Back Story: A Vivid Portrait in Black and White & Promiscuous Saxophone by John C. Mannone
Sometimes the genesis of a poem is just as fascinating as the poem itself. In an essay, “Seducing your Muse,” I suggest creative outlets might be the stimulus to creativity. If that proverbial “writer’s block” occurs, then a respite in another creative art will often recharge the creative mind. Therefore, it should not be surprising to find literary works stimulated by visual arts. The surprise might be that abstract art might be a better stimulus than concrete art. The mind desperately tries to “make sense of it.” I think this is how “A Vivid Portrait in Black and White” originated.
As a Chattanooga Writers Guild member, I attend a monthly poetry workshop at the founding member’s home. The artistic atmosphere of paintings and sculptures in a spacious home is visually stimulating. A Rothko painting (No. 61) hangs on her wall—layers of purples, blues and grays striate the “canvas,” with the texture paint plainly visible in the large reproduction. Its “simplicity” is intriguing. The geometry and texture of paint made me think of planks of wood and other shapes. I could almost make out ships, or people in them. The blue hints at sky and sea, the purple at something painful, like sacrifice. But the violets also appear in a natural twilight. There is something about twilight that is inescapably symbolic about transitions: day into night, life into death. All of this worked in my subconscious giving me a collage of glimpses linked by associations: ship’s planks, sorrow, life and death, color…people of color, black & white, slave ships. I remembered reading about the Henrietta Marie, which went down in a Florida storm, with all hands onboard. Though the slaves were sold in Haiti before the fateful storm, I imagined other situations when a slave ship might have gone down in a storm, the shackled human beings drowning with the crew. I am haunted by images like that.
I quickly jotted down initial images, but it would take another year to fashion the poem you now see. I wanted imagistic movements with smooth transitions. That required rhythms and fluid language. To preserve starkness without a disturbing staccato effect, I used internal consonance to achieve a consonantal rhyme of sorts often found in elegiac poems. I used this together with the roll-off pitch of words. It’s like having B-flat rhythms in the minor keys that Blues musicians use. The sad or melancholy effects are handled by language, not just the images of words.
“Promiscuous Saxophone” on the other hand, arose rather quickly to a finished product in a few revisions. It’s funny how that happens. It’s rare, but true. At a monthly Barnes & Noble open mic, we were tasked to write a poem inspired by a ten-item list. It's amazing what strange things come out of such prompts. Word association is a great prompt (see the essay linked above) that has led to dozens of published poems since I began writing poetry seriously in May 2004. There is something creative about trying to use words in ways we don’t normally do.
Here is the list: voice, aim, scrub, annoy, course, thrust, color, patient, an exotic fruit, a type of musical instrument, and embouchure (an optional word). This last word, provided by a trombone player/slam poet in the crowd, intrigued me. It has texture and I decided to use it. According to Microsoft Word’s Encarta dictionary, embouchure could be (1) the mouth of a river, (2) the mouth of a valley where it becomes a plain, (3) the adjustment of the lips and tongue in playing a wind instrument, or (4) the mouthpiece of a wind instrument.
The musical instrument category would surely facilitate that word. But why didn’t I use trombone? The word is not as musical to my ear as saxophone. And I was thinking of saxophone because of another venue near Chattanooga — a coffee house called Pasha’s in St. Elmo — where the jazz beats of “The Undoctored Originals” (a group of musicians, each just happens to have a Ph.D.) accompany poetic voices. There’s something sexy about a saxophone, maybe from it’s a linguistically subliminal effect or the melancholy atmosphere it can produce — loneliness inviting comfort. This is the genesis of the poem, but context was still missing.
Why not love? It’s generally good advice is to stay away from writing about it unless one can do it with freshness and avoid the usual catharsis and sentimentality. Someone once said to me, “kiss me with poetry.” I recalled that, flexed it to “kiss me with music,” and used a variation of that beautiful line here. So yes, I wrote a love poem and let the sensuality of language enhance the images.
John C. Mannone is a physicist who claims his right-brain came out of comatose in 2004 as he discovered the poetry of words as well as that of equations. In fact, life is poetry. He is passionate about all of it. He lives in beautiful east Tennessee. He is widely published in both literary and speculative fiction journals (and is the poetry editor of Silver Blade). Recent work appears in Conclave: A Journal of Character, Magnapoets, Numinous: Spiritual Poetry, and Hinchas de Poesia. Read “A Vivid Portrait in Black and White” and “Promiscuous Saxophone” in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on creativity. Always interested to learn how others go from idea to finished work.
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You are most welcome, Angie. I enjoyed doing it.
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I have never studied my modes of writing nor which expressions were better, when; but I find that in reflection much of my impetus in writing seems similar to yours except that I have a strong compulsion to write the history of my family accurately, so spend a great deal of time researching that era. Then for fun I have the same compulsion to write of sex, romance and suspense to shake out the fingers and brains cells....so to speak.
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