Amiri Baraka's jazz poems, particularly in "The Dead Lecturer" and "Black Music," translate jazz improvisation into poetry by constructing lines that seem to generate themselves in the act of performance, following unexpected turns and refusing the predetermined destination; A student poet might attempt jazz improvisation formally by beginning with a fixed structural element (a key image, a rhythmic pattern, a syntactic frame) and then improvising variations on it, allowing unexpected associations and sonic qualities to generate new directions rather than following a predetermined plan; Michael Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" uses jazz improvisation as both subject and formal model, its language reaching toward the specific quality of sustained meditative transformation that Coltrane's music achieves; A poet might write about the experience of hearing a specific jazz improvisation and attempting to translate its formal properties into linguistic equivalents, exploring both the possibilities and the necessary failures of translating between sonic and verbal art; Nathaniel Mackey's serial poem "Song of the Andoumboulou" is the most sustained experiment in translating jazz improvisation into poetic form, its long serial structure allowing for the kind of sustained development and variation over time that jazz's most extended improvisations achieve; A contemporary spoken word poet might perform a poem in which the written text is only a starting point and the actual performance improvises on and around the written words, treating the poem as a jazz standard that creates the conditions for improvisation rather than a fixed text to be delivered