-
Ellingtonia
- Callaloo
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 23, Number 4, Fall 2000
- pp. 1306-1307
- 10.1353/cal.2000.0225
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1306-1307
[Access article in PDF]
Ellingtonia
Sean Singer
for Edward Kennedy Ellington
1
. . . Ansingerd the lamp caught fire
after he put a blue cashmere sweater over it.
Subtle as a Nance obbligato
on filmy violin--two brown curves en passant,
purflings ease sound out of the stank of violin parts:
belly, waist, chin rest, rib, sound hole, pegbox, tailpiece, rounded shoulder.
Ellington was an expert on them all.
2
libretto
holy writ: Billy Strayhorn would wake up,
compose for four hrs. Would wake Duke
: Blood Count or Ballad for Very Tired and Very Sad Lotus Eaters
for example, & he'd bring his golden torso up,
& finish off the rest of the composition.
In the morning, after composing
all night, Duke would open the closet
[Full of blue cashmere sweaters]
& His Orchestra was playing it the next morning:
Plucky, plugugly, pozzolana, porous, & perfect blues. [End Page 1306]
3
Daffdowndilly Ebullience Daibutsu Ear Damselfish Ectogenesis
Dardanelles Edge Darksome Eiderdown Demonax Ellipse
Desirous Empire Doughbelly Eohippus Dovetail Espalier
4
Salieri eavesdropped
Mozart playing a word-sex game;
just then the creamy, squeezing oboe
exalted-unbolted Chimaphila umbelata plumbed beautiful music
the color of blonde night: red plum jam
on pumpernickel: a Puerto Rican hermaphrodite
putting on pink lipgloss.
5
Wednesday night, Ellington, who
could forefeel the slightest discolored saxifrage
leaf easing between two rocks, heard
through a catnap & a halfdozen chewed
pencil tips, the babygreen, sweetpea Billy
exhale.
Sean Singer has published poems in Pleiades and The Indiana Review. He won the Hart Crane Scholarship to the Catskills Poetry Workshop and an Academy of American Poets Prize.
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