A Process Note
These poems offer the aspiring clarinetist a series of visions and techniques to summon the imagination and let it rule the music. Like a traditional fingering chart, the poems indeed treat the reader as a clarinet student. They offer guidance and tips. Of course, you do not need to be a clarinet student to read them — maybe the charts and poems are interesting enough. Some of these pieces were written at a desk with the clarinet on my mind, others with the clarinet between my knees.
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Ryan Mihaly is a poet, musician, and collage artist who recently completed the BridgeGuard residency in Štúrovo, Slovakia. He graduated from the MFA program at Naropa University where he was an Anne Waldman/Anselm Hollo fellow. His collages and poems have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, The Adirondack Review, DIAGRAM, Opossum, Posit, Asymptote, The Massachusetts Review, and in Ilan Stavans’ anthology On Self-Translation: Meditations on Language. A multi-instrumentalist and composer, he has played in a number of jazz, rock, folk, funk, punk, and experimental groups over the years, and teaches saxophone to students of all ages.