'Words for Jazz Perhaps', Michael Longley (Critical Essay‪)‬

Michael Longley's debut collection No Continuing City (1969) contains the long overlooked (or under-heard) 'Words for Jazz Perhaps', a suite of four poems each of which addresses itself to one of the most vital and sustaining passions in Longley's life and art: music, specifically, jazz music. The suite of poems is dedicated to Sony Lipsitz, in whose famed 'emporium of just undiluted pleasure'--more prosaically, Belfast's Atlantic Records--Longley's life-long devotion to jazz began. Longley has professed to having been 'in love with music from the age of fourteen' and he spends 'about an hour or two every day seriously listening to music and it's either classical music or jazz.' (1) 'Words for Jazz Perhaps' not only transmits the concentrated and intense pleasures of experiencing jazz music but announces from the first Longley's belief in the crucial connections between music and poetry and signals the ways in which this enriching interrelation between the two art forms will sustain him across the decades as his writing modulates and develops. For Longley, jazz is an integral part of his poetic process, as he recently described it: 'For me listening to music (classical and jazz) and writing poetry connect at some deep level. But I do not write many poems. So I tap my feet to Fats Waller and look out the window'. (2) What is more, the title of the suite, 'cheekily pinched [...] from Yeats' as Longley has admitted, makes it an irreverent statement of intent from a new poet as he bursts onto the scene and sets about updating the old forms and practices--W.B. Yeats employed the ballad for his 'Words for Music Perhaps'--and so embraces full-on the complexities of an ever-changing contemporary reality in a poetics which has transdisciplinary and transnational exchanges at its core. (3) In this way, Longley may be seen to be ragging Yeats's classic in the spirit of the great American jazz artists. Longley's deep engagement with jazz music expands his own poetic resource at the level of both theme and technique as this multi-layered jazz suite reveals. The suite opens with an 'elegy' for the jazz pianist Thomas 'Fats' Waller that is more buoyant celebration than epitaph: