Burns' night out

British poet with strong Beat affinities and a particular love for US jazz of the 1940s and 1950s releases Wasn't That a Time?, an early greatest hits of his huge verse output

FOR CLOSE TO 70 years, Jim Burns has been involved in the UK poetry scene, as writer, as little magazine editor, as reviewer and supporter. The deputy editor of long-running British Beat Generation magazine Beat Scene, Burns has also been a frequent essay writer on Anglo-American cultural topics, art and film, political history and also, perhaps his first love, American jazz from the early bebop era deep into the 1950s.

He is prolific: there are a dozen collections of his anthologised writings in print, compiling a lifetime’s prose output and that does not begin to take account of the hundreds of published poems over those decades.

In 2018, his valuable essay ‘Jack Kerouac’s jazz scene’, identifying the jazz artists and songs which feature in the novelist’s work, was published in the volume Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack.

His latest publication, Wasn’t That a Time?, is a kind of verse greatest hits from the 1960s and 1970s. Below we publish a poem from the new edition which reflects on Burns’ deep affection for the jazz tradition and shares some of the excitement of an evening spent in the company of those musicians…

‘The Ageing Hipster’s Dream’ by Jim Burns

All those popular songs of the period,

Sung by thin-faced crooners in evening

suits, backed by groups of bored-looking

musicians, the middle-aged men thinking

‘It’s a hell of a way to make a living,

weeks away from the wife and kids’, and

the younger ones holding. their saxes like

Lester, and wondering if Woody or someone

Will ever ask them to join the band.

And there I am, hunched in front of the

stand, sneering at the dancers, and

waiting for the hip-looking tenorman

to take a solo, so I can shout ‘Go’, and

we’ll be gone, and the moment will

be fixed, and the sound and the scene

always remains the same. Cool. So very cool.

Notes:  Wasn't That a Time? is published by the Black Light Engine Room Press, 2022. You can find 'Beat Soundtrack #3: Jim Burns' in the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation, September 11th, 2021. Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack, edited by Simon Warner and Jim Sampas, was issued by Bloomsbury.