Jazz: Music, Dancing and Poetry: Improvisation

RonPrice

This morning I was listening to an ABC Radio National analysis of jazz music. There was much discussion of improvisation as a technique, a style and a method in the production of this twentieth century hybrid music. I mused: “There has also been a strong element of improvision in my poetry.” I write in what has come to be called free verse, a poetry in which (i) utterance is only an intermittent emergence from speech and (ii) complexity is derived from both multiplicity of tone and meaning. Free verse also is dervided from poetic prose and the very idiosyncractic approach to writing poetry which emphasizes the poem as an emotional or psychological event for both writer and reader.

Improvisation, with its freedom and spontaneity, its openness to feeling and its receptivity to passing thought, surprisingly possesses a structure. It is a structure that is derived from the very nature of writing itself, writing which has and does generate civilization and history. Improvisation in poetry is the result of signs which exist by virtue of their difference from the writer; they help to determine the identity of the writer, the poet. Signs are fluid, changing, creative entities which function to determine the structure, the very ‘reality’ of the poem. These signs, these words, these often seemingly improvised pieces of language are, in fact, at the centre of the poem and its meaning.

Taken in overview, my poetry relies significantly on improvision, on asystematic thought, on a highly personal introspection and inherent psychology. Sometimes the mind that introspects is calm and passive; sometimes there is an acute tension, confusion and anxiety as I wrestle with the profound enigmas of life and my experience. My poetry requires my readers, should they persist in following the mass of material I have written, to abandon convention and wrestle with their own minds. -Ron Price with thanks to Roger Fowler, editor, A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, Routledge and Kegan Paul, NY, 1987, p. 102; and Steven Kreis, Lectures on Twentieth Century Europe, Lecture 2, 1999:stevek@pagesz.net

I improvise and I play.
For playing is at the heart
of the process of writing
these little mixes of words
which I call poems and which
allow me to dance with the thousand
steps I have moved around in my head
at least as far back as September 1962
when I sat in matriculation class in Dundas
and tried to grasp, then repeat and eventually
write about: the most complex ideas
in the Western intellectual tradition.
It was an exhausting year
and I was only eighteen.

Ron Price
8 July 2000