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William Matthews - Mingus At The Showplace
Work rating: Medium

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem

and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience shat

literature.  It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th st., and I sat at the bar,

casting beer money from a reel of ones,
the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.

And I knew Mingus was a genius.  I knew two
other things, but as it happens they were wrong.

So I made him look at this poem.
"There`s a lot of that going around," he said,

and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right.  He glowered
at me but didn`t look as if he thought

bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
If they were baseball executives they`d plot

to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children.  Of course later

that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
and flurried him from the stand.

"We`ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,"
he explained, and the band played on.


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