Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2016SYR16
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Poem Inspiration Location
Hips Swing in the Breeze
poster information
Description
Hips swing in the breeze
Trumpets snaring the late sun
Jazz in the City!
This poem celebrates the long-running jazz program produced every summer by CNY Jazz in neighborhoods across Syracuse. It's a time of community celebration, dancing and joy, and I wanted to capture that in this art form.
Because it's haiku, I'm also trying to connect the local to the cosmic, to amplify one and give praise to the other (for instance, in the image that compares the glistening brass trumpets to the setting summer sun).
Capturing the rhythm of jazz in a “Western 5/7/5 haiku” is a bit of a trick, so I went with a kind of syncopation, with three beats in the first short line and four in the second longer line. That's my version of the three-quarter time you might find in a jazz!
Music is one of my biggest inspirations, and with the poem's mention of Jazz, I instantly got this vibe on the colors I could use—lots of blues and purples. I knew I had to put in trumpets, and I thought I'd throw in a lot of people and movement. I knew that the front musician would be a woman with a lot of power. I was thinking of having guys in the background. And I was like, No. I started thinking of The Shirelles and The Ronettes. I looked up photos with different poses, their cool costumes, and I referenced them.
Jazz in the City is a musical event here, so I needed to bring in Syracuse. I went to a whole bunch of places downtown, looking for buildings that people would recognize. I was first thinking of the Niagara Mohawk building, but then I went to Clinton Square and saw a bunch of buildings, and I thought they might be better. It was a lot of fun.