A Big Pile Of Junk

22 Jan 2019 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in 2019, the processes II, Uncategorized, vaguely about music II Tags:

Wrote this immediately after seeing a documentary on the inscrutable, charismatic jazz pianist Lennie Tristano. It took less than an hour – (the poem not the documentary). I MUST have been inspired!
Arlene

A Big Pile of Junk 🎼🎹🎷🎸etc.

Tristano said, let thought come through
Your all ten fingers;
(Or whatever number you must use
To play the blues
Or any tune).
How high The Moon or Gershwin’s Soon…
Your thought a boon
If it’s spontaneous, impromptu.
Corwin says the same thing too.

Not filled with an emotive ardor
But the charter of the instinct
And the intuition.
Be as one.
Let musicianship
Take lead, and lead your music
To your still unripe;
No comic gimmick or alchemic hype.
Your hippest self will be your type,
Reveal all your inner hope and razzmatazz.
We’ll call it jazz
Because
That is what a true jazz is.

Tristano
Called his own piano
Nothing but ‘a pile of junk’
To be transformed by Monk
Or anyone whose inmost mind
Uses the utmost energy to find
That inner passion,
Do what’s bidden, always hidden
In the inner sanctum of the shrine
We’ll call your talent.

A Big Pile Of Junk 1.22.2019 Vaguely About Music II; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Innate Wisdom

19 Jan 2019 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in 2019, Didactic II, the processes II, Uncategorized Tags:

Reflecting again and taking note. Kisses, Arlene 👩‍🎤

INNATE WISDOM ✍️🧘‍♀️🎯

There is a wisdom deep inside.

Like temperament and readiness.

Not available to everybody at the same time in their lives.

But, BUT, it’s there to come to light,

To see, to use.

Even though you cannot choose.

To those who are receptive

I address this, even to myself. Who knows

Where, who and when)

And so I write,

Not always sure what’s right,

But sure of this:

There is a a wise one deep inside.

It’s just to ride the storms

And go along with happenstance,

Peaceful, with acceptance.

And if necessary, playful pretence.

Wait and watch and see.

Patience is a key.

Innate Wisdom 1.19.2019 Definitely Didactic II; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Home Truths

17 Jan 2019 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in 2019, Pure Nakedness II, the processes II, Uncategorized Tags:

Home Truths 🏡
(Looking back at 1998’s ideas when I was still typing on a typewriter. Bringing it up to date with more than a few new changes.)

For the man with eyes,
The universe lies
In the stories I tell
Syphoned through typewriter’s ribbon:

The rhymes that spelled childhood,
Neighborhood, Brooklyn food,
Politic, mystic, the very prosaic,
Energy, laziness,
Clarity, haziness,
Hurt words and hope words;
(ambrosias which fueled fates,
Reversed gates of youth’s mistakes,
Going to heart’s every beat, every daybreak).

Home truths are die-cast
To what was unspoken, shy, personal,
Weakness, reversal,
Love with, without a libido,
God with, without binding credo.

Home truths for one with eyes,
Writ on the limited paper size
A4. What prize
Can outstrip a reward
Such as that?

Home Truths rewritten 1.14.2019 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Pure Nakedness II: Arlene Nover Corwin

No People, No Things

17 Jan 2019 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in 2019, Didactic II, the processes II, to the child mystic II, Uncategorized Tags:

There is part of a system of thought that says every time you dwell on the thought of people or things you lose sight of your self. It makes sense because thought, its being an ephemeral, comes in and goes on to another at the speed of lightening. Where is the you in that moment? A you that is essential, the you you want to find out about, go into at will and stay for longer than that lightening.

The habit of thinking about people and things disallows that, discourages that, waters down the ability. Result? One is spending hours of the day reaching out to an illusion, a passing evaluation, an ever changing object. Time wasted.

No People, No Things

A guarantee and rule of thumb
To the confused, depressed and numb:
Watch your thought and cancel out
The onslaught of intruding thought,
The babbling bout
That canters around things and people!
People, things: treacle-binding
Lust to rust –
First to last,
A dust to dust.
The biggest drug of all!

On the streets
Thought longs for treats,
Its base in things and people;
Gossip, impulse, points of view.
Where is the you?

Make a space encircling thought:
Fill it with an inner breath,
Take this knack for what its worth –
A hint to catch a glint
Of heaven’s state on earth:
See what goes on in your head: inside instead.

No People, No Things 2.11.1997/the whole renewed1.17.2019 To The Child Mystic II; Definitely Didactic; Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

You Can’t Beat A Book (best draft)

19 Dec 2018 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in 2018, the processes II, Uncategorized Tags:

You Can’t Beat A Book✍️📚📖📕📗📘📙

All kinds of new and fangled means –
The latest bangle; trendy,
Industry’s technology
Will never meet the human need to touch and fondle.

Who can touch a digit?
You can fidget with devices,
Till the cows come home.
Nothing can replace a tome.

What woman in a bookclub
Would prefer to dub
An ebook as the next weeks title?
Scrolls and parchment are immortal,
Reproducible for centuries.
Digit language zero/one can only chortle
As each zero/one ceases to be
In cyberspace vacuity.

Throughout all time
Books have been memorised,
Their novelists immortalised.
Would you feel wise, have won a prize
By memorising words you’ve seen
On screens backed by machines
You can’t depend on?
I am sure you’d rather
Smell the leather
Etched by some expert engraver
With a genius and a love for covers.

You cannot beat a book
For reading, touching, smell and look
With not a cell that needs rebooting.
It is in man’s genetic cast
To hit upon ideas; the race is curious.
But progress is a crook that hooks,
Invites yet blights for just that reason:
Both a blessing and a prison.

Books have content, naturally.
Bad, good, middling for they
Represent the sweep of thought
In all its magnanimity,
Eventual polarity.
I write about the book as object,
And maintain you cannot beat
A book for ‘tweeting’
And completing thought as art.
You Can’t Beat A Book 11.28.2018 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

You Ca’t Beat A Book

19 Dec 2018 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in 2018, the processes II, Uncategorized Tags:

You Can’t Beat A Book✍️📚📖📕📗📘📙
All kinds of new and fangled means –
The latest bangle; trendy,
Industry’s technology
Will never meet
The human need to touch and fondle.
Who can touch a digit?
You can fidget with devices,
Till the cows come home.
Nothing can replace a tome.
What woman in a bookclub
Would prefer to dub
An ebook as the next weeks title?
Scrolls and parchment are immortal,
Reproducible for centuries.
Digit language zero/one can only chortle
As each zero/one ceases to be
In cyberspace vacuity.
Throughout all time
Books have been memorised,
Their novelists immortalised.
Would you feel wise, have won a prize
By memorising words you’ve seen
On screens backed by machines
You can’t depend on?
I am sure you’d rather
Smell the leather
Etched by some expert engraver
With a genius and a love for covers.
You cannot beat a book
For reading, touching, smell and look
With not a cell that needs rebooting.
It’s in a man’s genetic cast
To hit upon ideas; the race is curious.
But progress is a crook that hooks,
Invites yet blights for just that reason:
Both a blessing and a prison.
Books have content, naturally.
Bad, good, middling, for they
Represent the sweep of thought
In all its magnanimity,
Eventual polarity.
I write about the book as object,
And maintain you cannot beat
A book for ‘tweeting’
And completing thought as art.
You Can’t Beat A Book 11.28.2018 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Food On The Backs Of Envelopes

18 Dec 2018 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in 2018, a sense of the ridiculous II, the processes II, Uncategorized Tags:

Found On Backs of Envelopes ✍️

Talent helps, but at the end
A chain of forces gives intent
Its form whose links
Are luck and karma,
Perseverance as its armour.

Pushing doggedly against the odds:
Time’s cycles, ups and downs,
Fenced in or pushing back or at
Rejection, vanity, the blocks
Of dailyness-es, laziness-es,
Each a hindrance stealing time.
Yet talent is the ground
Fed by the virtues which turn destinies around.

I’ve had this scrap since twenty four: two thousand four,
Which means it’s been
A household tenant fourteen years,
(I date my scribblings),
Its poetic siblings coming after
Several thousand crafted rhymes.

There’s a lesson here somewhere:
Save your bits of paper
Be they toilet, pamphlet, poster, letter…
Keep each ballpoint you collect –
Guidelines you will not regret
But laud, applaud one day
When someone reads the stuff you’ve had to say
And says “Hurray”!
All from not tossing out the scrap
Or throwing crap away!
Found On Backs Of Envelopes 12.17.2018 A Sense Of The Ridiculous II; The Processes: Creativity, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Being Remembered #1&#2

15 Dec 2018 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in 2018, our times our cultureII, the processes II, Uncategorized Tags:

Being Remembered ✍️🧘‍♀️📚#1

How would you like to be remembered?
Do you leave a name unblemished?
It seems to be today’s decor
That it is fame one’s going for:
Instant fame and more, more, more.

Life affirming while you’re living:
Your ambition:
Do you listen?
Does it have humility as spark?
Candidness, the best of trademarks?
Honesty, transparency?
A structure or a stricture?
Does the structure have self-knowledge
And the willingness to say “I’m wrong”?
A part of songs you wish to sow?

Bona fide fame comes slowly.
Doesn’t last if it comes fast.
Real work lurks in its background:
Lack of vanity to say you’re ‘so-so’
And indifference to fiasco.

But the trend is chasing marathons,
Traveling to distant lands,
Building ships on sinking sands
In lands where lava sleeps
And water ever creeps
Onto small isles that tremble.
Be remembered.

Be remembered
As the good go-getter for a better
World, the ground
Of future fertile worth
Whose girth is round.

Being Remembered 10. 9.2018 Our Times, Our Culture II;

Being Remembered🧘‍♀️✍️📚 #2

I wouldn’t mind being remembered;
Wouldn’t mind having an influence.
Must it be vanity?
It doesn’t feel ike vanity,
More like a sanity,
It being more a pyre to prepare a sharing,
Maybe teach ongoing insight
With its own ongoing fire
From the knowledge that I’m small,
Don’t know it all,
A pulse and impulse from within that shouts,
Will out,
Beat quietly in word,
Wanting somehow to be heard
When I myself have died all dead.

Being Remembered 12.14.2018 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

Dignity

09 Dec 2018 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in the processes II, Uncategorized Tags:

A little off-the-wall thought perhaps, but a sincere response to today’s transience.

Dignity💎
🏆
Who thinks of dignity!
In poetry
It’s usually
Outcries of sensation, passion,
Sentiment – its -ality.
Intensity
Without the dignified nobility
Elevating inspiration’s stimulus.
One muses:
Muses on the concept of
How to express all the above
With gravitas.

One studies self, one cerebrates
(not to be mixed with celebrates).
One muses on the Muse involved,
The verse unsolved, idea too.

Muse of poetry: Erato, Calliope, Euterpe…
One asks them in.
Six of nine may stand aside,
Not yet the brides
Of poet’s art.
You never know what part they may
Portray one day
Within the art and artist.

Dignity.
One ought to coax and never scold
The young and old
With their devices of today
Which ‘get it out’ the speedy way –
To set their lightning on ‘delayed’,
Set their sights on permanence,
Put instagrams and facebooks
Into real books with real paper,
All else a modern caper –
Here today and gone tomorrow.

What you do and what you say
Should have a value in the morrow,
In its soul a dignity,
Worthy of esteem
In fortunes’s fullness of good time.

Dignity 12.8.2018 the Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin

You Can’t Beat A Book

28 Nov 2018 Leave a comment

by arlenecorwin in 2018, the processes II, Uncategorized Tags:

You Can’t Beat A Book✍️📚📖📕📗📘

📙
All kinds of new and fangled means –
The latest bangle; trendy,
Industry’s technology
Will never meet
The human need to touch and fondle.

Who can touch a digit?
You can fidget with devices,
Till the cows come home.
Nothing can replace a tome.

What woman in a bookclub
Would prefer to dub
An ebook as the next weeks title?
Scrolls and parchment are immortal,
Reproducible for centuries.
Digit language zero/one can only chortle
As each zero/one ceases to be
In cyberspace vacuity.

Throughout all time
Books have been memorised,
Their novelists immortalised.
Would you feel wise, have won a prize
By memorising words you’ve seen
On screens backed by machines
You can’t depend on?

I am sure you’d rather
Smell the leather
Etched by some expert engraver
With a genius and a love for covers.

You can’t beat a book
For reading, touching, smell and look
With not a cell that needs rebooting.
It’s in man’s genetic cast
To hit upon ideas; the race is curious.
But progress is a crook that hooks,
Invites
Yet blights
For just that reason:
Both a blessing and a prison.

Books have content, naturally.
Bad, good, middling, for they
Represent the sweep of thought
In all its magnanimity,
Eventual polarity.

I write about the book as object,
And maintain you cannot beat
A book for ‘tweeting’
And completing thought as art.

You Can’t Beat Books 11.28.2018 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin
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