Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio
Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio - form Summary
Jazz Rhythms in Free Verse
This free-verse poem uses jazz imagery and colloquial sounds to recreate a noisy, bawdy nightclub scene in Cleveland. Musical verbs and onomatopoeic phrases create a syncopated, improvisatory pulse, while repeated lines — notably the chorus I got the blues
and the refrain about cartoonists — give the poem a song-like structure that emphasizes irony and communal weariness amid the revelry.
It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and coronet razzes. The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts. The banjo tickles and titters too awful. The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers. The cartoonists weep in their beer. Shop riveters talk with their feet To the feet of floozies under the tables. A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers: "I got the blues. I got the blues. I got the blues." And . . . as we said earlier: The cartoonists weep in their beer.
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