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
tries to graph the slope
of your only child’s eyes
as he asks “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—
murmur
embrace
pout
dance
ask
sigh.
Although
he whispered
to you once—
—his lips form
empty brackets now.
From this angle
the thesis in parenthesis
craves a more
transcendental equation.
Now tightly bracketed
you wonder if
an infinite series
is how father and son
might equal more
than the sum
of what they survive?
Even for Khayyam or Clifford
didn’t some delta
divide Greek letters
on opposite sides
of an equation—
or italicise absence
by their presence?
Meaning aren’t there two halves
to all mathematics:
the rules which we discover
& the symbols we invent
to transcribe them?
You feel absolute truth
is an asymptote
and still the algorithms
governing distance
multiply in the abacus
of memory until
you dream
of him whispering:
pear
endive
melon
date
apple
seaweed.
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?
As the parent
in parenthesis
wouldn’t you bend
every weekend
to kiss even
the conjectured 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
into a record’s black skin
like a dove winging
into a window
until you may hear—
in the alto horn’s tone—
an extra stress
on the moan in “Testimony.”
But listen—no matter
how high the moon—
could even Charlie Parker
chart the burdens of a bird
into “Ornithology”?
Even if in other takes
Yardbird stays—
doesn’t leave
his wife & infant son
the way autumn
might litter a lawn.
Could the tiny eyes
of any bird ever urge
you to push
square pegs of an arpeggio
into a cobalt whole?
Let’s be clear—
blue may be nothing
he loves or nothing
that ever loved him,
just some jive frequency
of water, sky, or
a bright bandanna
tied across his brow.
But if nothing aqua
ever seeped in his lungs
how could a moaned “No”
connect the power of breath
to epistemology?
Joy claims birdsong proves
the futility of words
and what human could improve
its contrafactual flow?
Some nights
even the moon appears
to take notes
as Parker makes a fractal
of their phrase—
then flattens & sharpens
one eighth into a swollen vein.
This paradox might remain 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 much wit as Witness,
while others say the warp
& woof of the Blues
weaves hip bandannas
to flag down the yellow taxis
of axioms.
But I do know
that many 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
might find themselves
waving outside a window
as Bird mines a horn’s
phonographic memory—
which cannot choose
what it may or may not save.
“Take a phrase,
then fracture it”—
he reciphers
one solo to say
until even the tune
of a wounded dove
can fray into ontology—
and yet still can’t free
his slender hands
to twist the band
into a bandage.
AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION IN DUPONT CIRCLE
a DJ Reneg8d remix
A “Blackbird” lifts
from a battered sax
at the tonal center
of the circle,
its eyes not following
the fountain’s waves
rippling flag-like
under an April sky
with a rhythm
both black & white,
tho perchance
only we can C
what feels sigil in its rites.
Cue a few bystanders
assuming the white fountain
is merely metaphor,
the soaring bird
simply symbol.
Isn’t it true
any blue-black wail
from bird or horn
over widening water
(even raving evermore)
would feel bound by
singular chords
if what spouted
from the dreadlocked man
were merely what he’d heard—
but these chords
seemed 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 blue sound
from the fountain
stirred or stilled
the green bills in his case,
or solely a bright silence
of clouds darkened above,
no matter how high,
would it not still be
the yang & ying of water?
Why then dream
of reeding anything
as jet as the yen
of a blackbird’s
undulating wings on the wind
if what his woodwind
meant to sculpt
was mere artifact?
Could any sculpture
ringed with purring pigeons
ever B more than just
a spouting place where he
(god with a minor G)
came to create?
What chords are these?
What Key?
An I nearly illusive
as the i
of Stevens’ blackbird
might look to unravel
these complex roots,
(but find merely
more chords it can knot).
And as he blows
this epistle of Paul’s
—to augment or diminish
the tints of the sky—
does what his woodwind
mean to sculpt
become more art or artifact
in our bicameral minds?
Given why A minor seventh
“singing” of starry darkness
might ring of paradox
in such admiral circles,
how could “these broken wings”
ever lift any voice?
Meaning listen,
who can say
what the “sunken eyes”
of our ancestors
might’ve quickly pondered
peering overboard
at some minor sea?
Oh, play black Bird,
riff on if
Si'l vous plait,
Paul’s riddle passages
contain or
constrain any changes
you may choose
and by choosing
seem to unchain.
O riff on if
—as the conductor
of dusk dons
his onyx tuxedo—
any truth
could even swing
in the traffic's rhythm
and what we
—despite knowing
a dominant chord
shouldn’t be conflated
with a universal key—
may begin to glean
from what rings
in the higher harmony
of what could be
a siren circling
above this basin
—above the arc
& spume
of its spray—
above even
the beating wings
of this one song,
each time
more softly.
