The Art of Reinventing Your Art
An artist not busy changing, is a busy dying. Some sonnets.
It’s been over 45 years that I’ve been living, doing, being my art. Writing, burping out poems, thinking the world into being.
There is a lot to say about “what is art” and what being an artist is. Today, I’d just like to discuss one aspect of all this - that artists must constantly be swimming in new waters. At least what we might propose as “great art”.
Too many musicians, painters, poets, musicians, writers, dancers, in a word “artists” - find one genre, one “thing” that works and they dive into it and remain there their whole lives. You might say, “What’s wrong with that?”. Well, to me, it doesn’t jive with what we should call creativity - a pursuit of the new.
You see, an artist is a transformer man/woman. They take experience and shape-shift it into a new thing. Translate it so others might too experience it, even in a more heightened fashion. Art is also about learning. An artist just isn’t magically born and created, as we so mythically, and wrongly think. No, it takes work and part of that work is mastering other forms, shapes, conditions within one’s art.
Picasso of course, is the archetypical gigantipithicus of this kind of artist. Especially so during the first 3 decades and his formative period. He didn’t just paint. He sculpted. He experimented with printmaking, etching, woodcut, aquatint, and lithography. He even danced. And then later in his career so many other forms of art beyond cubism/abstract art. He wasn’t a Jackson Pollock. He had periods of experimentation,and emphasis. He was moody. His art shifted with his moods, that is what is important about great art.
Of course, the same thing with Bob Dylan. Folk, rock, blues, spoken word, gospel, poetry, country …
Myself, I’m just a nobody poet. But I’ve been committed to my art and what it takes to “get there”, put character and juice in your voice. Beyond just reading, reading, reading … I’ve gone through extensive periods of experimentation, trying to master the forms, the shapes of my craft. One example is in the 90s when I wrote reams of sonnets. It’s the classic form of poetry and one all poets need to take a wack at.
So here are a few of those ancient pieces. Nothing to compare with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 but nonetheless, something I had to pass through, master, so that I could come out the other side and be stronger as an artist.
A Watchmaker Tells The Time
Let me tell you what I know of time
It’s ridges and too constant flows.
I have seen its face hidden in rhyme
As I’ve worked in precision, so slow.
Time’s a jester, what tricks she plays!
Tomorrow, todays, its potent tick-tocks;
Beginnings, ends, seconds, even days
The stones across our river it walks.
Spring and green, the birds, song distractions too
Look away! Look away! And so it goes and goes.
Until death, its long-legged companion grabs you
And your glass is broken, as the cock it crows.
All this is true, cuneiformed I know, I’m godly kissed
Time is but our weak need to know, we exist.
Love
What is it that I love in you,
that feeds desire and fills up belief,
that sits behind your eyes so sharp, so true
and lends me these full feelings of a thief?
I look at you and can’t find a why
nor even a what, my reason’s gone to sea.
You like the weather rule my sky
and paint it such colors so carefree!
But yet you let night fall, distance grows
questions bloom and my head a top spins
until it surrenders to its weight and slows
and then quietly just sits beyond its sins
bleeding all colors in search of you a what to know,
to say I loved and from this slavery have something to show.
Sonnet 1
Us poets need come again and again.
Stick brooms in hand we sweep
the dirt that gathers when
we live a dream as we sleep.
A rogue wave on a calm sea
we say the same thing, time and time again;
stand before us fearless and be free
if not, away with you who’d dare pretend!
The clock ticks and we dance its demands.
Round and round, we embrace and go
little sparks obeying life’s light commands
until the music stops and we know
our story is over and never will be told.
Only for us poets in rage to compress it all to gold.
I am unreconciled with life
There is only one truth, firm for it will be
And not all that lies before our impassive eyes
Shall drag it through mud into only possibility
Nor deny her bottomed, hip-based authentic cries.
What is it that turns this world if not pain?
And from where does this life and light burst?
It spills pushed by the power of all that does wain.
That all that is, will be a was - even beauty so cursed.
I look at an old woman’s thighs, bellicose and flaccid
And remember their strong days of push and passion.
I count the hands that climbed them so timid;
I cry this truth, this pain, like only a mad man could
We will all be not, like a butterfly crushed slowly underfoot.
Life
Ah, life! She is but a tight ass!
And I a rider sprawled across her back,
As she leads me up towards the pass
Where high I can see all that I lack.
And she is stubborn too - what can you do?
You push ‘n pull, hit ‘n stroke
Asking, no pleading, for her to quicken to the view
But nothing alters the step - removes the yolk.
On and on and on, you go - where exactly, you don’t know
Shifting this way and that, as she holds your load;
Your stomach is a knot, ready to blow.
But life indifferent brays - “You reaped what you sowed.”
Until finally - the sky opens, your ass tosses you off
And wasted on your back, ridden, you can no more scoff.