Jazz Idiom: Blueprints, Stills and Frames The jazz greats—photographed on stage and behind the scenes, and remembered in poetry.
The Jazz Photography of Charles L. Robinson | Poetic Takes and Riffs by Al Young
Morton Marcus | Photo: Jana Marcus
ROBERT SWARD: Mort, what do you mean by plain style?
MORTON MARCUS: To me, plain style is clear style: clarity of expression that is always conversational in essence and tone. It is never ornate or pursues verbal pyrotechnics. Although I’ve used many approaches in my poems over the years, for the most part I’ve presented them with an austere clarity, almost a simplicity of grammar and vocabulary. And again, I’m more concerned with giving the impression of a voice speaking than singing. That’s pretty much William Carlos Williams’ legacy for the poets who started writing in the 1950s and after. Find the American voice box, he said. We don’t speak English; we speak American. And we speak, we don’t sing. So with me, voice rhythms are all. As is clarity. The pursuit of clarity has always been a conscious decision on my part and has to do with my focus on imagery and metaphor as the core of my work.
RS: How do you hear your poems? That is, what do you “hear” first in your mind and–tricky question–how then do your poems find their way from head space, so to speak, to the physical page?
MM: One of the ways, a predominant way I think, that I develop a poem is through imagining a voice speaking, a particular voice that is talking to me or which I’m overhearing, a voice whose rhythm and tone I let guide the method and structure of what I’m writing in so far as tone, line length, stanzaic arrangement and form are concerned-some of the latter, of course, are only relevant when I’m writing verse poems.
RS: You’re saying the voice mode is primary.
MM: No, that’s just one way I develop a poem; a major way, it’s true. But for me, the voice is secondary to the imagery and/or metaphors that reveal themselves in the course of the writing.
RS: Explain.
MM: Maybe if I described one of the methods I use to write a poem, this will become clearer. But let me warn you that my description may sound fanciful …To begin with, images and metaphors in almost all cases appear like golden medallions in the vaulted darkness of my psyche.
RS: If I may say so, the preceding sentence strikes me as out of keeping with what you said earlier about “plain style.”
MM: No, no. You’re confusing two things here. My imagery may be baroque, even decadent, but my language is plain. And I warned you that this might sound fanciful. But let me go on. I was saying that images and metaphors in almost all cases appear like golden medallions in the vaulted darkness of my psyche. Let me add that their appearances are unplanned and unexpected. A long time ago I decided that these appearances were in many cases the beginning of the creative act for me, and that it was my task to pursue their meanings by following their development, which many times consisted of grappling with their changes in shape and direction. Is that clear so far?
RS: Go on.
Photo: Brett Hall Jones
Please join us for
a remembrance of
Oakley Hall
(1920 – 2008)
3:30 pm Sunday,
October 19, 2008
San Francisco Art Institute
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco
(Valet Parking available)
Books by Oakley Hall | Photo: Al Young
May 16, 2008
Oakley Hall, an author and teacher whose novels set in California and environs helped define contemporary Western literature and who also helped launch the literary careers of such prominent writers as Michael Chabon, Richard Ford and Amy Tan, has died. He was 87.
Hall died Monday [May 12] of complications from cancer and kidney disease at his home in Nevada City, Calif., said his daughter Brett Hall Jones.
In a richly varied and productive career, Hall wrote more than 20 novels, including “Warlock” (1958), a fictional account of the early West that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and “The Downhill Racers” (1963), about skiers in the Sierra Nevada. Both books were made into movies.
He was best known, however, as a professor of English at UC Irvine and a co-director of the school’s writing program. He joined the faculty in 1968.
“Oakley was a hugely generous mentor who was very important to many writers,” Michelle Latiolais, co-director of the university’s programs in writing, said Thursday.
“His course on how to structure a work of fiction was legendary,” said Latiolais, a former student of Hall.
He wrote several guides to fiction writing, including “The Art and Craft of Novel Writing,” in 1989.
As a novelist, Hall wrote “psychological realism,” Latiolais said. He often used the historical West as his setting, without the white hats and black hats.
“Warlock” is set in a California mining town where a gunslinger lawman tries to impose order. Violent gangs, murky politicians and a decent woman who is a prostitute are among the characters.
“Oakley complicated a romantic moral clarity we had about the West,” Latiolais said.
She said he also helped lay the groundwork for several generations of revisionist writers, notably Cormac McCarthy, whose “Blood Meridian,” a 1985 novel, follows a gang of Anglo scalp hunters in the mid-1800s.
Hall’s other books include a series of mysteries featuring American satirist Ambrose Bierce as the main character. The first in the series, “Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades,” was published in 1998.
Hall wrote the libretto for “Angle of Repose,” an opera by Andrew Imbrie based on the novel by California writer Wallace Stegner.
As a teacher, Hall was admired, beloved and feared.
“Oakley would stay on a piece of writing, get into it on a molecular level,” Chabon said Thursday.
“He wasn’t harsh, but he didn’t pull any punches,” he said of Hall’s critiques. “He didn’t worry if what he said would be easy to hear.
“He had a classic gruff exterior, but you knew he was a warm and affectionate man who was really trying to help. That made the criticism easier to take.”
In 1969, Hall co-founded the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, a summer program with workshops and informal lectures held at a ski resort near Lake Tahoe. The program offers unpublished writers the chance to hear from established authors. Ford and Tan, both close friends of Hall, have often been guest speakers.
“Squaw is where I got my start as a writer,” Tan said in an interview Thursday. “That is where I found the confidence and determination to be a writer.”
She attended the program for the first time as a student in 1985 and brought along several short stories she had written. They became part of her novel “The Joy Luck Club,” a bestseller published in 1989.
Hall, his wife, Barbara; daughter, Brett; and son-in-law, novelist Louis B. Jones, all became closely involved with the Squaw Valley program, which brought out a certain side of him.
“You can’t separate Oakley from the ‘father, husband, patriarch’ that he was,” Tan said.
Hall was born July 1, 1920, in San Diego. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1943 and earned a master of fine arts degree at the University of Iowa in 1950. He taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop before he joined UC Irvine. He retired in 1990.
Hall married Barbara Edinger, a well-known photographer, in 1945. In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Oakley Hall III; daughters Sands and Tracy; and seven grandchildren.
A memorial service is being planned.
Contributions in his name can be made to Doctors Without Borders, P.O. Box 5030, Hagerstown, MD 21741-5030; or the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, P.O. Box 1416, Nevada City, CA 95959.
– Mary Rourke
L.A. Times
mary.rourke@latimes.com
© 2008 L.A. Times
10 a.m.
(NEW VENUE, NEW TIME)
PETALUMA ART CENTER
30 LAKEVILLE ST.
MIKE TUGGLE, TERRY EHRET, DAN BELLM, AND GILLIAN WEGENER and friends of Phoebe Washer
11 a.m.
JUNGLE VIBES
136 PETALUMA BLVD NORTH
MUSIC BY G.P.SKRATZ, BILL VARTNAW, JEANNIE POWELL, LYNN WATSON AND JACK CRIMMINS
12 NOON
JUNGLE VIBES
136 PETALUMA BLVD. NORTH
MICHAEL LARRAIN, STEVE WASSERMAN, SEAN KILTY AND CLAUDIA CHAPLINE
1 p.m.
APPLE BOX (AT THE MILL)
6 PETALUMA BLVD. NORTH
ED COLLETTI, MICHAEL ROTHENBERG, TERRI CARRION AND WINNERS OF THE PETALUMA POETRY CONTEST
2 p.m.
APPLE BOX (AT THE MILL)
6 PETALUMA BLVD. NORTH
DIANE DI PRIMA AND MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN
3 p.m.
COPPERFIELDS BOOKS
140 KENTUCKY ST.
AL YOUNG, JOYCE JENKINS AND JONAH RASKIN
4 p.m.
PHOENIX THEATRE
201 WASHINGTON ST.
MARTHA AND TONY MIMS FROM LISTEN AND BE HEARD
5 p.m.
BELLA LUMA CAFFE
125 PETALUMA BLVD. NORTH
AVOTCJA WITH SHIRLEY KAZUYO MIRAMOTO ON KOTO AND EUGENE WARREN. NANCY KEANE, MICHELLE BAYNES AND GERI DIGIORNO
6 p.m.
AQUS CAFE (NEW VENUE)
FOUNDRY WHARF, 189 H STREET
GERRY NICOSIA, NEELI CHERKOVSKI, LATIF HARRIS, SHARON DOUBIAGO, NICOLE HENARES AND DANA ALBERTS PLAYING BACKUP
Produced by Geri Digiorno
BLUE MONK: Button pin to promote the Fall 2008 publication of JAZZ IDIOM: Blueprints, Stills and Frames |The Jazz Photography of Charles L. Robinson; Poetic Takes and Riffs by Al Young (Heyday Books)
Original photo: Charles L. Robinson | Button design: Lorraine Rath | Doctored blue version: Al Young
Shipping September 2008
Charles L. Robinson
Al Young
Photo: Joseph L. Robinson
The jazz greats, as photographed on stage and
behind the scenes
Thirty-nine jazz luminaries are captured in this book,
including Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Louis Bellson, Ray
Brown, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny
Hodges, Carmen McRae, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone,
and Anita O’Day. Poet Laureate of California Al Young riffs,
bobs, and croons his way across the page, providing poetry,
anecdotes, and insight into the players captured on film by
photographer Charles L. Robinson. Robinson was a friend to
many of the musicians photographed and, as a result, often
caught them in moments of candor and intimacy.
In Robinson’s photographs we see artists rehearsing before
a set: Charles Mingus, goateed and pensive, hunched over a
Steinway, phrases dancing in his head. Or the legendary Earl
“Fatha” Hines at the Monterey Jazz Festival, in the groove,
the original cool cat in sunglasses (back before Ray Charles
was even born) and famous for breaking the bass strings of
a piano. We see Muddy Waters and Jimmy Rushing backstage,
talking about some time “back in the day.” We see Milt
Jackson and Dizzy Gillespie sharing a joke. When the last
blue note of a performance is but a memory, and the smoke
cascades up to the beams of a club at two in the morning,
Robinson is there.
Born in 1934 and raised in Baltimore, Charles L. Robinson
earned a B.A. in biological science as well an M.S.
in vocational rehabilitation counseling from California
State University, San Francisco. At the invitation of Ralph
J. Gleason, Robinson became the staff photographer of the
Monterey Jazz Festival for several years.
Al Young is the author of more than twenty books of
poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and has taught
writing and literature at Stanford University, U.C. Santa
Cruz, and the University of Michigan. The recipient of
Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright fellowships, he lives in
Berkeley and is presently the Poet Laureate of California.
Jazz Idiom
Blueprints, Stills and Frames
The Jazz Photography of Charles L. Robinson; Poetic Takes and Riffs by Al Young
© Charles L. Robinson, Al Young, Heyday Books
