Listening to drummer Jimmy Cobb playing a duet with Gregory Hines on, of all things his myspace page. A series of links form local musicians, starting with my bro, took me to a page for Jack Dejohnette and then Jimmy Cobb- both of them actually administered by the musicians themselves. Just thinking, in preparation for the chapbox (more below) I'm finishing proofs of, that absolutely everything about my artistic, spiritual, ethical and intellectual lives is formed around my childhood impressions of jazz musicians., and maybe a few philosophers. It's really hard to articulate, thus the desire to do a set of poems, but there's something so transcendent about the lives, the attitudes, the creativity of those generations, and certainly still a handful of contemporaries, of jazz musicians born before me. People with only positive things to say, or only sincere criticisms and convictions. People who have kept at doing something beautiful while being more acquainted with the ugliness of the world than most. Having met a few of them, like McCoy Tyner, Eddiea Marshall, Jack Dejohnette, Donald Bailey, I become always more convinced instead of less that the sole redeeming feature of U.S. culture may well be jazz music (without intending any slight towards other art forms or artists).

So, with the exception of perhaps wanting to now add new, unwritten poems, proofs are mostly compiled for what I'm calling a chapbox, previously referred to as the chapbook "Debts". The box refers to the fact that I think I'm going to print it on 5"x5" loose leafs, with perhaps a few accordians of connected squares where I don't want page breaks, and stack them in a box. I know this has been done before, and mine's not even as interesting as the random-order looseleaf projects, but the twist is that I'm going to make the boxes in the wood shop that I (almost)finished setting up over the weekend. I'm really excited about that, as there's a few projects, artists and domestic (have to build a bed frame so we can get the futon up off the floor), that I have back-logged and am excited about. I've been spending equal time sketching joint-diagrams for this box as proofing poems, which I guess means that I'm antsy to be crafty again. Looking back over early posts on this blog this morning made me revisit how craft/artisanal work might be a necessary and fruitful connection to my writing practice- I have to "keep my hands in" as Mark Twain once put it.

Also revisiting blog posts, seems like Jenn and Loretta should have chapbooks done by now too. When do we get to trade?