I’ve brought back the above because one of my friends in visual poetry brought it up back-channel, inspiring the following beginning attempt at an explication (although it’s only mine, I have to emphasize, and I’m not being sarcastic):
A lot of what I do is surrealism: multiplications, for instance, that make surrealistic sense to me. The basic idea of the above is that a piano and all it represents (music, the creative process, self-expression, something to play, etc.) times a mountain and a fortress that is merged with the mountain and what it represents—power, unchangingness, seriousness, intimidation, etc., or the antithesis of what the piano represents, equals a painting of boats that represents a sea journey, but also a musical composition (theme and variation, a kind of fugue in spots–think of the boats as melodies), a game, happiness, as well as various associations with Paul Klee, from whom I stole the boats (although I’ve changed them)—also a progression from dimness into color. This journey, I contend, is similar to the brook’s journey to the spring flowers the brook’s water will nourish into being. All the journey of boats needs, surrealistically, exactly to equal the coming of spring, is the remainder, which is the word “mystery” made mysterious and added to by other words and elements—a magic word, you might say. I feel I’m ignoring scientific logic for emotional logic. Can’t help it, is my only defense. But I hope an engagent will find my dividend to be a pleasant short poem, and the graphic a pleasant picture—at least in its final larger size—and touched up.
A thought: what if someone played a mountain fortress on a piano, and the music that resulted came out as pictures? What would they look like? The whole idea is absurd, but . . .
Meanwhile, today I broke free of my egocentricity to come up with the Truly Brilliant, However Simple, Idea that I can use my new gallery (in my dentist’s waiting room) for exhibitions of works other than my own! That way I could work up from the classics of visual poetry almost anyone would like to what I and my most advanced friends are doing in the field. Basically, I have three walls. What I think I may do is devote one to classics like Cummings’s falling leaf poem; the second to my earliest, most accessible visual poems, and the third to my “Odysseus Suite,” if I can get it to satisfy me, something I’m still working on but making progress, I think–and two other recent ones. The one above and my “Seaside Mathemaku,” which several people have liked.
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