All that Jazz

ALL THAT JAZZ!

Remember this URL?

http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/JammingBalladGreenSky.htm


I wrapped up my original post on "Jamming with "Ballad of the Green
Sky" after John (Frost) picked up on line-stacking and the idea that
lines
don't exist until we make them by playing line-breaks, and stack them.
The whole tune's a string (line sounds awful rigid), weaving, wobbly,
and it's discrete, not continuous unless you play for blur.... So, you
make segments by playing line-breaks. Line breaks have to do with
everything, things you call form and sense, image and sound, the works.
Your instrument, sometimes horn, sometimes keyboard, is language....
Anyway, John unwound a line, played a couple line-breaks,
s, a
notation I borrow from html, and didn't play an extra one that's in his
middle segment that some day I'll talk about, about how Shakespeare gets
a couple characters talking inside a single five beat iambic line, which
brings up a useful "rule",

conceptualize rather than calculate your line-breaks,

...but for now, John set out a haiku

two frogs sit and sing
to stars on the plant the dark
green sky of tadpoles

I brought in some "imaginary playmates", just like I brought in the Old
Formalist, when I was poking around inside a haiku of Kits' a long time
ago (first time). Clari, Trump, and Saxo, oh, and a guy without a name
polishing glasses at the bar in the empty club. And they blew a lot of
riffs. After one of Clari's, Trump says, "Okay, you got in the last
gig." and Clari, says, "No, man, it was all of us and John, too,
remember, he blew one just before we got here. So, here's all of us,

I hear fourteen frogs
squatting and singing up dark
green sky filling ears

...which counts two frogs from each riff, including John's original
tune. Clari, clear sound, really clean finger work on the keys. Almost
like the second
ain't there, and it's the big one to get what
everybody thinks of as the big juxta...pos...ition. Does it with
stresses. Y'see, up, dark, green, sky and fill are all stressed. So, if
you're a listening reader, and a good one even subvocalizes when
reading uietly in the library, you can't get "dark green", with either
emphasis. You can't get it at all. You just can't get it. Read those
monosyllabic words and you've got to break between dark and green.
To ave "dark green", you've got to stress one or the other, select the
shade OR select the color, you're making comparisons underneath. You've
got to know that much about what you're doing when you write language.
So, it's "singing up dark" AND "green sky filling ears". So, you've got
to play the poem.

ANYWAY, I'M WRITING THIS POST
BECAUSE OF WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.

John came back, and it's a new gig. And it's a wild riff. He's playing
those
s, AND the other white-space, or white-noise, punctuation....

lily pad
sky
tadpoles swimming

in the dark
lily pad
platform
frogs croaking
knee deep in starlight


John's playing off that left margin like the game was handball, and he's
still riffing on that original line, only he's busted lose from the
two-
"beat". And anybody who thinks playing the instrument and
knowing that's what you're doing, playing sensemes and phonemes, can't
kick you into something a reader might remember when he or she has
turned the page,

knee deep in starlight

is worth reflecting on....

And Mugsy "reflected" on it.

"knee-deep .knee-deep"
a frog song
to tadpoles
swimming in the ancient light
of star shine


...and she uses quotes to do what? in the playing, she plays
"knee-deep" as his, but repeats it, inside the quotes, inside John's
voice, his instrument, what did anybody tell you about that in grammar
class, eh? For poetry, literacy isn't sufficient. The difference between
phones (sounds) in phonetics and phonemics? The sound is a semantic
critter. It has meaning....

So, what do you think, after

knee deep in starlight

you get

swimming in the ancient light
of star shine

...and it ain't over, folks, because about the same time Ana (I didn't
see a last name and only a cryptic email address, was writing,

one
green
frog

jumped

sky fell

star ponds

fronds

swayed

into
silver essence

moonbeams

whispered


(Hi, thanks for the welcome,
Ana)

...and the whole darned poem look-sounds like a frond, or a star fall,
and seeing and hearing are all interwoven, in

moonbeams

whispered


Well, anyway, that's it, all in one place, and the lesson in that is
that you might want to re-run any conversation here with cut and paste
and fill-in, even if you're not going to post it or back-channel to the
people involved. just like writing poems in your head and not writing
them down c'n let 'em get kind of dreamy, so can re-running a
conversation. But just making notes or cutting and filing the text c'n
become mechanical. Thing is write and cut and paste-in and push around
pieces. Hell, file it as your MOAPG (or other) "diary" and keep it in
your eDen..

And, if sometimes some of the "feedback" wasn't being an appreciative,
maybe even useful, "audience" and was "jamming", a conversation where
you play something the way the person posted it did and then you play a
passage a little differently, showing not talking about, your sketched
"suggestion" (or, better, suggesture) ...well, it might take on some of
the life we see above. Look at how the bouncing off birthed things? And
look at how all that associative wealth "in the air", "in the room",
keeps hovering, promising more...,

Gene