The movement and rhythms of jazz inform much of Emporia poet Kevin Rabas’s work, as well as life in central Kansas and the people who live here.
Rabas will appear at the Emporia Public Library at 7 p.m. Wednesday to read from his recently released poetry collection, “Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano.” Rabas, who also is a jazz percussionist, will play the drums as well.
The title poem from this, his second poetry collection, provides an example of how Rabas draws from everyday experiences to provide a glimpse of contemporary life.
“Some of the stories are kind of funny and fantastical,” Rabas said. “The title poem comes from when my wife and I were moving in Kansas City and we didn’t tie down this electric piano as well as we should have, and it went flying out of the back of the truck into the intersection.”
Rabas has taught poetry in the creative writing program at Emporia State University for about five years. At the same time, he continues to publish poetry and fiction. He also co-edits ESU’s literary review, “The Flint Hills Review,” with Amy Sage-Webb and writes about music for Jazz Ambassador Magazine.
“I love teaching at ESU,” he said. “The students are great. There are a lot of dedicated folks here.”
In much of his poetry, Rabas, like the Beat poets, tries to replicate the patterns and rhythms of jazz. He gathers inspiration from his experiences as a jazz musician as well as from interviews he has conducted with other musicians.
“Jazz is one of those American inventions, a combination of music of Africa and European forms coming together, and I try to capture some of that,” Rabas said. “I try to write about it so that it stays alive and vibrant.”
He also writes about family life, examining everyday experiences and highlighting how they define us.
“I write poems about family and place,” he said, in addition to jazz-influenced verse. “I try to capture where we are and what it’s like to live at this time in history in a town like Emporia.”
Rabas draws from a number of sources and writes in a variety of modes, including the personal lyric of the confessional poets, the spontaneous rhythms of the Beat poets and other, more contemplative styles.
“I draw heavily on what I’ve learned from the confessional poets like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton,” he said. “But also, a good deal of my writing is trying to retell stories very quickly, so it also moves in the narrative vein. So there are confessional and narrative poems and some meditative ones, too, where I’m thinking on paper about something.”
Rabas can’t say whether it was jazz or poetry that came to him first — he started writing seriously at the same time he was in the jazz program at University of Missouri Kansas City. Later, he got the idea to combine the two passions into a single, fluid form, using the sound and movement of language in much the same way a musician uses notes and measures to form musical phrases.
“Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano” was published this year by Washburn’s Woodley Press.
Rabas has won the Langston Hughes Award for Poetry, the Salina Poetry Series New Voice Award and the Flint Hills Poetry Society Award for Poetry. His first collection of poems, “Bird’s Horn and Other Poems,” was released by Coal City Review Press in 2007. Copies of his new book will be available for sale at the reading.