Passion, Possibility, and Ingenuity

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Art, artists, create, creation, literature, music, poetry, Writing

What does it mean to be an artist? Stripped of its mystery and its poetry, the word still inspires awe. There is no one thing that defines what an artist is or what an artist creates. The word remains a shell, a void, emptied so that the world may burn and shine through. An artist is a catalyst, the space carved out and reserved for possibility. With fire and grit, with science and chaos, lines and language, something known becomes unknown, and within that mystery, creation flourishes.

My father is an artist – the architect. I remember sitting for days curled beneath his drawing board. I traveled with him to vacant lots and corn fields, mounds of dirt and rotting brick. I saw nothing at these sites. He, however, saw walls, rooms, a swing set, a library – he saw possibility. He documented that possibility on napkins and scraps he kept buried in his pockets. Then, late nights, fueled by Pepsi cans, pots of black coffee, and packs of cigarettes, followed. He set out translating a home, its future memories, to lines and numbers, geometric shapes and scales.

When he was done, he had created something, but he was not yet an artist – just a man with lines.

Creation happened only after he had relinquished his rights to those lines and sketches.  Only after he handed them over to a contractor would those lines be read and used to imagine and create something.

My father was still not an artist. Only months, years later, when the structure was complete, when he could reach out and touch it, when he took off his shoes and tripped over the toys of a young boy’s new playroom, was the process complete.

What does it mean to be an artist? Perhaps a better question would be: what does it mean to be human? To recognize and celebrate our humanity, our passions, our possibility – to see the world, strange and new, to find hope, to ask why, to see how, to constantly be moving forward?

Artists work through many mediums:  movement, music, words, sound, food, wood, steel – the mediums are endless and the process is universal.

We create and inspire. We make the familiar strange and wondrous. We ask questions and reveal possibility. We empower those around us to ask why, to imagine how. We give, we hope, and most importantly, we dream.

Artists create; we remember. And the cycle continues.

Music and Poetics: A Study

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Art, freelance, music, poetry, poetry theory, Writing

I envy music.

A young woman on the corner plays a violin. Which is normal. Which is expected in March in the afternoon from a young woman in a ski town. She plays and eventually wanders. The notes carry the wind, tangled in the branches above the coffee shop where I write.

The words are buried in the sound, the man transposed. Reincarnite. Rhythm and pattern, the cascade. I wish that my words could be sound or even imagine it – naturally. She moves in waves, the soundin streams pouring from her center. The chaos of it, of her, near frantic, desperate strings. Voices in the ripples, in the walls, wind.

I lie to myself. I believe in my tricks. I have words and the games they play – twisting phrases, juxtaposed nouns and misplaced verbs, awkward metaphors, similes – purposely forgotten punctuation, periods slit into commas, invented chaos – internal rhyme and dialogue.

I break the sentence to make it more fluid, starve it and then, over fill it with images, adjectives. The illusion of texture, of substance. It is empty and then, full, the meaning lost, invented, left behind the curtains, under the bed, the blouse of a character, a tree – I didn’t know where else to hide it.

The effort is disguised. The intent. The theory. The panic.

I paid rent in graduate school peddling my poems on the street to strangers. I had a sign. I sold words. Which is a strange thing to sell – what’s already there, caught in streams and bodies of human movement against the brick walkways and crafted store facades. This constant art of mimic. I am trying to paint with words. I am trying to describe what is already there, to give it perspective, to grant it possibility, rebirth, integration. I infused the air with the obvious. My attempts to describe what was in language. Pointless, meaningless. But it is easier to listen than to see. Meaning hides, escapes, fleets and ends up being places that it shouldn’t. Just like my books. Lost somewhere into the screen. Fractured between word documents and notebook pages. There are some reduced to scaps, stapled and kept hidden in a box (I’ve forgotten where) something precious but something worth forgetting.

I am terrified of strangers and their words. I prefer to listen.

She plays, sweats, plays. The sound creates itself within her effort, painful and then, effortless. Embodied. She is a dark sound, shrill and deep, diving into the crease of her chest before escaping across her stomach, back, and shoulders. Her hands struggle to hold, juggle, orchestrate.

I imagine writing as a frenzy, a kind of layering – kaleidoscopic. Words that aren’t words but possessed light. The kind caught between her hands. Reflections of color bend into sound.

I am possessed. Listening – a kind of dreaming – caught within dialogues, invented and fleeting. The image of her caught and tangled. Distorted and slipping deeper between the varying folds of concrete and sky cloasing in.

The page folds. I imagine falling. THe fall. I crave her chaos. A study. Impossibly dense. The sensation of drowning. The words, like notes, dangling, swinging. Submerged mesaures and currents. THe notes building within the sound they imagined. Black against the white. Senseless arcs and spines. Borders. The rise and fall.

The effort is effortless. Natural. Within the . The chorus breaks, traverses its borders. Boundless.

The words repeat, rearrange. Reimagine. In patterns. Beats. Her hands move with mine. Engaged. Caught int he sound in the tree climbing against the waves filling the frame.

It is not art. It is survival. We have more in common than we believe.