For JSTOR Daily, “reader, writer, editor, and record collector” Ashawnta Jackson wrote a piece on jazz poetry and how it grew and inspired so many in the 1950s.
[…] Jazz poetry can be poetry that is strictly about jazz, or it can take its structure from the rhythms of the music. Because the definition of the form is so varied, explains musician and musicologist Hao Huang, poets as different as “Jack Kerouac and Maya Angelou have tried their hand at writing jazz poetry, often experimenting with jazz music backgrounds to their own poetry readings, with varying degrees of literary integrity and success.”