The Blackened Blues by Sean Murphy

The blues has often been the shadow of genius and can be considered survival music. Sean Murphy gets inside life’s marrow. When he writes about Charles Mingus or Billie Holiday on her deathbed, Murphy begins to explore salvation and sorrow. In many of his poems one will find the ethos of the blues – the Howlin’ Wolf. John Coltrane, Jake LaMotta, and Charles Bukowski are profiled in such a way that one is convinced Murphy is looking at their x-rays or has found the doorknob to their souls. In his poem about Bukowski, Murphy writes “Life lets you steal when it’s looking the other way.” Here Murphy seems to be “worryin’ the line” and causing the reader to almost repeat it. There is a hardness wrapped in tenderness in The Blackened Blues. He sees and understands the “beautiful blackness” – the mood and sensibility that is not restricted by race. Murphy writes about a condition, something linked to art and creativity; something that might drive a person like Sun Ra to explore another space or sphere. Oh, and then Bud Powell walks in only to remind us about our mortality, the black and white keys of life – The Blackened Blues.

–E. Ethelbert Miller, Writer and literary activist, Host of On the Margin (WPFW 89.3 FM)

The Blackened Blues is a kaleidoscopic, deep, and opulent journey into the psychic impulses that created the language of a cross section of many great artists in the modern world: it intersects with the construct which is society, and the contradictions that are generated from there. I feel in the portraits of the jazz musicians the rhythm and vibration of their brain forging their cosmos, and the transcendence attained generating its own counter-strikes—which could lead to silence and or destruction. In reading this collection I bumped into ideas being explored in a poetic way that I have pondered before in my own way, so it was a crucial reading for me. The implication that Charlie Parker was the vessel of a cosmic stream of pure vibration in the same way that Bach was, but Bach enjoyed a social placement that allowed him to find a sort of equilibrium in life that escaped Parker, is at once, provocative and defiant. More, despite the mystical purity of Parker’s language, who is to say where boundaries begin and end in an open system in the miracle of life, so what place does a synthetic substance create when it enters into the brain rhythm? With Bud Powell you feel that since nature is always improvising, and since Bud is attuned to the surge, nature is coursing through him that we get to enjoy through the patterns created, but how much did a police officer’s nightstick rearrange these patterns? In Coltrane we look at how he expanded to glimpse the vortex that is the godhead, but then contracted cancer and was consumed by an organism within. And then there is Sun Ra, who basically tells everyone fuck you: not only can I construct alternate cosmologies but I am not even from your planet! Many things are explored in these pages, and many questions asked.

–Matthew Shipp,  American pianist, composer, and bandleader.

Where to start? There’s a grand richness here in The Blackened Blues, and these poems may very well keep you up at night. Like good poetry everywhere, it’s hard to know where this stuff comes from. But Murphy is a good extractor. He has a great sense for finding subjects—everything from Bud Powell to Clarence Thomas and Jake LaMotta. Some of these are dense poems which at their best move beyond verbiage to inspiration.

The jazz world is an important source for Murphy, and the sense of how fleeting it is finds an analogue in “Shafi Hadi’s Silence.” Reading his poem on Coltrane will change forever how you think of him. Murphy sometimes tries to find an essence in his subjects and often succeeds: “Captain Ahab’s Oil” exemplifies how a wordless and insane quest can be given form.

As a former professor and jazz critic, I hear echoes of Bukowski here and a few others. Murphy’s themes range from Tina Turner’s legs to death and transfiguration. But to all his subjects he brings a unique voice, and it will pay you big rewards to listen.

–John Goodman, Former Jazz Critic, Playboy, author Mingus Speaks

By turns irreverent, funny, scathing, always intelligent, the poems in The Blackened Blues are Sean Murphy at his virtuosic, full-throated, twelve-bar best.  These poems do not “lie down mutely in darkness;” they sing.

–Justen Ahren, author of A Machine for Remembering.

In his debut chapbook, The Blackened Blues, Sean Murphy “throw[s] sparks at the darkness,” illuminating the complex lives of characters both real and imagined––from Charlie Parker to Kurt Vonnegut to Captain Ahab. A deft necromancer, Murphy spins a collection of gritty yet lyrical poems that unmask the famous and infamous alike––seeking answers and at times, redemption for his subjects. At its core, this collection is an exploration of  “the hot urgency of some holy inspiration.” How is it that the flames of creativity burn brightly in some while consuming others whole? These incandescent poems have some light to shed on the matter.

–Linda Flaherty Haltmaier, Poet Laureate of Andover, MA, Award-winning author of To the Left of the Sun