Blue and Green Music and me

Blue and Green Music, Georgia O'Keefe

When I was as Berkeley I was lucky enough to get into a poetry writing class taught by Robert Hass. At that point, he was most famous as the translator for Czesław Miłosz, the Nobel Prize winner. Our class was turned over to Jane Hirschfield, because Hass had been named poet laureate of the United State. Since then, he's won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. Anyway, I wrote the following in response to this O'Keefe painting - one of my top 5 of hers.

Blue and Green Music

Grooming with a clever hand
the landscaped sand, interior of man
pressed in grooves subordinate
to the bladed rise

a concourse, spread like rowed stones
cracked bone, the marrow thrown
against the pale plate and
cool viridian skies

Lines of light, drawn from pain
bulbous rain, the billowy plane
a musical skein of gauzy
endless space

Inchoate strokes, the figure born
concrete shorn, the white forlorn
as colors throw abstraction
into place

a quickening form that echoes life
translucent strife, the shuddering knife
creates a moment placed
beyond the screen

from misery to mystery
it gentles me, again I see
my birth and death as music
blue and green

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I got a pretty lousy reception as I recall. I was very please with myself for inventing a new rhyming scheme as well as articulating my reaction to such a stupendous, synesthetic abstraction. My fellow students were very into first person, emotive, confessional poetry. They (again, understandably) recoiled at phrases like "interior of man."

Years later I had an acquaintance who was a very gifted poet who wanted to see the picture along with the poem. Here you go Julia.

I quit writing poetry after that class - the last semester of college. By the time I graduated I had worked so hard that I was completely burnt out. Hass told us in one class that most poets have finished their best work in their early 30's (though he is disproving that point himself, isn't he). Given all the other things to do in life I don't know if I'll ever get back to it, but perhaps some day I might.