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Abstract
Brackish is a collection of poems preceded by the critical introduction, Transposing the Tradition: Jazz, Lyric Poetry, and the Individual Talent. Brackish explores the writers experiences coming of age on the coast of Northwest Florida, using brackish water as its central metaphor. Neither fresh nor salty, brackish water is a mixture of both. It retains elements of salt water and fresh water and finds identity in the fact that it is neither. The lyric voice in Brackish moves in this way: it is neither a childs voice nor an adults voice, but a voice that stands between those two poles, retaining a childs sense of discovery and mystery and an adults awareness of the larger world. In this way, the poems explore the tenuous gap betweeninnocence and experience. Transposing the Tradition: Jazz, Lyric Poetry, and the Individual Talent develops the theory of lyric transposition, a way of understanding jazz-influenced poetry. Like jazz standards, poems often cover familiar territory; and like a jazz musician, a poet develops an individual voice in the context of familiar material. What separates a poem from others on similar subjects or themes is the poets voice. Lyric transposition describes the movement from subject matter to the poets register, the way that musical transposition describes the movement from a songs original key to another key, more appropriate for a particularmusician. This theoretical perspective frames a discussion and reading of three jazz-influenced works of poetry: Michael S. Harpers Dear John, Dear Coltrane, Tyehimba Jesss Leadbelly, and T.R. Hummers The Infinity Sessions.