At the Improv

"Improvisation is haphazard." -Leo Ornstein

'Jazz Improvisation' by Vahram

Indeed, it is.

Today's theme is improvisation.  You know - like extemporaneous speech, making it up as you go, etc.  Haphazard, but fun.

Writer's Island posted the word 'improvise' as today's prompt, and that was my improvisational jumping off point, so to speak.  SiS/Few Miles posted a wonderful picture prompt, which continues the theme here, and finally, Poetry Tow Truck posted a really cool 'beginning and end' prompt in which writers were asked to choose a poem, take the first two lines, list the first line vertically (word by word) on the left margin and then the second line vertically to parallel the first on the right margin - and then write a poem using the two words in each column as the first and last words in each line of a new poem.  (You'll see what I mean shortly.)

Interestingly enough, because of the nature of that last prompt, I did not write in poetic form of any sort for the last poem, but rather, it's a free verse kind of poem (gasp!) since I was (yep, you got it!) improvising.

Improvise

"Don’t play what’s there; play what’s not there." ~Miles Davis

Create on the fly,

banish your inner critic

and see what happens.

###

I leapt in the air

improvising flight, like birds

in a sunrise song.

###

Improvisation 10 by Wassily Kandinsky

Improvision

You think, I don’t really know my lines. Not well enough, anyway.  A

'watch time' guard is glaring at you. You feel a bit ghostly

yourself, but you figure

I will just improvise and carry on.

Watch the crowd.  Their reaction is what counts. The…

the…the crowd seems to like you!  It’s an applause garden!

Watcher-dude is also clapping.  Emotion reverberates off each wall,

too.

Take a bow.

###

Where the third poem came from:

By the Round Pond by Wendy Cope, from her book If I Don’t Know

                                         

You watch yourself.  You watch the watcher too –

A ghostly figure on the garden wall.

You	a
watch	ghostly
yourself	figure
you	on
watch	the
the	garden
watcher	wall
too