speaking cooly
in the colors of night.
Magi are priests
spell-wailing wizards
Miles was deep, black, and magic
conjuring in the key of We
Magus, Magus? ask minders
of the metronome
Miles is secular they say
but we know you spiritual
a soloing sorcerer with ESP
Lord have mercy
you Rev. Miles tonally testifyin
from the Book of the Blues
blowing muted magic
like chapter and verse
Making a joyful noise
unto the lord
and nobody else hip enough
to dig the scene
You Magi Miles with crazy styles
even sported a Tutu
Miles, 1.6 sacred klicks of cool
Miles, 5,280 feet doing
the east Saint Boogie
moody as any Monk
you were Live and Evil
but In a Silent Way
Your holy brown hands
scribbling neon-blue notes
throwing Milestones through
the stained glass windows of Jazz
so deeply, so darkly
Such magic
Sample Analysis: Fragmentation and Uncertainty in Creeley’s “I Know a Man”
Robert Creeley rejects many traditional ideas about what a poem should be in “I Know a Man.” Instead of writing a lyrical poem full of images in a careful structure of rhythm and rhyme, he writes a stark, almost brutally short poem that is characterized by fragmentation and uncertainty. In fact, he might even be making fun of traditional poetry by using a speaker who is so caught up in his melodramatic thoughts about “darkness” that he almost gets into a car wreck. In the end “I Know a Man” is more about language and a new idea of what poetry can be than anything else.
Creeley’s poem is unusual because it contains no images at all, unless one counts the hypothetical “goddamn big car” (9). “I Know a Man” concentrates on language itself rather than on images or on painting a scene. He draws attention to language by using odd abbreviations such as “sd” in the first, fourth, and tenth lines instead of “said,” “yr” for “you’re” in the twelfth line, and the ampersand in the place of the word “and” in line eight. These abbreviations are a rejection of the “pretty” language of traditional poetry, and may be attempts to capture the natural vernacular tendency to shorten and compress words, and thus represent the way people actually speak. Creeley’s language in this poem is all very colloquial. He uses no archaic or difficult words. Instead his poem is composed of everyday words, curse words among them, that any reader would understand, none over two syllables long.
The syntax, too, draws attention to itself because he has tampered with it until some important points are ambiguous. The most obvious example of this occurs in the third stanza where the speaker says, “why not, buy a goddamn big car, / drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake” (9-11). Because of the way the commas are placed in these lines, it is difficult to tell if the word “drive” is spoken by the I or the friend. The context could support either reading. Perhaps an even more confusing example is the stuttering of line eight. Here Creeley writes “what / can we do against / it, or else, shall we & / why not” (6-9). Line eight is so fragmented and choppy, one initially feels as if one has missed a word or two. Thoughts are not getting finished, and as a result, this line is totally devoid of verb and normal syntactic structure, much less any kind of image.
Creeley feels no need to make this poem’s lines and phrases “musical” either. Instead, he creates short, choppy lines with awkward line breaks that sometimes even cut off words in the middle such as “sur-/rounds” in line six. The fact that these line breaks come in unexpected places creates an air of uncertainty for the reader. There is no sense of consistency, unless there is consistency in being consistently surprising. It is difficult if not impossible for the reader to predict what is going to come next. For instance, most would assume after reading the lines “As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking, —John, I” (1-3), that the dash signals the beginning of the words that the speaker says to John and that the pronoun “I” at the end of the third line is part of that quote. Another natural assumption might be that Creeley would continue to relate what the speaker said to his friend. Who would ever guess that the next lines would read “sd, which was not his / name” (4-5)? Both natural assumptions are upset; the “I” is revealed as being part of the speaker’s narrative interjection, and the phrase “which was not his name” is an aside not spoken to the friend but to the reader, and an absurd aside at that. And who would ever predict the last stanza and the way it suddenly, violently puts the rest of the poem in a new context?