Lester Young, photo by Herb Snitzer
Prose writers are disciplined. Poets not nearly so. And so the long hiatus here at MontanaWriter.
I pass time working on the blog that is to replace this one, and pushing lines of verse around on metaphorical pages. In short, I have been waiting for inspiration.
A restless reader by nature, I have been even more restless these day than I am used to. Dozens and dozens of new books are started but soon abandoned. The only book I have managed to start and finish these past few months is a biography of jazz saxophonist Lester Young. A good one that I will review soon.
It has been a season of re-reading: Yeats and Whitman and Shelley and Keats and Hopkins and Seamus Heaney and Hemingway.
Laying out those writers on paper now, it is clear I am searching the familiar-past for a way forward: returning to my literary roots.
It has also been a season of jazz and blues. At work I listen to Lester Young and Lightnin’ Hopkins.
Lester Young has become a bit of an obsession of mine (and I have had many). I have long loved Coltrane and Stan Getz but knew Young only by reputation. I knew he was influential, but did not know why.
Chancing upon an article somewhere last spring, I came across the fact that Young had lived in Minneapolis for a time, and long considered the Twin Cities a safe home of sorts.
That jazz had roots outside of New Orleans and Chicago and New York was an unexpected surprise. That my adopted home for 25 years was one of those places, made me want to know more.
It has been said that the saxophone of all musical instruments comes closest to “mimicking” the human voice. Lester Young called playing, “telling stories.” Jazz, like poetry, is born in the emotion of a moment. It is the expression of an inexpressible feeling.
Listening to Lester Young, you know that he has a soul like Keats or Whitman. His “sound” is at once ethereal and all too human.
And so another summer has passed. This one spent with Lester Young and a few old poetic friends. What the future hold for blogging and writing is unclear. But I know I do not go empty handed. I carry with me the gift of giants.
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