In his work, Ed Pavlic finds
instructive affinities between jazz musicians and writers.
“Jazz is a musical form that offers, almost compulsively, different angles of
perception,” he says. “You take a phrase and ask the question, 'How many
different ways can this be played? How many ways can this thing be perceived?'
“Writing is the same way in that it takes an aggressively self-conscious,
empirical approach to the many available angles we have on all the different
places and people we are,” Pavlic says.
Pavlic, associate professor of
English, will explore the connections of jazz and writing in a lecture titled
“Modern Man in the Pepperpot: Jazz and Contemporary American Writing” on
Tuesday, Feb. 11, at 11:30 a.m. in
Reamer Campus Center Auditorium. His talk, a faculty colloquium, will be
followed by a buffet lunch at 12:30 p.m.
in Hale House.
The title of Pavlic's talk comes
from a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa, a leading African American poet who has
visited Union twice and whose work is the focus of a
critical book Pavlic is writing. Vamping “the need” to write in his poem “Blue
Light Lounge Sutra,” Komunyakaa uses the line “chaos in the cosmos / modern man
in the pepperpot” to convey the tension between the free-thinking idealist
concept (modern man) and the inevitable personal and political tumult of human
life (the pepperpot),” Pavlic says.
Pavlic recently won the American
Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize for his collection of poems, Paraph
of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue. He has three other books in the
works: Ruse, Rook, Ratoon, a re-spinning of parables in relation to the
“Three Fates, the daughters of Necessity,” from Plato's Republic; a second
manuscript of poems called Work, 3, that considers the relationship
between various forms of labor; and Live at the Bitter End, which uses
the structure of a murder trial and America's fascination with the courtroom to
arrive at what he calls, “hopefully, surprising and satirical ends.”
Pavlic, who has taught at Union
since 1997, holds degrees from the University
of Wisconsin, Madison,
and Indiana University.
He is also the College's director of Africana Studies.
Pavlic entertained the idea of
teaching when he took his first college class just before the end of his senior
year in high school. Craig Werner, who taught the course in 20th-century
African American literature at Wisconsin,
was an engaging teacher who made Pavlic think, “Gosh, maybe I could do
that?”
Equally important to Pavlic's
intellectual development were the years he spent working with a traveling team
of bricklayers. It was what he now calls “all that can go down between you and
a pile of bricks in ten or twelve hours” that gave Pavlic an appreciation for
the intensity of labor. “At the time I hated it and wanted out as soon as
possible,” he recalls. “But I think constantly about how lucky I was to get
up at 5:30 in the morning, meet all
those guys, and square (myself) off every day against a job with no middle man
in sight.”
The early-morning rise is
something that Pavlic still appreciates; he often walks to campus in the
pre-dawn dark. And he has managed to instill that appreciation with an unlikely
crowd, convincing nearly all the students in his “Black Music in American
Literature” to show up a half hour before their 8:20
class to listen to music.
“You're getting up at 8 anyway,
right?” he recalls asking them. “So, what's another half hour out of your life?
And, is there a better thing to wake your brain up with than the sounds of
Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus?”