In his deeply innovative and beautifully human GHOST NOTES, Ralph Burns explores the vivid relation between American jazz and American poetry. His book embodies the movement of jazz. In the long title poem he plays wide open, as Red Allen advises. The result is inclusive and exhilarating, a structure that keeps on opening and opening.
"I think a good poem," says Burns, "like Charles Mingus's 'Chair in the Sky,' carries the possibility of alighting anywhere. There is nothing it denies prior to its first impulse, but as Dizzy Gillespie suggests, one of its projects is to 'learn what not to play.' Zutty Singleton played drums, and somebody showed up, then more people, including selves he may have come to recognize as a community, sometimes an argumentative one. That's what I want to happen in this book."
It does. GHOST NOTES delivers on all of its promises.
