Campbell McGrath's Charlie Parker

 

Charlie Parker (1950)

Bird is building a metropolis with his horn.

Here are the gates of Babylon, the walls of Jericho cast down.

Might die in Chicago, Kansas City's where I was born.

Snowflake in a blizzard, purple rose before the thorn.

Stone by stone, note by note, atom by atom, noun by noun,

Bird is building a metropolis with his horn.

Uptown, downtown, following the river to its source,

Savoy, Three Deuces, Cotton Club, Lenox Lounge.

Might just die in Harlem, Kansas City's were I was born.

Bird is an abacus of possibility, Bird is riding the horse

of habit and augmented sevenths. King without a crown,

Bird is building a metropolis with his horn.

Bred to the labor of it, built to claw an eye from the storm,

made for the lowdown, the countdown, the breakdown.

Might die in Los Angeles, Kansas City's where I was born.

Bridge by bridge, solo by solo, set by set, chord by chord,

woodshed to penthouse, blue to black to brown,

Charlie Parker is building a metropolis with his horn.

Might just die in Birdland, Kansas City's where I was born.

-Campbell McGrath

XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century is a  collection of poems by contemporary American poet Campbell McGrath (b.1962). There's one poem for each year about either a person or an event associated with that year, a sort of snapshot history of the 20th century in verse. Though Charlie ("Bird") Parker only appears once, some of the people are the subject of several poems (Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Zora Neale Hurston, Mao, others). Events include Guernica, Hiroshima, the Apollo moon landing. 

This poem is a villanelle. (Well, perhaps -ish, depending on rigorous you like your villanelles.) McGrath uses a number of different forms. Here's another example (short and suitable to its subject... 😉):

Gertrude Stein (1909)

                  I arose.

I arouse.  Eye arroz.  I arrows.

                  I, a rose!

-Campbell McGrath

Anyway, all sorts of types of poems...

I've been meaning to do a McGrath for a while, but haven't. But it's now part of my series of poems using the Amurrican vernacular by poets associated with Florida universities. McGrath is at Florida International University.

Charlie Parker died in 1955 at the age of 34, in Manhattan, just over two miles from the jazz club Birdland. He had various health and personal problems that could done him in, and just one of them was heroin ('the horse/of habit') or maybe the habit of horse.

This is the song 'Summertime', and if I have it right, should be the version from his album of 1950, Charlie Parker with Strings: