The subtext of the poetry section at the
2005 SD Festival of the Book was connections. I typically am interested and write about the disconnection between humans and the deeper universe but it was an engaging topic.
Quincy Troupe returned again this year and in my research over the past few days I became aware of the connections between him and Beauford Delaney via James Baldwin and Paris. (Quincy did the last interview of Baldwin before he died in Paris).
When I went to the
Minneapolis Institute of the Arts special exhibit of Delaney's painting I was captivated by how his work connected me with the works of the Impressionists that I admire. I wrote a cinquain-T about his 1952 Washington Square painting last June called
Thunder Storm Jazz Scene.
Now the story continues with a poem that came out of my latest experiments with synthetic voices and listening to the muse machine:
Why Beauford Delaney didn’t need Ginsberg and Proust
http://www.philamuseum.org/information/pr/pressroom/imageBanks/Deaney/delaney.shtml
Every place eye go literary historians in the know say read them
But we don’t want to hear them
But we don’t want to hear them
They will only tell me what eye already know
You can’t go sing in Washington Square anymore
What good will it do after Wikipedia has been there
They will only tell me what eye already know
Besides poets don’t get paid to explore abstractions
So I ride my bicycle with my dog on a prairie
Where all the lost souls wander
Searching for their grass root beginnings
Where the buffalo roamed and Sitting Bull lies incognito
Where all the lost souls wander
It ain’t out there but the emptiness
Pulls down your pants, trips you up, knocks everyone to the ground
It ain’t out there but the emptiness
Gives them a head ache they cannot shake
Aspirin and dreaming only seems like the freedom
That’s copied down in our DNA code
Gives them a head ache they cannot shake
Turning our world into something we never wanted
Where the buffalo roamed and Sitting Bull lies incognito
Where all the lost souls wander
Geometric madness measured out with color in crazy quilt patterns
Tracing labyrinth maps of destiny to guide our feet
Sublimate our hearts and move the pen as the master demands
Where the buffalo roamed and Sitting Bull lies incognito
Where all the lost souls wander
They will only tell me what eye already know
You can’t go sing in Washington Square anymore
And we are left to wonder what it was he told
James Baldwin about life in Paris
That eye already knew from long ago but wasn’t there to share