Process:

Creativity is all about an independent style — yet the creative mind can be influenced in many ways — in painting it may be museums, magazines, books or the internet, whether it be technique or inspiration and in writing everything one reads somehow makes its way into ones use of language. No one is free of influence though a true work of art is completely fresh and untethered. 

In straightening a bookshelf today I found over a dozen neatly organized journals dating back at least twenty years—most of which had only five or six pages filled with notes and quotes and snippets of language and art thoughts to be use in later writings and paintings.

In one notebook dated 12/23/13 I copied a section from a New Yorker article written by Adam Gopnick entitled “Two Bands” Duke and the Beatles. In it he talks about the mystery of modern creativity. “There are artists whose genius lies in exploiting other peoples’ talent and we can recognize the exploitation as genius.”  It goes on to say that “originality comes in two kinds: originality of ideas and originality of labor, and although it is the first kind that we get agitated about, we should honor the second kind still more.”

There is “WIT” made by the head and spun out into life; and “work” created mostly by fingers engaging with tools as various as tenor saxes and computer keyboards,

e.g. Johnny Hodges chord changes played over and over (until a creative perfection) another “happy accident produced by hard labor.”

In another notebook from 2006 I found some scribblings. With the exception of few lines I didn’t remember writing any of it—the few lines I recognized made me realize it was mine and not something I was transcribing.

Blue

Jazz storm of blues

refraction under the ice blue —

smoke curls in a rockin’ bar room

vein blue eyelid tributaries of light

hard blue swallow blue acting out above

smell of clean calm

blue cough of a buss starting up

Penguins breath blue

blue knuckled nuns

steel blue rage as rigid

as steel blue wisdom

our lady of blue intentions

blue prism of sky/lake

the blue memory of the fossil

false blue of the bird wing, hydrangea, wet stone.

Changes (maybe) or simply an exercise to be pitched later.

Blue Inventions 

Hole-in-the-wall  

smoke storm 

in a jazz club

eye veined blue as

tributaries in an ice cube

down the alley two  

blue knuckled women

rage as rigid as 

steely religion

parallel intention

at the corner the cough of 

bus so blue   so distant 

from a bird’s breath

on the waterfront 

gray-blue s-wing and s-way

                        

interactive swallows 

swapping sky lanes

over the smell 

of upturned fish  

death’s blue calm

            

a shiver of blue everywhere: 

 bird wing, sky waves, 

alley, moonstone.