An innovative new erasure chapbook from Warren C. Longmire, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] navigates the personal and artistic lives of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie through the author’s own roving imagination. stages, it strives to find, in the continued disappearance of Black American contributions to world art, the seed of innovation that never dies.
What becomes of a history overwritten, sampled, celebrated and smeared? How do we find creation past erasure? Part new media archive, part visual poetry project, BIRD/DIZ [AN ERASED HISTORY OF BEBOP] is a journey into highs and lows of Black America’s first global music export. Taking biographies of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as a jumping off point, BIRD/DIZ jumps between actual erasures of the written/oral history of Bebop, redacted poems taken from those words, and reflections on historic performances from some of jazz’s chief characters. From St. Louis heroin dins to Copenhagen sound
Price: $13.00
Pages: 84
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Imprint: BUNNY
Publication Date:
15 November 2022
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781737803669
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
POETRY / American / African American, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / General, POETRY / General
"As Fred Moten writes of Joseph Jarman, '[He] always knew that for black musicians, which is to say black speakers, exile is our public holiday.' So that Warren Longmire’s BIRD/DIZ speaks out of this exile, this public holiday; and at the same time, the poems rise up out of Black folks’ worship––and the history of said worship, as carried out vis-à-vis the history of the Black jazz tradition. Our Black culture, then––as imbued into Longmire’s poetics, in the word, in Black music––keeps us Black folks coming on, would keep coming onto us were we to keep willing it into existence. Said otherwise, hearing BIRD/DIZ, we get to hear our own voices, as when the speaker’s father talks and cries his Black man tears. Nor is Blackness in any given way held up by Longmire for too long a time; not before Dizzy Gillespie becomes 'the brightest thing in frame.'"
Warren Longmire is a poet, technologist and an educator from the bad part of North Philadelphia. He is a former co-editor of Apiary Magazine, a board member for Blue Stoop and has taught at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He’s been published in journals including Prolit, American Poetry Review and The Painted Bride Quarterly and is featured in the Best American Poetry 2021 anthology. His first full length publication, Open Source, was released in 2021 through Radiator Press.
