"All That Jazz" by John C. Mannone, Frequent Contributor

All That Jazz

John C. Mannone

To say that words of poetry dance

to the jazz beat           is something

that can only be felt. The bright

sounds, bright colors, the crisp

hue of words, percussions of

resounding fricatives. The symbols’

shshsh…onomatopoeia.

            Words arranged as notes

on a page,        the melody

            carried from stanza to stanza:

framework for the heart

            to pulse those words.

Let the spaces in between

verses be filled with rifts

of words in jazzy layout—

            an experimental composition.

Fast-paced-sounds-that-voice

an answer to a subtle melody:

saXophone wooing piano.

            Let only the chords

            of your heart   be broken

with the music of words.

Poet’s Notes: I’ve been thinking a lot about sound and the absence of sound and how that plays in poetry. This piece of meta-poetry tries to carry some of the jazz rhythms in its structure.

Editor’s Note:  I really enjoy this experiment, particularly that way John plays with white space to emphasize the jazzy feel.