SOURCE: "Words without Music about All That Jazz," in The Christian Science Monitor, March 19, 1987, p. 24.

Nordell is an American journalist, editor, and critic. In the following review, he determines that Sitting In provides "an uneven performance with a number of fine, thought-provoking moments."

It shouldn't be surprising that a poet here and there goes public with a fondness for jazz. Both poetry and jazz got rhythm, as the song says, and both have to make things new within established forms, whether the 14-line sonnet or the 12-bar blues.

Britain's late candidate for poet laureate Philip Larkin went so far as to write newspaper reviews of jazz, a collection of which was reissued not long ago. Recently a lesser-known American poet, Hayden Carruth, came out with [Sitting In: Selected Writings on Jazz, Blues, and Related Topics], in which he possibly goes further—saying that for him poetry has always...