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Charlie Parker Essay

Decent Essays

The recording I listened to was the poem “Charlie Parker” performed by Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen. This performance is accompanied by a musical rendition that relates to the poem’s content, as the poem is about musician Charlie Parker. Kerouac is performing this poem in memoriam of the musician. Kerouac describes Charlie Parker in an affluent manner to attest to his musical reverence, such as calling him “a great musician”. The sound of the poem and the meaning are greatly intertwined with one another. The sound is musical and whimsical in nature, as the music playing compliments the poem performance. The meaning of the poem is about the great musician Charlie Parker and a testament to his life. So the music that accompanies this meaningful …show more content…

I thought that Kerouac’s musical tone of voice accompanying the music playing really gave the experience of listening to a song rather than a poetry performance. It had a nice flow to the performance that added to the songlike feel to this performance when listening to it. I especially heard this tone in lines, such as “we blop and we plop”. The use of sound imagery helps in relating the songlike feel to poetry to the actual musician who is at the center of the poem’s content and meaning. This is not the only imagery seen in the poem, as there are multiple points in the poem. Kerouac uses imagery as a way to immerse in the poem to give the reader mental images about Charlie Parker. This can be seen at the beginning of the poem when Kerouac is describing Charlie Parker, such as the line “Charlie Parker looked like Buddha.” Kerouac also used imagery to describe the music of Charlie Parker as well. Kerouac describes the experience of listening to Charlie Parker play in lines such as “like the perfect cry of some wild gang at a jam session Wail! Whap!”. This type of imagery gives the feeling of being at one of the great musician’s performances. This poetry performance was one full of meaning and emotion. The music helped assist in creating this experience of emotion and meaning to the poem’s content. The imagery also stands out in this performance to help create the vision of emotion and

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