Letter to Cedric Brut April 1 2004 Page 1 of 2

Resource added
James A. EMANUEL 55 bis, bd du Montparnasse 75006 PARIS 1 April 2004 Cédric BRUT 6, rue des Tamaris 31170 TOURNEFEUILLE Dear Mr. Brut, Thanks for your letter postmarked 15 March, which I found upon my return from a poetry—reading trip to Belgium. I can respond briefly to only a few of your questions because of the limitations of the human memory (forty years have passed since I worked on my Hughes materials), my knowledge of jazz sprints only from songs that I have liked, and various circumstances leave me with little time to spere now. I hope that you understand. None of my replies come from academic knowledge, as far as I can predict at this moment. Both jazz and poetry reach beyond everyday experience. They express the disciplined use of refined and expanded imagination. Jazz satisfies my demand for economy and uniqueness in the use of poetic words and phrases. A good haiku wastes no single word. A good haiku leaps over blank spaces, like Erroll Garner at the piano (see my haiku on him, page 56 of my JAZZ from the Haiku King). Poetry and music are natural expressions (common to children and TV commercials) Langston Hughes loved both poetry and music. He published over 800 poems (I have published over 380, but he composed faster); and he wrote plays, lyrics, librettos, etc. for the theater. Jazz—and—religion in Hughes's works is a big subject. He read poems with jazzmen accompanying him (as I have done—and did two weeks ago in Brussels). Donald Gibson's Modern Black Poets

Full description

Typed letter to Cédric Brut from James Emanuel, dated April 1, 2004. Emanuel writes about the aesthetics and function of jazz within poetry, and he specifically cites Hughes as an achiever of melding the two together. (Page 1)

Comments

Log in to view and add comments.

Annotations

No one has annotated a text with this resource yet.

  • type
    Image
  • created on
  • file format
    jpg
  • file size
    6 MB
  • container title
    James A. Emanuel Papers
  • creator
    James A. Emanuel
  • issue
    Box 13 Folder 5 "B" miscellaneous, 2000-2004
  • rights
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • rights holder
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • version
    1-Apr-04