Poetry Archives

A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

James A. Emanuel

EVERYTHING is jazz:
snails, jails, rails, tails, males, females,
snow-white          cotton bales.

Knee-bone, thigh, hip-bone.
Jazz slips you percussion bone
classified “unknown.”

Slick lizard rhythms,
cigar-smoke tunes, straight-gin sky
laced with double moons.

Second-chance rhythms,
don’t-give-up riffs: jazz gets HIGH
off can’ts, buts, and ifs.

© 1991 James A. Emanuel. All rights reserved.
From Jazz From the Haiku King | Broadside Press, 1999
Reprinted by permission of the author.

What are tags?
Tags, sometimes called “folksonomies,” are words that describe or categorize a poem, like “20th century modernism” or “Italian sonnet”. Tags can help you find poems that have something in common, based on how other people classify them.

« Previous