The Cool, Cool Bards

The poet and the jazzman met in a San Francisco basement, aptly named The Cellar, to discuss a fusion of the arts. "In Now with Winter," said the poet, "we try something slow and soft. In Artifacts we want a sax solo, like the thrill is gone."

"You mean," said the jazzman, pointing to the text, "we goof around here."

"Yeah," said the poet. "Have a ball." Then the combo climbed onto the bandstand and gave out with a rippling accompaniment while the poet chanted into the mike. His name was Kenneth Ford, and he writes the kind of poetry the hip set digs. Sample lines, dedicated to Saxophonist Judy Tristano. separated wife of famed Jazz Pianist Lennie Tristano:

There was grief, clearly heard,

Such lover's grief, -

And your ax in the form of your sax,

Sounded like the sounds of a dying bird.

In downtown San Francisco and all along the Bohemian strip known as North Beach, other poets and hipsters were gigging together to the raucous applause of the city's beard-and-sandal set. The poetry was usually poor and the jazz was worse, but nobody seemed to care. Record business was being done by dim little jazz spots such as the Sail'N and the Black Hawk--the Taj Mahal of West Coast jazz, where Dave Brubeck blew himself to fame. And at the Tin Angel, on the waterfront, Trumpeter Dick Mills and his combo were playing with the man who started the poetry-and-jazz trend, Poet Kenneth Rexroth. decked out in red shirt, olive green corduroy suit and black string tie. "Lord! Lord! Lord!" cried Rexroth happily. "Look how it packs them in!"

Yawps & Whimpers. Since the mid-403, Poet Rexroth, now 52, has presided over a circle of San Francisco writers he describes as "mature Bohemians." Their characteristic literary theme is the decline and fall of practically everybody, delivered in a tone that wavers between a yawp and a whimper. At the GHQ of the San Francisco poets, a tiny joint on Grant Avenue known simply as The Place, the non-squares were invited to gather on Sunday afternoons to "snarl at the cosmos, praise the unsung, defy the order." Poet Rexroth first carried the snarls into the jazz clubs last winter. "Poetry," he argued, "is a dying art in modern civilization. Poetry and jazz together return the poet to his audience."

A longtime jazz buff, Rexroth got together with Saxophonist Bruce Lippincott and worked out a sketchy jazz accompaniment for his new poem, Thou Shalt Not Kill, a lengthy dirge for long-lost friends, mostly poets: "What happened to Robinson who used to stagger down Eighth Street, dizzy with solitary gin? ... Where is Leonard who thought he was a locomotive? . . . What became of Jim Oppenheim? . . . Where is Sol Funaroff? What happened to Potamkin? . . . One sat up all night talking to H. L. Mencken and drowned himself in the morning." Then the Rexroth verse turns to a super Bohemian and aman who was also a good poet: Dylan Thomas. When Rexroth first read the poem, 500 fans stormed The Cellar (seating capacity: 43) to hear him:

Who killed him?

Who killed the bright-headed bird?

You did . . .

You drowned him in your cocktail

brain . . . You hit him with an album of Hindemith.

You stabbed him with stainless steel by

Isamu Noguchi . . . You killed him! You killed him.

In your God damned Brooks Brothers

suit, You son of a bitch.

Mumbo, Jumbo & Bumbo. Other local poets--Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Junk Man's Obligate) and Kenneth Patchen (Hurrah for Anything), et al.--have moved into the jazz clubs. "All these Kenneths," comments Kenneth Rexroth, "sound a little like Mumbo, Jumbo and Bumbo, each the biggest elephant in the world."

The jazzmen, in turn, have taken to scribbling. Lippincott. backed by his own quintet, recently recited a piece about how the guy in the combo feels when he is going way out ("We were all there waving at the hillside Picasso men who turned out to be saguaro cactuses . . . We were all there together, really, still, now, always, rotating, revolving, dancing, now, always"). The jazz accompaniments are both premeditated and improvised, but all of them are far too sketchy to stand by themselves. If the poets are sold on J. & P., most of the jazzmen are cooling on it. An exception: Dave Brubeck, who is reminded by the union of jazzmen and poets of "the Bards and Meistersingers."

The act continues to sell at a brisk rate. "At any moment," wrote San Francisco Chronicle Columnist Ralph F. Gleason recently, "I expect to see [Coach] Abe Saperstein announce T. S. Eliot in a coast-to-coast tour with the Harlem Globe Trotters."

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