How do you own and authenticize the jazz effects (i.e. sound and rhythmic qualities), ideas, breath and energy in your writing? Particularly when in our present époque, live jazz has to some extent lost its social reality and immediacy/ urgency.

I don’t necessarily agree that live jazz has lost its social reality and immediacy. I think particularly in the black community, jazz has always been important. It probably has a slightly higher number of listeners in the black community than in the white, although the musicians there might have a mostly local reputation.

But I’ve found that I can own jazz or make it authentic in the sound and rhythm because it’s a metaphor. This bridge connects the speaker of the poems to the subject matter. Energy, the rhythmic expectation, affects line length and line break, but it also applies a pressure on the line. This tension creates a jazz feeling, and does more than traditional iambic measure. Ellington said that jazz is about choosing to be joyful in spite of conditions. A poem can be the best possible arrangement of language to express a particular moment. Its improvisatory movement, perhaps like jazz itself, is a subterfuge.

Sean Singer COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

I notice you used the word “subterfuge” often. Is it a conscious or subconscious deliberation? What other “subterfuges” happen in your work?

Language is a kind of illusion that intimately links the reader and the writer. As a reader, I escape into the writer’s imagination. As a writer, I develop strategies to somehow bridge fantasy and reality. Maybe that is the best function of a subterfuge in a poem.

Temperament is crucial to any musicality (not just jazz). How do you explore this via the written word?

Interesting question. I think maybe a temperament of being playful and serious at the same time might be a key. Being masterful of the craft, but also being open to the “wilderness,” the part of the subconscious that won’t be expressed in other kinds of language.