WD Editors

The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing
by Keith Flynn
ISBN: 978-1-58297-404-0
$16.99, 336p
Available March 2007

Read a Chapter Now!

In Chapter 29 Satchmo: Embodying the Role, Keith Flynn introduces us to one of the most colorful characters in all of music history, the King Kong of jazz, Louis Armstrong. Born in 1901 to a domestic servant and a part-time prostitute named Mayann and raised by his grandmother in a New Orleans brothel, Satchmo tore down more racial, cultural and class barriers than any other American musician. With his incredible charisma and his trumpet, he “gave every performance the patina of greatness”—and the characteristics that made Armstrong’s performances so vibrant and legendary can be applied to keep your poetry alive and in motion, as well. Click here to view or download this chapter to read more.

Trace Poetry’s Long Blue Line and Discover the Power and Music in Your Own Voice

Poems are made of words, not ideas. Those words are rhythmic and, when chosen and composed properly, are capable of entering a reader’s or listener’s body and resonating. The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz, and Memory explains the historical connections between word, image, and sound to empower you to create work that is dynamic, vital, and musical—to create poems that live in the air.

The first section, Learning to Listen, begins by reflecting on the birth of the American poetic voice, teaching your to find your own voice by dissecting a poem’s line, sound by sound, rediscovering not only the power of their poetry but also where that power comes from. The second section, Learning to Observe, outlines the history of foreign influences—from the surrealism of French writers Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud to that of Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali—inspiring you to explore your experimental impulses and discover new ways of seeing. The third section, Learning to Speak, focuses on the influence of music on twentieth-century poetry, beginning with the troubadour and the slave experience, through the eras of jazz and blues, and onto the slam stages of the modern city. The different strategies of these performers offer insight into your development as a creator and prepare you to act as a vocal interpreter of your work.

The Rhythm Method equips you with the tools you need to extract the sparks of language, art, and music that have always stimulated and nourished our poetic vernacular and to use the fire to forge your own unique voice and your own style of performance.

About the Author

Keith Flynn is founder and managing editor of Asheville Poetry Reivew, a biannual literary journal that has published over 600 new and established writers including Robert Bly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sherman Alexie, and many others. From its first regional issue, Asheville Poetry Review has grown into an international publication with distribution in 35 states and five European countries.

Catch Keith Flynn on Tour!

April 3 Penn State Univ.—HARRISBURG, PA
April 4 York College—YORK, PA
April 5-6 Tupelo Reading Series—CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA
April 10 The Regulator Bookshop—DURHAM, NC
April 12 Wake Tech Community College—RALEIGH, NC
April 13 Osondu Bookstore—WAYNESVILLE, NC
April 15 Asheville School—ASHEVILLE, NC
April 16 Brevard College—BREVARD, NC
April 17 Catawba College—SALISBURY, NC
April 18 Charlotte Writer’s Club—CHARLOTTE, NC
April 19 Gardner-Webb College—BOILING SPRINGS, NC
April 20 Borders Bookstore—CHARLOTTE, NC
April 22 Malaprops Bookstore—ASHEVILLE, NC
April 25 Brooklyn Public Library—BROOKLYN, NY
April 26 SUNY-Farmingdale—LONG ISLAND, NY
April 27 YMCA Of Syracuse—SYRACUSE, NY
April 28 Poets & Writers Workshop—SYRACUSE, NY
May 29-June 2 BookEXPO America—NEW YORK, NY

Praise for The Rhythm Method

Keith Flynn’s kaleidoscopic, tornado-speed tour through modern and postmodern poetics is nothing less than a portrait of the turbulent soul’s history of our times. He is respectful and appreciative of traditional methods and poets, but his more ardent sympathies are with the new, the newer, the very newest. Informative—oh, yes indeed!—but The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz, and Memory is also one of the most engaging, soulful, generous, and truly exciting books I ever read. Open it and hang onto your head. —Fred Chappell

Keith Flynn writes about poetry with the same energy and passion that Jerry Lee Lewis plays piano. Yet equally impressive is Flynn’s immense knowledge of both poetry and music, which makes The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz, and Memory required reading for veteran as well as novice poets. —Ron Rash

This volume on poetry and poetics is a godsend for poets at all levels—beginners, master poets, and everyone in between. The author speaks directly to the reader, as a fellow lover of poetry. And so the book reads like the true companion to poetry we’ve always wanted. Not stiff-necked, not dryly academic, this work is wise and thoroughly well read. Keith Flynn takes us from Guilhem d’Aquitane to the Delta blues and beyond. He knows his stuff, and by the end of our journey together, so do we. I wish I’d had this book a long time ago, but I’m thrilled to have it now. —Marilyn Kallet, poet, editor, translator, and director of University Writing Programs at University of Tennessee Knoxville

Poet and master teacher Keith Flynn, almost without the intention of doing so, has modeled in this book how to write excellently about music, a boon for an increasing number of creative writers these days who are committed not only to their creative work, but to the ways expository writing makes students better learners when they write in and about the subjects they study. Flynn’s expository prose is beautiful, rhythmic; it achieves the high ideals we should hold for ourselves as teachers and writers and successfully employs the very tools our students will learn to use best once they have read and modeled their writing after what they find in these pages. I highly recommend this book as a text for a creative writing or literature course but will also recommend it to teachers of writing-intensive courses at my university, which stresses writing about music. —Patrick Bizzaro, poet, critic, and director of University Writing Programs, East Carolina University

Table of Contents

PART 1: Learning to Listen
INTRODUCTION: From the Beginning: The Body is Nourished by the Word
CHAPTER 1: Honoring the Condensary
CHAPTER 2: The Poem as Momentum: Building the Flow
CHAPTER 3: Being Called to the Tribe
CHAPTER 4: The Anxiety of Influence: Borrowing the Mask of the Master
CHAPTER 5: Chance Favors the Prepared Mind
CHAPTER 6: The Action Verb and Beautiful Accidents
CHAPTER 7: The Poet as Engineer: Leading the Reader’s Train of Thought
CHAPTER 8: Finding the Form: The Open Field
CHAPTER 9: Mastering the Art of Description
CHAPTER 10: The Imagination as Redemptive Force: The Power of Poetry
CHAPTER 11: Dynamism and Vibratory Space: What Editors Want
CHAPTER 12: Moving Through Time: A Slinky the Size of a Boa Made of Steel

PART 2: Learning to Observe
INTRODUCTION: Learning to Observe: A Prequel
CHAPTER 13: Arranging Texts with Your Eyes
CHAPTER 14: Paris Calling: The Flowers of Evil
CHAPTER 15: Verlaine and Rimbaud: The Time of the Assassins
CHAPTER 16: The Prose Poem: A Union of Opposites
CHAPTER 17: After the War: Remaking the World
CHAPTER 18: Destruction, Derision, Dada
CHAPTER 19: A Pope in the Throes of Convulsive Beauty
CHAPTER 20: The Destructive Tendencies of Diamonds that Won’t Stay Coal
CHAPTER 21: The Invasion of America
CHAPTER 22: The Automatic World: Surrealism’s Manifest Destiny
CHAPTER 23: Breach and Convergence: The Spanish Revolution
CHAPTER 24: Ekphrasis and the Ecstasy of Cinema

PART 3: Learning to Speak
INTRODUCTION: The Long Blue Line: Memory and Sound
CHAPTER 25: The Troubadours and the European Diaspora: Singing is an Act of Love
CHAPTER 26: American Gumbo: Music Brewed in Democracy’s Melting Pot
CHAPTER 27: Poetry and Performance: Preach the Gospel of Beauty
CHAPTER 28: Building the Bridge: Classic Blues and Bessie’s Radio
CHAPTER 29: Satchmo: Embodying the Role
CHAPTER 30: Bristol Hillbillies and Delta Bluesmen
CHAPTER 31: The Birth of Blue Radio
CHAPTER 32: Swing Time and the Bebop Colossus
CHAPTER 33: Into the Mystic: The Art of Silence
CHAPTER 34: Sheets of Sound: John Coltrane’s Musical Consilience
CHAPTER 35: This Land is Our Land: The Real Folk Blues
CHAPTER 36: Busy Being Born: Dylan, Hip-Hop, and the Slam Movement