Praise
PRAISE FOR BIRD/DIZ
As Fred Moten writes of Joseph Jarman, “[He] always knew that for black musicians, which is to say black speakers, exile is our public holiday.” So that Warren Longmire’s BIRD/DIZ speaks out of this exile, this public holiday; and at the same time, the poems rise up out of Black folks’ worship––and the history of said worship, as carried out vis-à-vis the history of the Black jazz tradition. Our Black culture, then––as imbued into Longmire’s poetics, in the word, in Black music––keeps us Black folks coming on, would keep coming onto us were we to keep willing it into existence. Said otherwise, hearing BIRD/DIZ, we get to hear our own voices, as when the speaker’s father talks and cries his Black man tears. Nor is Blackness in any given way held up by Longmire for too long a time; not before Dizzy Gillespie becomes “the brightest thing in frame.”
–Anaïs Duplan
Part poetry, part essay, part video watch party, Warren Longmire’s BIRD/DIZ creates its own bebop history via stunning erasures and lyric youtube video meditations. Visual tracings of alternative textual pathways turn airshots to airships that lift off the page, straight into the heart: “A love in the pocket of the phrases barely contained.” Get it while it’s hot!
–Jena Osman
Like an ancient traveler’s guide to the future, poet Warren C. Longmire’ new book project, BIRD/DIZ [an erased history of bebop], works to illuminate the real world experiences and emotions of the architects of modern music also known as Bebop. To those living outside of their movement, their secret society, the musicians who created Bebop were weird at best and smart assed negroes at worst.
Samplers they were, these bebop musicians of the 1940s… musical samplers long before digital technology could catch up. They were exploiting the contrafact and building new tunes out of the shredded remnants of Great American Songbook standards.
In BIRD/DIZ, Longmire presents a slowly, emergent map of his impressions of the lives and realities of these misunderstood pioneers, from the murky folktales, journalistic tomfoolery and historical imaginings, tearing away the unneeded, the unwanted, the useless, the inhumane.
–Homer Jackson, executive director of the Philadelphia Jazz Project.
