ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Charlie Parker’s influence on Robert Creeley from the missing vantage. It looks at the analogies between Creeley’s poem and Parker’s performance, and discusses some of the defining features of bebop. The improvisations of modern jazz, superimposing expressive and inventive melodic phrases on the rhythm and chord structures of received forms, provide the model for Creeley’s late modernist poetic idiom, which looks back to Pound just as it points toward a postmodern poetics of “process.” From references in essays, interviews, and letters, it appears that Creeley’s affection for modern jazz began in the early 1950s and developed from listening to recordings by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Milt Jackson, and, most importantly, Charlie Parker. The expressive power of the passages is predicated on Parker’s divergence from an expectation created by repeating melodic figures. The power of Creeley’s phrase “no // matter” is due to the strain it places on legibility.
