Yes, thank you, Doug, for processing the video and adding those reference links!
Here’s that riff I shared, inspired by the White Body Supremacy thread
riff: […]
A noun, In popular music, jazz, etc., a short repeated phrase, freq. played over changing chords or harmonies or used as a background to a solo improvisation; 2) A repeated phrase, idea, or situation.
B verb, In popular music, jazz, etc.: play riffs.
—Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th ed.
I called the piece above a ‘riff’ in the B sense of incorporating ‘repeated phrases, ideas, or situations’ in an improvisatory flight. I would not tend to call it a ‘poem’ because its lacks (in my feeling) the intentionality and wholeness of a poem. These are fragments of a murdered psyche.
However, as I am always doing, I will receive and recombine sensory and intellectual impressions, in order to say or mean something that doesn’t fit neatly into declarative sentences.
I started with a feeling in my heart, gut, and whole body, which was vibrating with the image held in mind (and the reality of the image—the man hanging, the tree, the onlookers—sensing the texture of black and white, the pixels of the image on my screen and the photographic paper these were based on, a graphite #2 pencil in hand), and I was contemplating the relentlessness of incarnation—which you can hear, for example, in a John Coltrane solo.
I drew a black bar in the middle of the page, then underneath it began to write my splattering of cognitive associations, guided (I felt) by a covert cosmological intuition, which remained mute in some stubborn way. And then the line came (inspired by Goethe’s theory of color as emergent from the play of dark and light, as witnessed in the prism experiments described by Bortoft in our reading):
“When my blues bloomed violet, I knew black was almost back…”
Which, as one can both see and visualize for oneself (empirically!), is just how the primal phenomenon works. The rest flowed from there. Of the deeds and sufferings of lights, a mere shard—infinite participant.
I am happy enough with the experiment to share the story of my process, which is really a group story, but I still want to note that if I/we were to continue such improvising, composting, and re-composing, we would likely grow more fertile soil for thought.
See also:
- Art is About Elegant Form: An Interview with Albert Murray by Wynton Marsalis — thoughts on the blues inspired here
- Scribbles and doodles from notebooks - thinking of how to bring love, care & attention to the literal aesthetics of notebook writing as @marielle.hasselblad illustrates; I am usually a messy, careless writer-by-hand