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The Sunday Poem is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work.
D.B. Jonas reads his poem at its conclusion.
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Cecil Taylor in 2009/photo by Marek Lazarski, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
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Cecil Taylor at the Clavier
……………He plays the piano with a razor,
……………The concertina with a pair of scissors
……………Malcolm Lowry, The Comedian
It’s not as if we’d never had fair warning,
hadn’t felt the rumble from down deep,
the anxious weather massing
somewhere far away, the menace
of those few fat drops, the rising growl
of wind among the empty branches,
the skittering of tiny searching things
beneath the autumn leaves,
his furtive forays, essays, explorations,
precise as Monk and restive as Montaigne,
and all those brief excursions and retreats,
the edgy listening silences, and then at once
a desperate haste, a rush of furious cascades,
as if Bud Powell had suddenly turned up
among the anxious jangling keys
to howl his hopelessness again.
And never had that Bösendorfer’s registers
been stretched that far, as if specifically
designed to lead us out as far as human
hearing will allow, away from every roiling
composition’s center, out into desolation’s
vacant lots, into a nocturnal space that has
no center, where every feral noise or note
that finds our ear is something numinous,
and sparkles in the brewing luminous.
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Listen to DB Jonas read his poem
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DB Jonas is the author of four collections of poetry: Tarantula Season and other Poems (2023), Flight Risk (2025), In Dubious Terrain: Lyric and Conjecture (2026) and Ut pictura: New and Selected Ekphrastics 2021-2026 (August 2026). Further examples of his work are accessible at jonaspoetry.com.
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Listen to the 1980 recording of the Cecil Taylor Unity performing Part 1 of Taylor’s composition “It is in the Brewing Luminous,” with Taylor (piano); Jimmy Lyons (alto saxophone); Ramsey Ameen (violin); Alan Silva (bass, cello); Jerome Cooper (drums, balaphone); and Sunny Murray (drums). [The Orchard]
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Click for:
An interview with Philip Freeman, author of In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor
A Letter From the Editor: On “The Weary Blues: Celebrating Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance”
Information about the book Kinds of Cool: An Interactive Collection of Jazz Poetry, Vol. II (featuring women poets)
More poetry on Jerry Jazz Musician
“Where the Music Wasn’t Allowed,” Jane McCarthy’s winning story in the 71st Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest
More short fiction on Jerry Jazz Musician
Information about how to submit your poetry or short fiction
Subscribe to the (free) Jerry Jazz Musician quarterly newsletter
Helping to support the ongoing publication of Jerry Jazz Musician, and to keep it commercial-free (thank you!)
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Jerry Jazz Musician…human produced since 1999
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