“Swing Landscape” – a poem by Kenneth Boyd

October 23rd, 2025

Kenneth Boyd writes poetry based on jazz paintings. “Swing Landscape” is written for a Stuart Davis painting of the same name.

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Stuart Davis’s 1938 painting, Swing Landscape

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Swing Landscape

When my stained fingers are blistering new forms
When leaning into new slurs of the old saints
When every greasy stroke reappears as a song
When abstracts are free but not without a cost
I rise and burst in the dark like a shapeshifting Nyx

Listen to the flowing tone of my landscape
Where stalking sounds cower behind my canvas
Curtain and light listens in shared silence
Though bared, my silent affair isn’t covered
In the layer of an aspiring novice—Con Alma
Not even as time flickers to the stride of my mumbling
Moaning as I dig the smooth tread of a crooner overdue

I transpose a wall into a dance floor or funeral chapel
Where my misplaced shapes are shattered riffs
Pursuing the night but resurrecting babies of the blues
Rescuing a laddered vision as it shimmies and shimmers
Absolving my rhythmic hypnosis before
Insomnia climbs faceless but not unseen

My eyes bathe in the rabble’s improvised skin
As they wail and pale, trail, bail, and flail
Sound is the liaison to my surreal swathes
Of hair snapping, smiting, swinging with a boogie
On my Bauhaus illusion of a pinwheel dance floor
Celebrant brushes remembering a jubilant chorus
Solve optical rhythms of unknown spins and slides
Squirming after clams and cracked notes

A burner from some cat slices through the room
Kindling my smoldering memories of Habana
Swooping and looping, imitating masters like Bauzá
Dodging the night, blurring the moving lines
Smudging the tickling between my real and surreal
Slinging passion of a One Note Samba, for two
Colors overflowing at nightfall and daybreak
Stroking that malicious metronome—tock-tock

Searching my mural for meaning like a scavenger hunt
Scattering fabricated fossils of my age behind
Smack-dab in a parable of nerps, narps, and nobs
Shaping my puzzle from the bridge to the head
Sight-reading layered embellishments of the band

My friend Miles could make wrong notes sound right
The point-blank licks, of black and electric blue,
Hard to make out in a murderous growl under sunglasses
Possessed to shout. “How do I paint a shout?”
Like a comet, higher and faster, at the top of my range
Cresting as a wave explodes, blinding, like the instant
A light bulb burns out, after a rushing current
Popping a brief, bright, and hot flash under
Offerings stiff as a rose in thorny octaves
With a flaming range of stinging bebop

You pretend to imagine, but misunderstand,
Like a jazz junkie, my persistent fusion
Was the preamble of a spreading wake

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Kenneth Boyd, winner of a Royal Palm Literary Award and judge for the 2025 awards, is a neurodivergent poet and former jazz musician. His poetry appears in Wayfarer Magazine, Unlost, Viewless Wings, Flora Fiction, The Ekphrastic Review, The Debut Review, and elsewhere. His collection, Grasshopper Dreams, was published in 2023. Kenneth is a graduate of the UCLA Extension Creative Writing Program and an Assistant Editor of Poetry at Southland Alibi magazine. He enjoys life in Northeast Florida with his wife and dog, Stella. He can be found on social media (@BardoPoetry).

Listen to the 1954 recording of Dizzy Gillespie performing his composition “Con Alma” [Universal Music Group]