In the US, jazz and poetry have had inspired each other since the 1920s. In Australia the association is less celebrated. But Canberra-based poet is a champion of both art forms and has kindly allowed Jazz Australia to publish five of his music-related works.
Geoff is a leading literary figure who has published 16 collections of poetry as well as two novels, three verse novels and several other works, including anthologies, translations and a biography of Bernie McGann.
He has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award.
Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, German, Serbian, Slovenian and Greek. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry in Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Britain, Italy, Serbia, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Singapore, China, the United States and New Zealand.
Among his more recent books are:
Freehold (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005)
Cartes Postales (Picaro Press, 2004)
Drumming on Water (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2003)
The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets (editor) (Indigo, 2003)
Agnostic Skies (Five Islands Press) will be published later this year.
Jazz/Poet
he scrawled
a sudden
sentence in
the air
violent yet
articulate
I snatched
a phrase
and took
it home
to work on
but
by dawn
it was
dead
John Lewis
A gifted child
forgotten in a room
with sunlight and piano
the right hand
working
blues and fugues,
the left
transparent chords.
It is a kind of
game with space,
the unheard equal
to the heard,
the composition
recomposed
each time more simple
than the last,
a movement in the
mind alone
where any moment now
we know
applause will break the glass.
Thelonious Monk
And as the solo opens out
the notes are girders
swinging into place;
their coldness
might be sentimental
if it wasn’t for the space,
that architecture
full of sky
and never to be glassed.
As semitones
climb through the wires
the pedal is nostalgia only.
The instrument he’s telling us
is oak and iron
and black shellac.
The music’s
more or less like life,
solid as a sweating forehead
totally abstract.
Bud Powell
The wood tonight
is glass and metal,
the left hand disappearing
almost,
stabbing down for counterpoint
as if a chord
might somehow scald it.
A sharp, reluctant punctuation.
The right hand scuttles
through its clusters,
reckless with acceleration.
The dissonances
sing and shine,
dialogue of a heart and mind
skating at the edge of madness.
Bill Evans
His notes are almost
cubes of ice.
Wearing their
translucent skin
they hang, without dependence,
in pure space.
Hammers touch
without percussion;
the chords are voiced
in slanting planes,
a pedal lets them
shiver there.
The runs are clean
as mountain water,
logical as air.
Geoff Page
Photo of Geoff Page by Alison Hastie
