Poem of the Week 7/18/2017
Arthur Russell
Improvisation
I love my guitar, but I haven’t learned
to improvise.
However you conceive
of boundaries on the other side
of which something like my facility in speech
would begin to emerge in music, on guitar,
I’m just a trained monkey.
I can muck around with volume, rhythm,
syncopate a song, but when it’s my turn
to take a solo after a chorus,
the scales that match the chord elude
me, or I need to start at the tonic
or I’ve lost the beat, which is so not me,
or I simply have nothing to say.
I stopped writing this poem
the last two days to take out my guitar. I can’t believe
I would need to write a
poem
about a problem that clogs my music.
That’s like complaining to your mom about a bully.
I took out Jobim’s Corcovado for which I have a nice arrangement.
This doesn’t sound like poetry, does it?
I figured out the keys
it moves through, worked the scales in those keys up
and down the fret board,
and found snatches of melody to dip
into when I got to those bars.
God, this is killing me; it’s so embarrassing.
My music-literate friends
would read this and say: “What an idiot!”
After two days, I had nothing but
the arrangement I’d worked out six years ago.
Then I went back to this poem.
I hate
the way it feels to hate a thing I love
because it won’t give me the thing I want from it
the most.
That last stanza
gave me no trouble.
————————————————————————-
Poem of the Week email subscription
https://zc1.maillist-manage.com/ua/optin…
Blog – http://redwheelbarrowpoets.org (234 followers)
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/RWBPoets (368 likes)
Twitter – https://twitter.com/RWBPoets (95 followers)
The Red Wheelbarrow Poets 