SOURCE: “Jazz and Poetry: A Conversation,” in Georgia Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 645-661.

In the following discussion, moderated by Robert Kelly, Komunyakaa and Matthews discuss the relationship between jazz music and their respective poetry.

Robert Kelly: Jazz has been present in literature at least since the twenties and thirties when James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes translated the emotion in the music into their poetry. The Beats used jazz to explore more open forms and to create new rhythms. Recently, Al Young and Michael Harper have written openly of their affection for jazz musicians. And James Baldwin reminds us in “Sonny's Blues” that such music has contributed both form and content to literature when he says that jazz helps us to tell “the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted and how we may triumph.” Why is jazz important to the two of...