This week’s Cartwheels on the Sky feature the poems and process of Jazz poet Tony Seymour.
His literary career spans nearly five decades, encompassing poetry writing, journalism, academic research and public performances. His collection of over 1,200 poems has many inspirations, particularly the search for truth, political events, the pursuit of love, world history and the various lives a soul experiences in a lifetime.
A performer who reads to music, his is more than “stream of consciousness”; instead, Tony’s rapid delivery of his poetry has been described as a “scream of consciousness”, or a “Zap Rap” featuring intra -syllable rhyming, the use of onomatopoeia and alliteration, and a vocabulary that has sent readers and listeners reaching for a Thesaurus.
A “poets poet” Seymour’s work appears within several major Collections at Stanford University, including The Allen Ginsberg Collection and the Dr. Huey P. Newton Collection, at UC Berkeley in the City Lights Collection and the Phillip Lamantia Collection. But, in his words, he “reached the zenith of all honors bestowed on a poet” with the inclusion of his jazz poetry in the Hogan Jazz Archive, at Tulane University in New Orleans, which is considered the ultimate holding for the History of Jazz where few poets, aside from Langston Hughes and ts elliott also have their works.
For many years, he served as the poetry coordinator for the North Beach Festival in San Francisco, and to this day, he continues to write and perform to as wide an audience as possible.
Listen live from 7-7:30pm, Saturday, May 1 at 88.3, KGUA FM Gualala. Also streams live at https://kgua.org
