Customer Reviews

Choruses

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Q. troupe's Luminous Maturity truly speaks out in this learned, secondary collection of poems that draws from a wide influence of jazz/musical forms, politics, art, and the beauty and power of our own collective linguistics.If, as a reader of poetry and/or prose, you would like a generous sampling of Troupe's work, this would be a very recommended read, for it allows a sense of continuity, definition and recapitulation of Troupe's ever-evolving oeuvre to be sensed:

You have the presence of Troupe's brillaint immersion of contemporary thoughts/ideas with that of classical poetic forms: sestinas, villanelles, haikus & tankas - among them, a collection for the Point Loma Waste-Water Management Project in San Diego - and his literary musical/cadenced innovations covering a wide array of subjects from visual/sculptural art, to contemporary politics, to familial reflections/tropes and his speciality: forms attempting to emulate the steady pace and flow
of Jazz, especially that of Miles Davis.

Aside from some of the more lengthy, free-wheeling and boundlessly expanding poems, and perhaps from his (sometimes, but rarely) careless digressions into other lesser-known aspects of living and life, Quincy Troupe's poetry speaks with a resonance and clarity greater than the abstractions of most poets, and its
manifestions can best be seen through this work.

If you could take a snapshot of the very early work of such great jazz poets as Langston Hughes and Jack Kerouac, you would notice in the lines a solid grounding in language, nonetheless characteristic of a less adventurous, beginning writer. This could also be said of the poems of Quincy Troupe's latest book, Choruses. The poems in Choruses have that definitive jazz feel to them, not only in syntax but in tone, rhythm, and mode. The title itself implies the improvisation, fluency, and spontaneous capability of a sax player bent on blowing pure attitude. The e.e. cummings-esque all-lowercase format and the use of the first person pronoun "eye" in place of "I," are some of Troupe's trademarks, which further evoke this flavor although (in the case of "eye") they could prove to be distracting. I've heard that Roger Ebert, movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, said that movies aren't about "what you say, but how you say it." I don't think this applies to poetry. I think that the most beautiful descriptive poem about a gardenia is still a descriptive poem about a gardenia, nothing more. Therefore, for a poem to really succeed it must say something definitive in addition to saying it well. In poems like "Looking Out Between Thinking," "Sighting Birds at the Beach," and "Whenever Eye Walk By," Troupe regresses into self-indulgent descriptive mush, apparent in this passage from "Sighting Birds at the Beach," where he describes the birds as "black holes & shapes up there in space on a day/gray as sadness." Then again, Wordsworth managed to become very successful-becoming Poet Laureate of England, even-by writing poems about clouds and pretty skies. One of my poetry teachers once told me, "All good poetry begins in observations." This is true, but not to the extent that Quincy literalizes it. When I first met Quincy in 1998, he was talking to a group of high-school kids about his role as a poet, more specifically, as a "modern-day troubadour." I think his notion of being a "poet," in the traditional sense of the word, compounded with the inherent responsibility the position entails, unconsciously shapes a lot of his work. For example, in a brave attempt at merging (as the book cover describes it) "ahead-of-the-curve ideas and canonical form," he begins this volume with a few traditional forms. "Song," the poem that opens Choruses, is a villanelle about his role as a poet in society. Two sestinas follow, one about the recent mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cultists, the other about baseball greats Mark McGuire & Sammy Sosa battling for the home run record. I'm not impressed. A friend of mine wrote a sestina about playing Minesweeper. He redeems himself, however, in such a way that's it's almost worth the fifteen bucks for the paperback copy. When he stops talking about himself or about Poetry, it's to talk about other people, which he does very well, admittedly. Perhaps that's why his biographies were so successful. (By the way, check out Miles: The Autobiography.) His poem for Allen Ginsberg and Lucy Goldman, "Choruses," earns its place as the title poem with incredible tenacity. Other tributes, such as "Tempus Fugit/C.T.A." for Miles Davis, Bud Powell and Jimmy Heath and "Mother," for Dorothy Smith Marshall, are real, appropriate and well-crafted, not to mention vivid. The pertinent question, then, is "Where is he going to go with all of this?" My suggestion: to the stage. In his PBS special The Power of the Word, Bill Moyers points out that listening to a Quincy Troupe poem is a lot more pleasurable than reading one. I agree. My few encounters with the man have been altogether pleasant. He reads with an energy very few poets that possess the "sucessful" and "contemporary" tags can claim. Furthermore, he's fun to talk to. It is in these respects that I think he deserves more exposure. However, his writing as it stands is just beginning to take shape, even several volumes into his career as a published writer. Diagnosis? Write on, Q.T. Write on.