Billy Collins And All That Jazz: An Essay by J.Doria

You can’t read Billy Collins’ poems without considering their background music, which, like his comic and physically impaired mice, perforates his words and timbre of his poetry, a distant accompaniment, a soundtrack to his verses. The central focus here will be Many Faces of Jazz from Picnic, Lightning with reference to some other works from Questions of Angels, The Apple that Astonished Paris and The Art of Drowning.

Billy Collins has said that he likes to be alone with his reader, creating a very personal and intimate link between ourselves and the poet. Reading is a singular act and Collins makes full advantage of this. Not only does he seduce the reader by his profoundly simple yet enchanting verse, he shares his love of music as well, almost gifting us with a mixed tape ranging from classical to jazz to the blues to a track on the radio. In this poem, The Many Faces of Jazz, Collins reflects on our complicated relationship with this genre of music which he clearly loves “and, most essential, the whole/head furiously,/ yet almost imperceptibly nodding/ in total and absolute agreement.”

The poem takes you into a smoky, hazy jazz bar perhaps by invitation where we watch an audience. Jazz can be a musical estrangement of sorts. It jars. Tempos can be jagged and ragged. It refuses to soar with Beethovian swells, climaxing gloriously and unforgivingly. We feel we should ‘understand’ it but don’t. One almost feels uneducated. Perhaps it is this which makes us feel uncomfortable or the liberty which improvisation offers. Why can’t a tune be a tune, for godsakes, you might ask? There’s almost too much freedom and interpretation to it. It’s persistent in its clashing and gnashing of teeth. It titillates and teases but fails, for some, in allowing a comfort zone, a final ‘aha’ moment, with which Bach is littered or Vivaldi or, she blushingly confesses, Abba. Chords don’t melt into each other like puzzle pieces; they dive and soar and race and pause all over the place like a drunken spider, like confetti in the wind. It free flows. One must confess, it’s challenging and mostly one feels out of one’s depth.

It is precisely this estrangement which Collins manages to express in his poem The Many Faces of Jazz. We take delight in realizing we are not alone in our “pained concentration” and that indeed, we have unwittingly chosen this “new source of agony” whether we like it or not. It is noted that the person with a look of “existential bemusement” cannot be ruffled by this musical flow of improvisation, or marginally impressed, denoted by his “lifted” eyebrows and the casual “oscillating” swizzle stick held nonchalantly in his free hand. One imagines a stern whisky in the other.

We glance over to the uber cool girl in the academic and softly alluring turtle necked sweater, her head a swooning “flower on a stem”, her “lips slightly parted” in a seductive stance, perhaps hoping for the attention of some other like minded jazz enthusiast and we wish we were younger and prettier. For some reason, the other faces are staunchly male. We cannot imagine a man being a “langorous droop” over a ballad as this perhaps mistakenly remains in the realms of female, born out of a terrible and innately sexist prejudice. Our suspicions are confirmed by the possessive article of “her half closed eyes” as she basks under our jealous gaze.

The music distracts us and we turn our heads and see the “fellow at the front table” who has a penchant for “everything but the instrument” which leaves the vocals, we conclude, and if something is not done, he will mount the stage and change the status quo, so great is his passion and need. The “crazy-man-crazy face” individual cares for nothing but percussion, as any percussionist knows. They demand attention and take over the sound. A percussionist who listens is a rare find. This “crazy” owes his raison d’etre to the drum solo. Nothing else matters to him. Even the person who has some buried anger within, “locates the body of cold rage dammed up behind the playing” and loses himself “deeply” almost therapeutically, to it.

Collins then, in the final stanza, manages to draw our attention back to our round metaphoric table in the corner of the bar, back to himself. We are by now wondering what his jazz face is although we are already persuaded that he likes this music. At the same time, we wonder what our jazz face is “and don’t tell me you don’t have one”. He won’t let us off easily. He professes his unwavering adoration of the genre by his “furiously, yet almost imperceptibly nodding” head in “total and absolute agreement.”

Because of our adoration of the poet, we cannot help ourselves but follow his lead. We are charmed by Art Blakey’s haphazard and jarring version of Three Blind Mice as Collins chops parsley in his kitchen and is endearingly affected by “the thought of them without eyes / and now without tails to trail through the moist grass” so charmingly described in I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of Three Blind Mice. He eases us from jazz to the blues, blaming Freddie Hubbard’s “mournful trumpet” on Blue Moon (or the onions) for “the wet stinging in my eyes.”  

We are driven to listen to Thelonious Monk tinkling out Ruby My Dear and imagine “the snow that is coming down this morning” and “how the notes and the spaces accompany/ its easy falling…as if he had imagined a winter scene/as he sat at his piano/late one night at the Five Spot” (Snow from Picnic, Lightning). He doesn’t stop there but offers us “an adagio for strings”, probably a Bach’s cello concerto, “the best of the Ronettes,/ or George Thorogood and the Destroyers” in one giant and determined musical leap. Here Collins outlines his uncanny knack of demonstrating how music inextricably colours the nature of things, not dissimilar to his poetry, particularly.

In Lines Lost Among Trees Collins beautifully sketches the moment when inspiration flies beyond grasp and blames it woefully on “ the jazz of timing.” 

We cannot have but sympathy for the poet enduring the incessant barking of a neighbour’s dog who, in the end, triumphs over an entire orchestra, and Beethoven, in Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In The House. The effusive repetition of “barking, barking, barking” intertwined with “while the other musicians listen in respectful silence to the famous barking dog solo”, effectively transmits the insufferable intrusive sound of the dog barking. Its triumph over an entire orchestra is so outstanding that we are forced to bow to its canine vocal aptitude.

Collins doesn’t stop there. All these musical references open up worlds for his lone reader, a swirling whirlwind of poetry and music. He tells us how The Sensational Nightingales who, on a Sunday morning “must be credited with the bumping up / of my spirit, the arousal of mice within…” In Tuesday, June 4, 1991 he figures he “will make him (the house painter) a tape when he goes back to his brushes and pails” because the painter “likes this slow rendition / of You Don’t Know What Love Is.”

Collins’ musical allegiance takes real shape in The Blues when he astutely reminds us that “no one takes an immediate interest in the pain of others…But if you sing it again / with the help of a band / … people will not only listen,/ they will shift to the sympathetic / edges of their chairs.” He underscores a human trait. We turn to music and poetry in times of need and pain in an attempt to define and assuage them.

Perhaps the most touching of all is Questions About Angels where he so poignantly ends spiritual, yet unquestionably lyrical, musings on the life of angels with the unavoidably alluring image of “one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet, / a small jazz combo working in the background./ She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful/ eyes closed and the tall thin bassist leans over / to glance at his watch because she has been dancing forever, and now it is very late / even for musicians.”

As the bard so aptly wrote in Twelfth Night, “If music be the food of love, play on.”

And Mr Collins certainly, evocatively and profoundly does.