Imaginative Freedom

I was listening to Keith Jarret and trying to play along, at least the melody of the head. Although I cannot play like him, if I turn it off and play immediately afterward, I can imitate the rhythmic patterns.  I don't have problem finding notes to play per se.  What I notice is that what I play is very unjazzlike, square. Even though I know, at some level, what the jazz-like rhythmic patterns are, they are not what I am hearing yet as I play.

I do play what I hear in my head, but what I am playing in my head are these square patterns. If play them, they are honest at least. They reflect what I am hearing rather than being random scales.

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As I work toward imaginative freedom in my poetry, I realize that I can have that honesty: to write exactly what I hear in my head. The opposite of that freedom is to write what you think people think poetry ought to be. A good poem should be honest, in the sense of not giving a shit what someone might think, rather than trying to create an ideal self for others to admire.  I don't mean honesty in terms of literal truth, though that could come in as well. The tone can be ironic, or you could say the opposite of what you mean.  You can have a persona, but it is a persona that is honestly achieved.

It takes a certain confidence, too. I have to know I am capable of a good phrase in order to come up with a good phrase, or even a phrase that is bad in an interesting way.  There is a technical work that I've done as a poet, which is highly analytical.  For example, looking at sentences like this:

"Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded." (G. Stein)

"Je dors peu, et le peu que je dors, je le dors le jour." (S. Beckett)

There is a "syntactical imagination," just as there is a pragmatic and a phonological imagination. You have to be involved with language itself, but not in a boring way as sometimes happens. What I like is the New York school sensibility, where the technical aspects are active, but not the whole point of the poem as in mid-career Creeley. I've spent countless hours studying Ceravolo and Coolidge, and that allows me to write poems with bad enjambement.