I recently asked questions to several of my fellows who both write and play music. I asked them to relate how words, music and visual art interact in their creative processes, and I asked them what recent experiences have most recently stoked the desire inside them to flare out into art. Finally, I asked them to share some lines.
Here are the answers from TOM ORANGE - wild musician and poet.
"Music has been central to me for most of my life. Words came later, and
visual art later still. And most often I've experienced the mutual
reinforcement of these interests through friends and colleagues in
my/our various creative endeavors. For example, when I started writing
poetry seriously, not only were most of my poet friends big music fans
like me, but it seemed they knew a lot more about visual art than I did,
so I felt I had some catching up to do in this area.
Specific
interactions within creative processes themselves are a little trickier
to pin down. I've never been that interested in, say, writing a poem
about or inspired by a painting. A lot of my poetry, though, uses other
writing as a starting point. I've never been terribly good at 'inspiration' to fill a blank page with language 'inside' me. I can't
quite explain it, but some poems and poets, when I encounter them,
trigger in me an immediate need to pick up pen and paper and literally
start using their words in my own way: I start with their words and
rearrange them, modify them and add to them in a kind of improvisation.
If the process sustains itself long enough, I can end up with a
chapbook's worth of poems.
For a while in my writing I was
trying to do the kinds of things I was hearing in the music I was
discovering and obsessing about at the time. But since giving up writing
and focusing most of my creative energies on music, I've found I can
now do some of the things I was hearing in the music myself. So language
now seems very oblique, indirect and mediated. And more than a little
beside the point.
I should also add that I've never been that
interested in realistic representations of the world through art: I want
art that makes new worlds and new things that we've never experienced
before. Clark Coolidge, the poet I wrote my dissertation about, says it
best: 'I want everything to come together. / And then I want it to all
go away, / leaving behind one thing that was never / in the pile to
begin with. / The world is not enough. I want something / else to
appear.'
I am continually inspired and quite frequently
blown away by the creative talents of my friends in the local
experimental music scene here. When I was more active in poetry, I'd go
to readings occasionally that were so good I felt I could throw away my
pens and paper, quit writing poetry and be completely fine with it
knowing that someone else was doing work that good. Likewise with the
music scene today. As I often tell folks, I know I've seen a good set
when what I'm hearing and seeing makes me want to start, like, five new
bands, or otherwise gives me ideas for stuff I can try myself. And then
there are also those occasional shows that, again, make me think I
should just sell my gear and live happily knowing that such music exists
courtesy of someone else!
Here's an excerpt from a 21-part serial poem, written through the kind of process described above:
http://dusie.org/orange.html
