Ed Pavlic's poetry is all about music and the memories it evokes.
Take “Bedtime Stories by Roberta Flack,” one of the poem's in Pavlic's Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, which has won the 2001 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize.
The poem was inspired by Pavlic's niece, who would urge him to tell stories about the time he and his sisters were growing up. It alludes to the fears and misunderstandings of a young boy who lies awake at night listening to adult conversations and the television downstairs, and the haunting strains of Flack's “Killing Me Softly” on his radio.
“That's a romantic song, if you're an adult,” Pavlic says. “But if you're a kid and you're scared of the dark and your radio comes on with a song about a woman talking about a guy killing her softly with his song … I would just turn it off.”
Pavlic, who admits he is still scared of the song, can play it back in his head and evoke the feelings that come out in the poem: connections to fear and loss and a joy for the togetherness that a little kid might feel for his big sisters.
Pavlic often asks his students, “Aren't there songs that involuntarily take you back to places you've been? All of a sudden you're there. The song comes on and you can smell things from the time you remember. It just becomes this aura.”
Paraph of Bone draws heavily on the poet's musicality, in particular his penchant for the blues and the improvised art form known as jazz. Many of his lines resemble musical riffs, and there are frequent references to musicians such as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis. Pavlic, an assistant professor of English who specializes in Africana studies, calls his book “an extended blues about people who can't, and so didn't, live without each other.”
The APR/Honickman Prize includes publication of the book, a $3,000 cash award, and distribution through Copper Canyon Press, a leading publisher of poetry books.
Poet Adrienne Rich, who awarded the prize and wrote the book's forward, said “Pavlic has listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic art form but allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories.”
Yusef Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer Prize winner, writes in the cover blurb of Pavlic's poetry, “A contained structural improvisation focuses each poem in a white space underlying the text – held like a mantra of boiled-down innuendo that is tinted with the blues of jazz and literary-cultural folklore.”
For the title of the book, “paraph” (a flourish at the end of one's signature) and “bone” combine to convey a sort of exuberance at the core of who we are, Pavlic says. (A paraph also was used to prevent forgery; the inference underwrites the singularity of signatures and poems.) The rest of the title, borrowed from Davis' landmark exploration in modal jazz that featured prolonged invention within a single scale, refers to the wide spectrum of human experience. “(The title) is a provocation that says 'you're not going to get all of this,'” Pavlic says. “There's a kind of mystery to it, and I liked the way it sounded.”
“A lot of times I start poems with sounds, not even a word, and the words kind of branch out from there,” Pavlic said. “There's a whole musicality to poetry.”