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Trident is an unfolding poem whose sections are composed in response to recordings by trios. “Supertrios” and “Trident” listen to recordings of the same name released by McCoy Tyner. “God Is More Than Love Can Ever Be” improvises its melodies with Sun Ra, and is named after what is, to my knowledge, the only piano trio album released by him. “The Life of a Trio” attends the 1989 weekend reunion of Paul Bley, Steve Swallow and Jimmy Giuffre.
The opening “Wave” signals procedures followed throughout. Flotsam and jetsam afloat on this wave were left by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jayne Cortez, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Denise Levertov, Jack Kerouac, Nicole Brossard, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Carla Harryman, Michael Heller, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, and Dolly Parton, all of whom contribute their grace notes.
“There are no wrong notes / we’re told / bold enough” to represent the music A.L. Nielsen approaches lyrically in Trident: Book One. This is a book of trio listening in tercets, wherein crest the waves made by piano (McCoy Tyner, Sun Ra, Paul Bley), bass (Ron Carter, Eddie Gómez, Hayes Burnett, Steve Swallow), drums (Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Samarai Celestial), and even clarinet (Jimmy Giuffre). It is a book of reckoning with faith, history, and their very American contradictions: “It don’t mean / a thing if it ain’t / got that sting // I go to the garden / alone and find it / filled with song . . . We play / against it and are called / free” . . . If indeed “Love is blue”, it is an even deeper hue for Nielsen’s care, his attention to the music, and for the questions it inspires in him. I am so glad to see this book in its full and final form.
—Eliot Cardinaux, founding editor of The Bodily Press
A.L. Nielsen was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for Poetry. Additional awards include the Kayden Prize, the SAMLA Studies Prize, a Gustavus Myers Citation, the Gertrude Stein Award, a Sigma Tau Delta Award for excellence in teaching, The Darwin Turner Award, an American Book Award for his edition of Lorenzo Thomas’s Don’t Deny My Name and a lifetime achievement award from the African American Literature and Culture Society. He is the Emeritus George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at Penn State University, having taught in the past at Central China Normal University, Loyola Marymount University, the University of Kansas, UCLA, San Jose State University, Howard University and the George Washington University. His albums of spoken word and music, Sometimes I Wonder Can A Matchbox Hold My Blues and Spider Cone: More Blues, Rage and Hollers, are available on Apple Music and other streaming services. His poems have appeared in both Best American Poems and Best American Experimental Writing.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 140 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-553-3
$18
