Many poets don't revise their work after it is published, and especially not when it is published in one of their books. If you know me then you know that I am not one of those poets, for example my poem "Subterranean Night-colored Magus" has been published at least eight times over the last 25 years and no two of those versions are the same. So it won't be any surprise that I have revised a few of the more important poems in my book "Ideas of Improvisation" (which you can get here Thread Makes Blanket Press). Most of these poems I was cool with when the book came out, but have since figured out ways to improve. A few of them are only slightly different in terms of the actual number of words changed, but I'd argue that they are now significantly better. Two of them "An Idea of Improvisation at Dupont Circle" and "The Al Kwarizmi in You" have pretty extensive changes. The "Dupont Circle" poem is, to me, one of the central poems in the book and wasn't quite doing what I had hoped it would do. My book is in conversation with many poets, artists, and musicians, including Wallace Stevens' book "Ideas of Order" and its main poem "The Idea of Order at Key West". Part of our disagreement is over the Eurocentric tendency to claim conflate its dominant position with objectivity or access to some kind of universal truth, which is reflected in my choice of articles ("An Idea" instead of "The Idea") and in my viewpoint that Reality & Imagination aren't a dichotomy or opposites, but rather are two valences linked by acts of improvisation. That Reality helps to construct and inform our Imagination and our Imagination helps to construct and inform our Reality. Constant revision, both of the work of art and of the self, is part of this process. So these are what I currently consider the definitive versions of the following poems. The "Al Kwarizmi" poem was revised to make clearer the importance of PEMDAS (the mathematical order of operations) to the poem. The "Dupont circle" poem was revised to make stronger my point vis a vis Stevens and to improve the ending. The rest were just revised to clarify their central arguments or revise their "ghost poems" which appear in red text. I don't plan on tinkering with the poems anymore, but one never knows what insights the future may bring. Note that the first poem here is comprised of the Section headers and doesn't actually appear in the book as a unified poem, although i consider it such.
AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION
AS THE I IN KALEIDOSCOPE
i
i is the imaginary unit.
Although there is nothing real with this property,
i can be used to extend the real to what is called complex.
ii
Then the narrative I too may bloom
as iris in the mason jar of the imaginary.
iii
Because when doesn’t a dot above the lyrical i
imply pupil to the third I of improvisation?
BETCHA BY GOLLY WOW
(for Phyllis Hyman)
What blue wail is this, what flutters alone
like a tasseled scarf of tightly knit notes
rising to scale our hills past dusk? Or quotes
lush echoes, skipping like kisses off stone
faces that bob or float in Southside streams
& sigh “If I could” as their half-sipped woes,
pulling bipolar box cars in their flow
to exit St. Clair Village under steam.
Phyllis, how your lips dared pucker with flair,
barely brushing our naked neck some nights
with May feathers of whistled melody
rippling into June rain. What splits our air
daring still to flutter or dip? Whose kite
straining at its cord, dying to twist free?
last train her mascara still running
June darkness fireflies pulse into police lights
on the shoulder of one pallbearer a butterfly
THE AL-KHWARIZMI IN YOU
graphs the slope
of your only child’s eyes
into “Daddy when are you
coming back?”
Even before
he lays his head
on the hollow
around your heart
you try to recall the order
of operations for
a return arc
beginning with—
endive
date
apple
melon
pear
seaweed.
Although
he whispered
all of these words
to you once—
—his lips form
empty brackets now.
From this angle
the thesis in parenthesis
seeks to form
a transcendental equation.
You wonder if the idea
of an infinite series
is how father and son
might equal more than
the sum of what they survive?
Even for Khayyam or Clifford
what delta doesn’t divide
Greek letters
on opposite sides
of said equation—
or italicise absence
by their presence?
Meaning aren’t there two halves
to all mathematics:
the rules which we discover
& the set of symbols
we invent
to transcribe them?
Could there be a calculus
for the arc of a ball
not tossed between you
and your boy—
for the arcs of hours
after the divorce
where you tried to solve
for the function of ex?
The algorithms
governing distance
begin to multiply
in the abacus
of memory
even as
you still dream
of him reordering:
pear
endive
melon
dates
apple
seaweed.
As the parent
in parenthesis
wouldn’t you bend
every weekend
to kiss even the imagined
curve of his forehead?
AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION AS AN ALGORITHM OF THE BLUES
Although this
ain’t the ballad
of a wounded boy,
tonight a needle descends
on a record’s black skin
like a dove winging
against a window
until there might be—
in this alto horn’s tone—
some extra stress
on the moan in “Testimony.”
how high the moon—
could even Charlie Parker
transcribe a bird’s burden
into scribbled charts
of “Ornithology”?
Even if in other takes
Yardbird never leaves
his wife and infant son
the way autumn
might litter a lawn?
Could the tiny eyes
of a bird without abandon
bid anyone push
the square pegs of an arpeggio
into a cobalt whole?
Let’s be clear—
In some fashion
blue may be nothing
you’ve ever loved or nothing
that ever loved you,
just some jive frequency
of water or sky or
bright tones in a bandanna
tied across your brow.
But if nothing aqua
ever seeps in our lungs
how could any moan
connect such briefness of breath
to epistemology?
Joy claims birdsong proves
the futility of words
because what human could improve
its contrafactual flow.
And some nights
even the moon appears
to take notes
as Bird makes a fractal
of a phrase—
then flattens & sharpens
one eighth into a swollen vein.
This paradox remains hypodermic,
a beaked flame of bird-speak
beneath a spoon’s black skin,
but let’s say the song ain’t over.
I don’t know why
some cats try to pull
from Parker’s tone
as many parts wit as Witness,
while others insist the warp
and woof of the Blues
weaves bandannas
to flag down the yellow taxis
of new axioms.
I do know
that they claim
“Bird lives”
in this address of ghost notes
unexpected as ketchup
on corn flakes.
Of course imagination
sometimes flares
into an act of faith
and perhaps even the hands
of an abandoned boy
could find themselves
outside a window waving
as Bird mines a horn’s
phonographic memory—
which never seems to choose
what it can or can’t save.
“Take a phrase,
then fracture it”
he might decipher
the solo to say
until even the wings
of a wounded dove
can feel the tune fray
into ontology—
but still not free
his slender hands
to twist the band
into a bandage.
AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION IN DUPONT CIRCLE
a DJ Reneg8d remix
A “Blackbird” flies
from a battered sax
near the tonal center
of the circle,
its darkness tipping
the fountain’s waves,
rippling flag-like
under an April sky
with a rhythm
striped black and white,
tho perchance
only some can C
what is sigil in its rites.
Cue some bystanders
assuming the white fountain
must be metaphor,
or the soaring “Blackbird”
somehow symbol.
Any blue-black wail
over widening water
(even raving evermore)
might feel bound by
simple chords
if what spouted
from the dreadlocked musician
was merely what he’d heard—
but weren’t these chords
also voiced by Bird,
whose tarnished horn
wasn't spurred
by splashing water
or rippling wind,
but perhaps a C
sharply diminished
within?
If simply a cerulean sound
of the fountain
stirred or stilled
the green bills in his case,
or solely a white silence
of clouds extended above,
no matter how high,
wouldn’t it still be
the yang or ying of water
only brighter?
How then might he dream
to reed of a thing
more jet than the yen
of a blackbird’s
undulating wings on the wind?
Is what his woodwind
seeks to sculpt
more art
or mere artifact?
Could any sculpture
ringed with purring pigeons
B more than just
a spouting place where he
(god with a minor G)
comes to create?
What chords are these?
Which Key?
An I nearly illusive
as the i
of Stevens’ blackbird
might look to unravel complex roots,
(but finds merely
real chords it can knot).
And as he blows
this epistle of Paul’s
—to augment or diminish
any tint of that sky—
what might become artifact
in our bicameral minds?
Given how A minor seventh
“singing” of starry darkness
rings of paradox
in such admiral circles,
could “these broken wings”
lift any voice?
Meaning listen,
who can say
what the “sunken eyes”
of our enslaved ancestors
thought of darkly
dreaming overboard
in some minor sea?
So play black Bird,
riff on if
Si'l vous plait,
these riddle passages
were composed
of changes you chose
and by choosing
tried to unchain.
And since the contrafact
is key, perhaps riff on what
—as the conductor
of dusk dons
his onyx tuxedo—
might strut
in the traffic's rhythm
and why we
despite knowing
a dominant chord
can’t be conflated
with a universal key—
might ache to hear
in the higher harmony
of a siren or
saxophone circling
above the basin
—above the arc
& spume
of its spray—
even higher
perhaps than the eye
of the blackbird
but not a single note
in our broken-winged
ancestor's song.
