Lenard D. Moore

True to its title, distinguished Eastern North Carolina haiku poet Lenard D. Moore’s The Geography of Jazz is as much about place as it is about music. Here we have the Picasso on the venue wall. Here we have the diamond ceiling tiles. Here we have the van backed up to the club, where the musicians are unloading. Here we have shined shoes tapping on the stage. Moore also brings us into private spaces—a bedroom, a car on the highway—where he plumbs the liminal space between jazz as a collection of notes and as an emotional vehicle. As he listens to Miles Davis’s painfully gorgeous Porgy and Bess, for example, he writes, “Needle on vinyl, / Miles in the groove, / and ghosts hover / over the warped wooden shelf … This music heats me / like bad booze burns, / like promises never kept.” Moore is bringing a live jazz band for this reading. Evidently, when he writes, “I am inside the music,” he really means it. —Corbie Hill