Talkin’ about Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace

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It’s a funny thing, but it’s Zen. He talks about it in one of his prose pieces: accepting the poem that you’re writing and trusting the piece to lead you in the right direction.

DS: Do you have a strong affinity for jazz?

PB: More so now. My dad and I had a lot of conflicts, too, father and son things. That’s why I went very heavily off into ’60s rock when I was a kid. I even passed over Motown. Motown was ubiquitous, but I was really interested.

My dad was into jazz. My mom was more [into blues], but my dad collected the records, so . . . you know how that goes.

DS: A number of the poems in Stompin’ are centered on late-night conversations between your father and his friend Preston. They listen to jazz, drink, and pontificate on the meaning of it all. What period during your childhood was Preston around?

PB: It was late. I took poetic liberties with this.

DS: What was the nature of their relationship?

PB: It was as it is in the book, but Preston was not as folksy as he is in the book. I made him folksier because I had to make a contrast, and I wanted to draw on that.

DS: What does that contrast, or conflict, speak to?

PB: It speaks to folk culture versus what happens to folk culture in a society like this. What happens to folk wisdom. What happens to a subculture that informs the larger culture, yet the larger culture can be hostile to its spirit. That subculture creates its own tradition, its own language, its own grammar, and its own achievement. There’s a gold standard there. What happens to that as time moves on and things change and a new generation comes up and doesn’t really feel that connected to it?

DS: How did you come up with the dialogue?

PB: I would recall something specific, and then get creative.

DS: So in those moments when they’re arguing, giving each other the business, what you wrote captures the spirit of what you were hearing?

PB: Oh, yeah, no doubt about it, because I heard that from my bedroom. Their conversations about jazz were vociferous, engaged, often funny, brilliant and profane.

DS: When you write, are there any connections to the creation of music?

PB: A hundred years ago poetry was at the center of popular culture. People who could read, who were literate, usually knew a poem they could recite by heart. They’d learned it in school, or they read the newspaper and there would be the local poet writing something, and it would move them and they would remember it, and over dinner they would recite it. And people read the Bible and knew it by heart, and that was poetry. So it was much closer. Now that’s been replaced by popular music; that’s where the popular poetry resides now.

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