Our prompt for the day (optional, as always) takes its cue from Arkansas. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem inspired by your favorite kind of music. Try to recreate the sounds and timing of a pop ballad, a jazz improvisation, or a Bach fugue. That could mean incorporating refrains, neologisms and flights of whimsy, or repeating/inventing lines or ideas – whatever your chosen musical form would seem to require! Perhaps a good way to start is to listen to your favorite piece of music and “free-write” for the duration of the piece, and then use what you’ve written as the building blocks for your poem.
Copenhagen 1961
15 April 20 2000
I wasn’t there
And this wasn’t the version I first heard
But when I found this disc
Lost from numerous migrations
Recently found digitally
As karma willed it
The crash of the drums
And the piano makes you pay attention
They part like the red sea
And our prophet on alto steps in
Being gentle with the theme
Playing it straight
So those who are not in
can begin
to get in
Our prophet fades it away before he is tempted to let the spirits inside loose
Piano and rhythm run us for a time, foreshadowing with slight changes on tonight’s theme
Take your 8 minutes for Stairway
This is 28 minutes until you are enlightened enough to realize this is heaven
Being lulled into a trance
We are opened to the flutist
Who nods his respect to the theme
But he is our John the Baptist
He is eating the honey and dancing naked in the fields
Our first foray into the true mind of our prophet soon to make his return
As the Baptist leaves, he comes back to the theme, and stabs at it
Making it, reforming it, but the history proves a mighty opponent
The flailing continues
The the trilling signals his end
And the prophet joins in where the Baptist leaves the field, bloodied
Short attacks at the theme
Logical
Mathematical
Precise
And when that fails
Our prophet uses his snake charms
And telegraph machines
Tapping out warnings
The dervish is next as he swings around with fluid movements
Sliding side to side
Using his whole body to free the theme from its structure
Removing its hard chitin shell
Our prophet massages it back into place
Giving it new life
Giving it bew purpose
Petting it like an over excitable puppy
Soothing the theme just long enough
To clip at it, chop away the features that make it recognizable
Out of breath our prophet uses his phases set on star shine
Squawking as a mother hen does to reign in her chicks
Giving another fill bodied attack with the dervish, the phasers and the caress all simultaneously
You would think the theme could never emerge from this ritual
And yet it does, more powerful
Carrying with it the journey
You have witnessed
And the final kiss before it is sent back into the world
Our prophet whispers in its ear, we cannot hear, it is not our time
But when our children are born, we make it the first song they hear.
(Unconscious write while listening to My Favorite Things, 1961 Copenhagen live set)
