Choruses

By Quincy Troupe

Virtuoso poems of African American life, laced with the seduction of jazz and the crackle of politics.

Quincy Troupe launches a pyrotechnic display of jazz rhythms, political commentary, sports tributes, travelogues, and architectural abstracts in his latest volume of poetry, Choruses. Merging traditional poetic form with contemporary content, Troupe fashions words & sounds that build bridges toward a new tongue as he writes in Song, an ars poetica. Only Troupe could write a sestina chronicling the mass suicide of Heavens Gate, or a villanelle for Michael Jordan: "rising up in time, michael jordan hangs like an ikon, suspended in space / / his eyes two radar screens screwed like nails into the mask of his face." A masterful technician, Troupe experiments with free verse as well, repeating the same words in three different line-break configurations in "Images: Three Variations of Shape & Form." From haiku to tanka, from Mark McGwire to Sammy Sosa, from bebop to hip hop, these choruses "become sound tracks lifted off a poets tongue, / / syllables, within moments, are transformed into song."

With oracular power and the boldness of jazz improvisation, these poems by the acclaimed biographer of Miles Davis celebrate modern African American life without shying away from sharp critiques of social injustice. Where ahead-of-the curve ideas and canonical form intersect, there you will find our best modern-day troubadour, Quincy Troupe.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 156689090X
• ISBN13: 9781566890908
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 7.0" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

Troupe's Luminous Maturity Speaks

Q. troupe's Luminous Maturity truly speaks out in this learned, secondary collection of poems that draws from a wide influence of jazz/musical forms, politics, art, and the beauty and power of our own collective linguistics.If, as a reader of poetry and/or prose, you would like a generous sampling of Troupe's work, this would be a very recommended read, for it allows a sense of continuity, definition and recapitulation of Troupe's ever-evolving oeuvre to be sensed: You have the presence of Troupe's brillaint immersion of contemporary thoughts/ideas with that of classical poetic forms: sestinas, villanelles, haikus & tankas - among them, a collection for the Point Loma Waste-Water Management Project in San Diego - and his literary musical/cadenced innovations covering a wide array of subjects from visual/sculptural art, to contemporary politics, to familial reflections/tropes and his speciality: forms attempting to emulate the steady pace and flowof Jazz, especially that of Miles Davis.Aside from some of the more lengthy, free-wheeling and boundlessly expanding poems, and perhaps from his (sometimes, but rarely) careless digressions into other lesser-known aspects of living and life, Quincy Troupe's poetry speaks with a resonance and clarity greater than the abstractions of most poets, and itsmanifestions can best be seen through this work.