(written on a reading tour of Vermont with Hayden Carruth)

“I don’t talk much.”

But after an hour of quiet
driving towards Middlebury
for the next reading, a snippet
of conversation leads to
jazz sessions in Chicago and
New York … Teagarden,
Pee Wee Russell, Chick
Webb, Condon, Goodman,
and the memory of hundreds of jazz
players who have fused their
silken driving rhythms into
the pores of the master’s poems.

The oxygen tank clicks
mechanically every 15 seconds,
the soulless backbeat
maintains life, it becomes
a thread in our conversation.
Words are measured carefully—
they are the lifeblood.

“Hayden, what makes a good
poem?”
“Genuineness. Genuine to the
feeling and intent, without
all the editorializing.”

And then we fall into
silence, driving through
the snow and rain, the
oxygen pulses.

©2006, T. Namaya

Namaya is a jazz performance poet and founder of Jazz Beat Blues Poetry Ensemble. He has gigged around the world—Europe, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia—and will tour Australia in 2009 with his show “God SEX POLITICS.” His latest book is Vermont My Home on Blue Heron Pond.

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