from "Book of Adam"
by Sylvia Chan
My poetics are inspired by my jazz listenings and performances. Stan Getz’s and Chick Corea’s performance of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Con Alma” demonstrates striking behind-the-soloist work: the drummer posits an Afro-Cuban sensibility as the pianist pushes for a 6/8 rhythm. The bassist moves from triple to duple time. Getz, the tenor solo, plays a straight swing rhythm. These narratives frame a macro–zero in on the personal because each time they’re performed, recorded, or evoked, they ask their audiences how they’ve been reinvented. I’m continuously delving into their ongoing “sounds,” which informs my writings. These poems take on several vehicles and motifs — gender as reconstruction, genealogy, genetics, pianism as allegory for interpersonal and local politics — as part of my working project, “Book of Adam,” which delineates a jazz singer’s devolution with Adam, a piano accompanist. “The Part About Fate or Counterpoint,” the most “beyond category” of the poems, relays two narratives in two forms: the speaker’s and her mother’s, and the ongoing narratives the speaker has riffed from their footnoted Bolaño and Spahr texts. The title and form offer alternatives and synonymity as well.
Sylvia Chan is poetry editor of Sonora Review. Her work appears in Eleven Eleven, Switchback, and West Wind Review, among others. A San Francisco East Bay native, she teaches and writes in Tucson, where she is an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1