Jazz Fan Looks Back by Jayne Cortez

Cortez's poem is in the strained syncopated meter of jazz, a kind of stride talk. It reviews the history of Jazz by naming the names of the great Jazz Legends who gave Jazz a name. It is a pure celebration, a paen to Jazz music, an epidictic. The speaker even styles herself after the women in Jazz whom she admired. The past tense is key, for the speaker is "looking back" on an era that no longer sizzles, larger than life, but which persists in memory and tribute. So for all its celebratory tone, Cortez's poem is also elegiac, like a good ol' fashioned New Orleans funeral.