Removed while under consideration by The Atlantic Monthly.
—NOTES—
Well, you can tell there’s been some changes. I tried to do a little tightening as far as words like ‘the’ and ‘and.’ I hope this helped strengthen the poem. I have a habit of ending lines with words like that, and it just weakens a poem. Makes it less forceful, causes less impact. I also tidied up spelling and grammar problems, and tried to seperate the use of ‘man’ a little further. Also, I broke up the poem into stanzas. Not based on the ‘Rhythm’ lines, which one might expect, but given the topic of jazz, I tried to emulate the feeling of a jazz show, when the musicians are just up there jammin’. They come back to refrains, but not when you’d always expect. So that was part of the reasoning. Also, I tried to keep each stanza in context with itself. So, you have the audience perspective, the horn perspective, and the rhythm guys’ perspectives, and they all kind of flow into each other. It’s not a deliberate, delineated, definite seperation… but something gradual and natural. I like where it’s headed.
Let me know what you think.