A Poem or a Song

First, my apologies for taking almost 6 months to produce another post.
Was VERY busy with my Track & Field blog, this having been an Olympic year.
But still, not a good excuse!
My intentions for this blog was for a much more frequent output.
Then again, it's quality over quantity--eh?

Writers have 2 methods--planned and spontaneous.
In one, you form a plot, give life to characters, draw outlines, keep Thesaurus & Dictionary at hand.
In the other, you apply pen to paper, or fingers to typewriter keys, and let words and symbols fall where they may--to be edited & revised later.

But that speaks to a finished product that--eventually---will look (and even feel) the same at its conclusion.
You will have a book---or a poem--or a short story--or a play--or a song.
It will be--in the end---what you intended it to be.

But what of those "works of art" that BEGIN as a poem, but END as the first in a series of 7 novels?
If you're an artist--a painter--how often does your drawing, your sketch, turn into a brilliant painting hanging on a museum wall?

A lifelong Bob Dylan fan, I've always agreed with those who call him Rock's Bard, its Minstrel Poet.
You have the music, of course, which is often brilliant by itself.
But Dylan's grand legacy will be his WORDS, not his songs.

Take "Visions of Johanna"--which happens to be my favorite Dylan lyric!
I've often described it as an Edward Hopper painting brought to life.
Or as Van Gogh's "The Night Cafe".
Maybe even linked to that mysterious woman named "Mona Lisa".

Dylan's in the meat-bone of New York City, in some "loft" where "the heat pipes just cough", and though "country music plays soft", there's really "nothing to turn off".

Except "Visions of Johanna", a woman in the writer's life who has an intense hold on his tired wracked brain and his lonesome eyes and wounded heart.

Who is "Johanna", a woman who even though "Louise is alright, she's just near", and she's "delicate & seems like the mirror", but who "makes it all too concise and too clear" that Johanna----that woman Dylan loves--isn't there!

Yet, in Dylan's "Vision" he sees "the ghost of 'lectricity" that "howls in the bones of (Louise's) face"---but allows that aching for Johanna to be traded off for this psychedelic visage of Louise--who instead is "entwined with her lover"  in the rapturous movements of love---with the music of "harmonicas" & "skeleton keys" & "the rain" as background.

No wonder Mona Lisa had the "highway blues"!
Who wouldn't?

I digressed.
But what were Dylan's words intended to be?
A song?
A poem?
Journal ramblings of a stoned wanderer?

Same applies to this post.
It began as a piece looking at how one's INTENDED format isn't always the END product!
Though my love of Dylan is passionate, I truly did NOT intend to make his best song the core focus of this post.

That happens with characters in novels too.
In my "novel" about an important (life-changing!) relationship I had with an artist in the late '70's (title of "Identity"), one of the characters was Kate Caplan (Shute), who was estranged from her husband, Mark Shute.
Mark was INTENDED to be an almost invisible minor character, an "extra" in a movie.

Yet midway through, my heroine, "Sally", is at her cabin near Lake Tahoe, alone with her 12 year old son, Charles.
Mark suddenly enters, begins an attempted rape of Sally--only to be stopped in time by young Charles, who scares Mark out the door!

This scene was NOT planned!
I had no idea Mark Shute would do what he did---or that Sally's son would save her!
Or that the entire direction and structure of my novel would be forever changed---making its 2nd half a whole different "vision".

Talk to a thousand authors, and they'll tell you the same story--names changed.

It's nice to do a piece that starts and finishes in basically the same place.
A poem stays a poem--a play is never a short story--a haiku doesn't transmogrify to Whitman's "Song of Myself"!!

But as "traders in the arts", we all know (and try to accept) the volatility of the ingredients and tools we use.
We need to be ready to see three words become a 300,000 word novel.
We must know that characters are more than words on paper--that they are blood, sweat, and tears.

My vision?
I'd love to see Hopper, Van Gogh, and Dylan sitting in that "Night Cafe", or in Hopper's 3 a.m. diner---or in Dylan's "loft"---talking about their visions.

And Madonna?
Well, like all women to a lonesome man's eyes, she "still has not showed".