Improvisation and Exhaustion

Abstract

To start to respond to this provocative question, I want to take Lorna Goodison at her word. In “Keith Jarrett—Rainmaker,” a meditative lyric from her 1984 collection I Am Becoming My Mother, the Jamaican-born poet situates herself in a conflicted moment of exhaustion, her desiccated spirit “seared” by the “vengeance” of the sun. She describes her own spare, thin lines in the poem as blurry, mixing severe want with a few vestiges of promise, traces of hope for remedy or even survival, recognizing how the sun’s warmth might revitalize even as it dries and evoking a Marley-like “song of redemption” that conjures “petals of resurrection / lilies.” But what’s really needed, she asserts, is rain: “So my prayers are usually / for rain.” The poem becomes a form of prayer not, in this instance, supplicant to a withdrawn or uncertain divinity, but instead as an evocation of openness to a particular impossibility, a coincidence of the extemporal and the a-temporal in a moment of close listening. Rain answers her prayer for vitality, but as an improvised coincidence—a brief shower—of musical, or at least aural, attentions.