St. Louis poet Quincy Troupe is returning home from his longtime base in New York to perform with a jazz quartet at Saint Louis University and to read and sign books at Left Bank Books.
The jazz gig – 8-9:30 p.m. Friday, November 2 – is part of the Nu-Art Series “Jazz n’ Tongues: The Art of Music and Poetry” project. Co-hosted by Saint Louis University Music Program, it will be held in Saint Louis University Theatre, 3733 West Pine Mall Blvd., with an admission price of $10. For tickets, visit https://tinyurl.com/Troupe-SLU.
Troupe has two new books of poems to perform from, “Seduction” and “Ghost Voices,” both forthcoming (with gorgeous covers) from Northwestern University Press, which is trying to rush their publication to coincide with Troupe’s homecoming gigs.
“Seduction” – with brilliant cover art by St. Louis painter Oliver Jackson – has more than love poems for Troupe’s longtime wife, Margaret Porter Troupe, though it has those.
“You can be seduced by language, beauty, music, art, the weather, anything. You can be seduced by the love of a car, the love of food – anything – clothes, travel. I am seduced by geography, terrain, places, or cars. All of that seduces me,” Troupe told The American.
“Or you can be seduced like Miles was seduced by a voice he heard while walking in the dark, by the voice of some old, black woman. He never saw her face, but her voice seduced him, and he tried to imitate it on the trumpet. That seduced him forever.”
In “Ghost Voices,” a book-length poem cast as a prayer (with haunting cover art by the late abstract painter Jack Whitten), Troupe was seduced by voices of the dead.
“In Guadalupe we have a house that looks out at the Caribbean Sea, and you can hear the ocean waves washing in every night. One night it came into my head that those ocean waves were bringing in the voices of African slaves who jumped off the ship or were pushed overboard, and those sounds were those voices foaming up onto the shore,” Troupe said.
“It evolved from there. The voices went through the West Indies, with the ghosts following the slave ships, following their kinfolk who had been kidnapped in Africa, carrying them to the West through Brazil and Haiti into the Gulf of Mexico and into New Orleans, then upriver to St. Louis, where I was born, and then coming to New York.”
Those poems mix traditional poetic forms with forms of Troupe’s own creation.
“The poem is based in history, and it is based in imagination,” Troupe said. “Miles said, ‘I try to be free in the way I play,’ and I was trying to be free. Why not have new forms?”
The “Miles” who so often comes to mind for Troupe is, of course, Miles Davis, who told his autobiography to Troupe, a collaboration the poet captured in the memoir “Miles and Me.” Seven Stories Press has repackaged and republished “Miles and Me” in advance of the star-studded film based on the book, directed by none other than Denzel Washington, expected to start shooting soon and to appear next year.
Troupe will read from and sign this handsome new edition 4 p.m. Sunday, November 4 at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid Ave. This event is free and open to the public, but proof of purchase of “Miles and Me” from Left Bank Books will be require to enter the signing line.
Troupe reflected on something that Miles told him and is included in the autobiography: that he liked people from St. Louis because they were country.
“Miles Davis was very country. He was very clean and could dress, he had a fashion sense, he was a musical and a fashion genius, but he was country. We are all country in St. Louis. St. Louis is country,” Troupe said.
“That is not derogatory. You can be country and be sophisticated also. It doesn’t mean you’re not sophisticated. It means you come from a basic way, from a place. I am not confused about where I am from. I don’t care how much I travel, how many books I have read, how many achievements I have, I understand where I come from. I come from St. Louis. And there is a certain code there: don’t lie to me. Do not lie to me. Or you’ll pay. Don’t be lying to me. And don’t think you are better than me.”
