Connections with Beauford Delaney

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