Some follow-up on this topic. While I was doing my long haul on Philip Levine, I came across some of his jazz poems in an essay called “Detroit Jazz In the Late Forties and Early Fifties,” the best of which was this one:

I Remember Clifford

Wakening in a small room,
the walls high and blue, one high window
through which the morning enters,
I turn to the table beside me
painted a thick white. There instead
of a clock is a tumbler of water,
clear and cold, that wasn’t there
last night. Someone quietly entered,
and now I see the white door
slightly ajar and around three sides
the light on fire. I remember once
twenty-seven years ago walking
the darkened streets
of my home town when up ahead
on Joy Road at the Blue Bird of Happiness
I heard over the rumble of my own head
for the first time the high clear trumpet
of Clifford Brown calling us all
to the dance he shared with us
such a short time. My heart quickened
and in my long coat, breathless
and stumbling, I ran
through the swirling snow
to the familiar sequined door
knowing it would open on something new.

I also came across this arresting line by James Harms in The Long Embrace, Contemporary Poets on the Poetry of Philip Levine. He’s talking about the great utility of expression in the Sonnet:

“Fourteen lines and a volta (along with meter and rhyme, etc.) might seem a confining set of logistics for exploring the intersection of the inner life and the lived moment, but aside from the three-minute pop song, what formal convention has proven more productive and flexible in addressing the lyric realities of our lives?”