Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

Alice Coltrane

Satchidananda’s teacher was considered
a saint, Swami Sivananda Saraswati
I’ve been listening to Alice Coltrane’s
newly-released The Carnegie Hall Concert
from a night in February of 1971, days after
the release of the album Journey in Satchidananda
Satchidananda was initiated into Saraswati
by his teacher Sivananda in 1949 in India
(his name means “existence-knowledge-bliss”)
My own memories of him are from Cambridge, MA
between 1973 to 1976, because my parents
attended his lectures and gatherings
without being full-fledged followers
I remember sitting with him on stage one night
in a hall in Central Square, and being out
on the sidewalk with him and others chatting
The performance at Carnegie Hall
had a double drummer set-up of
Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis,
Pharoah Sanders on saxophone & flute,
Cecil McBee on bass, bassist Jimmy Garrison,
Archie Shepp on saxophone, Kumar
Kramer on harmonium, Tulsi Reynolds
on tamboura, the latter two were students
of Satchidananda, and so was Alice Coltrane
who traveled with him to India in January 1971
Her ensemble’s “Journey in Satchidananda”
for this live version is sparser
than the studio original, recorded in Dix Hills, NY
on November 8, 1970 (a month before I was born)
with a minimalist swing the double quartet
brings to an atmosphere of purposeful
worship and meditation in gratitude

Guillermo Parra is a poet and translator whose recent English versions of Venezuelan poets include bilingual editions of Vicente Gerbasi (Black Square Editions, 2022) and Eleonora Requena (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022). His poems were published in The Canary 7 (Canarium Books, 2021). He lives in Clearwater, FL.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx