@mahgister, what I am hearing from you, while listening to Scriabin played by Richter, is about how a musician can translate the composer's passion, and a large aspect of that is in the understanding of timing, or perhaps the composer's magical heartbeat. I was talking about the listener getting so involved in the music that she loses a sense of time. I think that is what passionate moments are about.
@stuartk, I will post a poem below about jazz. It might help in the understanding of the poem to know how I work. I was taught, and I have taught others, to write in images. As one of the most influential American poets, William Carlos Williams, said: "There are no ideas but in things." So poems are not about ideas, they are more about dreams and the translation of images. That approach to poetry is difficult to accomplish but also freeing. Perhaps it might free you?
Max Beckman was a pre-Hitlerian German painter who sensed what was coming and captured the distortions of Germany to come under Hitler. In Germany, as in America, jazz was considered "decadent" music. It was played in speakeasys here and in clubs in Germany shunned by conservative society.
As @maghister said, rhythm is a very integral part of poems. And I worked carefully on the lines and the way the rhythm works.
MAX BECKMAN'S FACES
they were all caught
looking over
their shoulders stunned
by how easy young bodies
glide into jazz
&
the way cigarette
smoke
from a vamp
aging before our
eyes crawls
up the cheek
of an idle dandy
& disappears
in his hair

