So I've created this new form in my manuscript “Ideas of Improvisation” that I call a "Colorpuntal" (which is a portmanteau neologism of the words “color” and “contrapuntal”) where I use a different color text (maroon) for certain words in a poem to create an entirely new and different poem (ghost poem) inside of the existing host poem. It's like an Erasure poem—but with the original text still present—so it becomes a contrapuntal poem. All of the text forms the host poem, the maroon text forms the ghost poem. You can think of the whole thing as a dialectic—thesis + antithesis = synthesis. Most of these ghost poems are haiku, senryu or epigrams that use the principles of Japanese short form poetry, although a few of them are just short poems. Ghost poems make up about one third of the poems in my book. I particularly like the way a ghost poem can trouble, complicate, or even contradict the host poem. To me the idea of poems with multiple dimensions or voices is a natural artifact of my aesthetic philosophy which is expressed in part by the section header text. The section headers at the start of each of the book’s three sections actually form a poem titled—
“AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION AS THE I IN KALEIDOSCOPE”
the first part of which reads—
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.
Without getting too deep in the weeds the idea is to borrow the Imaginary Unit ( i ) from math and employ it as a metaphor for the Self. Just as the Imaginary Unit (the square root of -1) is a useful fiction in math (originally invented to help solve quadratic equations), my philosophy is grounded on the scientific fact that our sense of self is a similar construct—a useful fiction for operating a human brain and navigating the world. The square root of 16 is both 4 and -4 and the square root of -1 is both i and -i. So the self modeled by I has two parts. The colorpuntal is a way of giving both of these parts a voice. One can think of the ghost poem as the voice of the Speaker's alt self or one can think of the ghost poem as being the voice of Apophenia—the Goddess of Improvisation—who is a character that appears in many of my poems, including at least ten poems in the book. Technically of course apophenia is the tendency to see patterns in random data or what causes human hallucinations. To me participation in the process of improvisation is a type of spiritual seeking, a type of prayer. I consider myself a mystic seeker, a poet in the tradition of the Sufis, just not Muslim. I understand “spirituality” as a valid human emotional experience, but one that is an artifact of a bicameral brain and thus not necessarily connected to any deity or superpower except in our imagination. Thus it is also useful fiction. Since the actual process of apophenia involves finding (creating) patterns in randomness it is a form of improvisation that all human brains engage in all the time. A vital part of mystic seeking is the separation from and attempted reunion with the Beloved and of course the Beloved (normally understood as our Divine Creator) can also be understood as the other half of our selves—the -i—or the intuitive half of our brains.
Thus the Beloved in all of my love poems can be read as being the Sufi Beloved and in my poem “The Coltrane in You” the sixth stanza reads—
Meaning what if
the “good news”
only concludes
the Beloved’s Christian name
is Apophenia?
I don’t know
if sufis such as
Rumi & Trane
knew all twelve ways
to kneel and kiss the ground,
but surely their
chromatic Ohs
could mean ensō
in modulation.
and argues that Apophenia is possibly also the Beloved and that this is the true “good news” that is to say the true Gospel (Evangelion) preached by all mystics including John Coltrane & Rumi. The wordplay in the poem involves excavating the words “angel” and “lion” from the word “Evangelion” and these could easily be seen as avatars of i & -i or the speaker in the host & ghost poems also. Thus the colorpuntal gives voice to multiple facets of the Self. Whether the second voice is the Speaker’s other half or is Apophenia or even some external divinity is up to each reader on a poem by poem basis. Below are a few examples of colorpuntal poems from my book "Ideas Of Improvisation." The first example is also the first poem in the book—
WHITMAN’S SAMPLER
a DJ Reneg8d remix
To begin with, take warning, I am . . .
far different from what you suppose;
I do not ask any . . . delight, I swim in it as in a sea.
Then the eyes close . . . and . . . speed forth to the darkness,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Entering but for a minute . . . see a sight beyond
all the pictures and poems ever made,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb,
love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the body of a man?
O I think it is not for life I am chanting . . . my chant of lovers
. . . it must be for death . . .
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves,
and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn; which too long
I was offering to feed my soul.
And what I assume you shall assume;
Stop this day and night with me, and
you shall possess the origin of . . .
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end,
held by this electric self out of the pride
of which I utter poems,
I too but signify at the utmost
a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
gather, and merge myself as part
of this mystery—
and here we stand
in the mystical moist night-air
and from time to time,
here, take this gift . . .
The ghost poem here reads—
“a different sea
the darkness and swelling
of green leaves”
This haiku which to me is about a cup of green tea, but also has metaphorical resonance with Whitman’s book “Leaves of Grass” and with the various themes in the cento and is in the voice of Apophenia but any reader may decide it is me if they think the main speaker is Whitman or vice versa. Here is another example.
AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION WITHIN THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
(a free jazz of ashes buried or scattered by a dead? cat in a different key)
These are perhaps
some points
on the musical taste of
The Black Raspberries,
although we thought
the shrubs might be
mostly petals and
it was quite a pinch
when a light note later
the purpose of the thorns
entered us
for the first time
like a Pointillist painting
of a pond that Cecil
tailored in the moment
by pleating with
some fate
we couldn’t
fathom back then,
yet felt again
and again beyond
the petaling of
those phrases,
in the syntax
that arranged them,
not ours
to diagram,
like a garden,
but to enter in,
and sometimes
to venture out,
before the feeling
seemed to
nearly inspire
some type of
blade-dancing
raised up to
the point of
a sound science.
The ghost poem here is:
"Perhaps the light
of a pond
beyond the diagram
but feeling nearly
the point of"
This poem can be read as explicating Ashbery’s aesthetics (ashes buried) where his poems arc towards some asymptotic limit never to be reached or as an explication of my own colorpuntal form or as an explication of the human relationship with the Divine as well. Another poem from the book is—
FATHER, SON AND THE WHOLLY GHOST
We pray mainly
in the alleys of memory.
There, shards of smiles glitter
on the ground,
but here we wear the same name
—almost—identical scars,
though you can’t or won’t
remember what date I was born.
Something trickles
down the side
of my face.
In some versions this may be all
you have taught me:
needles are hollow lies
and collapse as many families
as veins.
Now a prisoner in death's camp,
you wither each day
until we may count your T-cells
with one hand.
When the phone beckons
and Mama’s voice begs
Please buy a dark suit to wear
I may be wrong—
but I say
don’t some of us
wear black
all day
everyday
anyway?
The ghost poem:
"We pray there
but here you can't
In some versions
a prisoner
we may phone
but don't"
And finally this last example.
THE COLTRANE IN YOU
(por il miglior fabbro)
probably begins
before the first Oh!
of any emotion
to möbius like the circle
at the center of God.
Meaning inky-haired & lightheaded,
you start to dream of tracing—
in tree frog hues—
a sonic essay
that Alice or Stevie
(in Wonderland)
arranged over doubts
the black of our mouths
splay open.
And since the tint
is half the sound
your belief,
(in the feeling of faith
rather than gothic of god)
becomes more than
mere ode or elegy
borne in a mouthpiece.
Isn’t that why
at the wheel of the warship
of worship you vie
for the harmony
of suspended chords
in righteous unravel
or strive to maroon
at the bluest end
of Duende?
Perhaps this means
certain starred charts
—once incomplete—
have now become
your guide
in a bitter suite
as incensed ropes of smoke
muscle music from hunger.
Splay, how “What if?”
preys to probe
the pouty mouth
of imagination—
cartographer
of our interior—
to query if
it’s the lion or angel
in “Evangelion”
that extends
the swing of most triads
or swells our
Hammond organs?
And since all great musicians
know there are only
twelve ways to kneel
and kiss the ground,
surely the second O
of said emotion frays
to mean all things
in modulation,
how therefore to be drawn
around a circle of fifths
ruled by ratios—
even irrationally—
as you Picasso keys
into a piano’s grand motif.
A quasi Cubist riff—
perhaps brayed into a bridge—
to re-choir
something like
the Acknowledgement
of our father.
Maybe a relative minor
to absolve some resolve
towards Resolution
or flip the full-hipped logic
as you Bearden the burden
of our double basis
until battered sticks shatter
and every Zildjan shivers
with symbols unseen
of the quest inside
your questions.
Because a talent
may also be a weight,
your gift gives pause—
purpling in turbulent
Pursuance of relief
—wind from a box—
spilling like
certain bottled spirits
—e pluribus unum—
until God is an American
Sonnet Wanda worked
into the Psalms
of our unanthemed hands.
Since prayer is a petition
people sign with their lips
your ongoing gaze flips
inward to cast bated phrases
that nearly sync
in their artful craft
bobbing about
a more Lydian theory
of the Lyric
on modal lines
which appear
to conflate
or conflict
until they’re well nigh
wholly writ.
The 3 ghost poems are:
"The first dream
arranged doubts
our mouths half sound"
"Circle of fifths
Picasso riff
a logic of shivers"
"Wind spilling
bottled spirits
into prayer"
The last two of these of course are Senryu.
These should be enough examples to allow any reader to competently begin navigating the whole of each poem. The idea of poems being multidimensional is of course part of my HyperQbist aesthetic which is sketched out elsewhere on my blog. There are also many more references to my complete spiritual/philosophical system in the other poems in the book, beginning with the Walt Whitman cento at the beginning. The notes to that poem point out that said poem
“is a cento of lines from Walt Whitman poems. The symbol “i” is used in engineering contexts to denote an electrical current and is also used in mathematical contexts to denote the square root of negative one or the Imaginary Unit of Complex Numbers (a type of multitude.) Thus the symbol i can be understood in this poem to both sing the body electric and signify that it contains multitudes.” Happy reading!
