Translating Jazz Into Poetry: From Mimesis to Metaphor 9783110339017, 9783110326543

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Erik Redling Translating Jazz Into Poetry

Buchreihe der ANGLIA/ ANGLIA Book Series

| Edited by Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Hubert Zapf Advisory Board Laurel Brinton, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Susan Irvine, Andrew James Johnston, Christopher A. Jones, Terttu Nevalainen, Derek Attridge, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ursula K. Heise, Verena Lobsien, Laura Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, Martin Puchner

Volume 42

Erik Redling

Translating Jazz Into Poetry | From Mimesis to Metaphor

For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/36292

ISBN 978-3-11-032654-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-033901-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039528-0 ISSN 0340-5435

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Lonely/iStock/Thinkstock Typesetting: PTP-Berlin, Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgments As this book was intended to fulfill the requirements for the German ‘Habilitation,’ I am deeply indebted to the advisory committee at the University of Augsburg who not only instructed me as a student but also devoted themselves to the guidance of my academic research direction. I feel most grateful to Professor Hubert Zapf for his generous advice, criticism, and support throughout the complete writing and publishing period. I could always contact him even from distant places and receive prompt feedback. Also, I shall always be grateful to my second advisor, Professor Martin Middeke, who encouraged and advised me academically over many years. For its conception and actual shaping of the argument, the book owes very much to Professor Eve Sweetser of the University of California, Berkeley, whose diligent reading of the drafts led me to reexamine my own positions on the cognitive approach to poetry. My special thanks go to George Lakoff, the renowned professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, my teacher and supervisor, who kindly invited me to work with him and test my cognition-based approach to jazz poetry. Without the participation in his classes, the reading of his publications, and the argumentative discussions with him this book could not have been written. I also would like to thank my sister Ellen and my brother Paul Redling, as well as my colleagues and friends in Augsburg and Berkeley who always had an open ear for the issues of my project. I am further deeply indebted to my friend and mentor Mike Grimwood who served as a wonderful sounding board of my ideas. I also dearly wish to thank my parents for their continual belief and trust in me. For their help in getting the manuscript ready for publication, I wish to thank Joe Fruscione for his copy editing and Merle Willenberg for formatting the work. Nele Rodiek deserves special praise for her invaluable help in securing the permissions to print a plethora of jazz poems – a gargantuan task. I also want to thank the general editors for including this volume in the ANGLIA Book Series and the editorial team at De Gruyter, Ulrike Krauß, Katja Lehming, and Wolfgang Konwitschny, who did – once again – an outstanding job in maneuvering this project through all the stages of the publication process. Finally, I wish to express my profound gratitude to the German Research Association (DFG) whose fellowship financed my research stay at the University of California, Berkeley, and allowed me two years of intensive research and writing on this Habilitation project. This book is dedicated to my wife Kathrin and my little son Lenny for thousands of reasons. DOI 10.1515/9783110339017-202

Contents Acknowledgments | v 1

Introduction | 1

2

Mimesis: Intermediality and Reductive Interpretations of Jazz Poems | 7 Mimesis and Intermediality: Werner Wolf’s Typology of Intermedial Forms | 9 Mimesis and Jazz Poetry: Three Contemporary Studies on Jazz Poetry | 18 Sascha Feinstein’s and T.J. Anderson’s Restricted Interpretations of “Jazz-Informed” Poetry | 19 David Yaffe’s Worship of Jazz and Dismissal of Jazz Poetry | 27

2.1 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.4.1

3.4.2

3.4.3 3.4.4 3.4.5

3.4.6

Metaphor: Intermedial Translation as a Metaphorical Process | 31 The Domain conceptual metaphor theory: The Basic Tenets | 33 text is theory: Understanding Paul Blackburn’s Jazz Poem in Terms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory | 38 theory is text: Understanding the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Terms of Paul Blackburn’s Jazz Poem | 41 The Translation Metaphor: A Communication Model of Conceptual Metaphor | 46 theory is theory: Understanding Lakoff’s and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Terms of Ovid’s Model of Transformation | 50 theory is theory: Understanding Saussure’s Theory of the Linguistic Sign in Terms of Ovid’s Theory of Transmitting Meaning | 52 text is theory: Understanding the Medieval Text Ovide Moralisé in Terms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory | 54 text is text: Understanding the Medieval Text Ovide Moralisé in Terms of Blackburn’s Jazz Poem | 57 theory is theory: Understanding Iser’s Reader-Response Theory in Terms of Ovid’s Model of Understanding a Metaphorical Expression | 58 theory is text: Understanding Baudelaire’s Theory of Synesthesia in Terms of Blackburn’s Jazz Poem | 61

viii | Contents

4 4.1 4.1.1 4.1.2 4.1.3 4.2 4.2.1 4.2.2 4.3 4.3.1 4.3.2 4.3.3 4.3.4 4.3.5 4.3.6 4.4 4.4.1 4.4.2 4.4.3 4.4.4 4.4.5 4.4.6 4.4.7 4.5 4.5.1 4.5.2 4.5.3 4.6 4.6.1 4.6.2 4.7 4.7.1 4.7.2

“Oh Play that Thing you Jazz Mad Fools!” Exploring the Creatively Inspired Metaphor jazz music is writing in Jazz Poetry | 65 time is space: a sequence of notes is a line | 68 a sequence of notes is a line i: Translating Melodies into Lines | 69 a sequence of notes is a line ii: Snake Patterns in Jazz Poetry | 83 a sequence of notes is a line iii: Improvisation on a Theme | 90 sound is motion: Translations of fast and slow jazz in Jazz Poetry | 101 fast tempo of jazz is a vertical column | 102 slow tempo is a horizontal line | 125 tempo is rhythm | 133 tempo is rhythm i: Free Verse | 137 tempo is rhythm ii: Syncopation and Typographical Techniques | 143 tempo is rhythm iii: Literal Descriptions of Rhythms | 151 tempo is rhythm iv: Additional Rhythmic Features of Jazz Poems | 158 tempo is rhythm v: Swing | 164 tempo is rhythm vi: African Drum Poems | 168 hot and cool Jazz | 175 hot jazz: The Adjective “Hot” | 177 hot jazz is fire and hot jazz is sex | 178 hot jazz is cooking | 182 “Hot” Poems | 193 cool jazz: The Adjective “Cool” | 199 Thelonious Monk: Translating Monk’s Cool Compositions | 200 “Cool” Poems | 203 “tone-colors” are colors | 206 Blue and Red | 206 Black and Brown | 213 A Palette of Colors | 224 musical key is a mood | 235 minor key is a sad mood | 236 major key is a happy mood | 246 Dynamics: Forte and Piano, Crescendo and Decrescendo | 248 Forte and Piano | 249 Crescendo and Decrescendo | 258

Contents |

4.8 4.9 5

acoustical pitch is a vertical scale | 261 “Voices” of Instruments | 268 Conclusion | 282

Works Cited | 287 1 Primary Sources | 287 1.1 Paintings and Photographs | 287 1.2 Film | 287 1.3 Sound Recordings and Lyrics | 287 1.4 Poetry and Prose | 289 2 Secondary Sources | 295 Poetry Index | 300 Credit Lines | 304 Name Index | 307 Subject Index | 309

ix

1 Introduction Jazz itself has long been in the process of dissolution, in retreat into military marches and all sorts of folklore. Moreover, it has become stabilized as a pedagogical means of “rhythmic education,” and with this has visibly renounced the aesthetic claims that it admittedly never ever made on the consciousness of the producers and consumers of dance, but did make in the ideology of the clever art composers who at one time thought they could be fertilized by it. They have to look around for something else and are certainly already doing so; but in the surviving clubs the last interjected false bar [Scheintakt], the last muted trumpet, if not unheard, will soon die away without a shock. (Theodor W. Adorno, “Farewell to Jazz” 496; additional information not mine)

Theodor W. Adorno’s premature goodbye to jazz in this 1933 essay has to be seen in the context of his prioritizing of avant-garde composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, or Anton von Webern as well as his critique of mass culture and the culture industry. As the critic Robert W. Witkin observes, Adorno regards modern experimental music as “serious” and marked “by its more or less complete inaccessibility to most people and its remoteness even from many of the audiences who traditionally appreciated classical music” (Witkin 170). By contrast, Adorno perceives jazz – and here he primarily means the commercially successful and danceable swing music arrangements of the big band giants Benny Goodman, Paul Whiteman, and Glen Miller performed during the late 1930s and early 1940s – as characterized by its broad accessibility and popularity (170). Accordingly he refers to jazz as “light music” in his article “On Jazz” (1936), arguing that the culture industry has appropriated jazz for the mass market and turned it into an exchangeable “commodity in the strict sense” (Adorno, “On Jazz” 473). Jazz may appear to specialists as a distinctive music style and, in individual cases, an art form, but, Adorno claims, the very elements they consider to be fundamental to jazz (e.g., originality, spontaneity, improvisation, and the inimitability of its performance) are a myth in the face of its commodification (477). Refuting their view of jazz as a “serious” music with an individualistic character, he goes to great lengths to demonstrate its banality. “The more democratic jazz is,” Adorno writes, “the worse it becomes” (475). Contemporary criticism has emphasized the untenability of Adorno’s negative view of jazz and farewell bid to the popular music.¹ Adorno’s treatments also

1 See especially Theodore Gracyk’s refutation of Adorno’s critique of jazz in the essay “Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music”; regarding Adorno’s argument about the popularity of jazz, see Ulrich Schönherr’s article “Adorno and Jazz: Reflections on a Failed Encounter” in which he calls attention to the fact that “jazz never had – perhaps with the exception of the swing era to which Adorno primarily refers—a social ‘mass basis’” (89). DOI 10.1515/9783110339017-001

2 | 1 Introduction

neglect the inspirational force jazz had and still has on a wide range of poets and other artists. Under the spell of Modernism, various American writers were enticed by jazz’s vitality, spontaneity, innovativeness, and improvisational quality. As poets became aware of the creative potential set free by relating their medium to another, they started to experiment with ways of rendering jazz into written form. Thus they followed Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make it new!” – not in the sense of deliberately changing past artistic traditions but of making new connections between music and writing. Consequently, these poets were consciously engaged in transforming the jazz’s fresh musical elements (such as improvisational riffs, melodies, tempo, and rhythms) into musical poems. The results of their efforts were works of art that highlight the artists’ creativity. Jazz’s popularity, which prompted Adorno’s steadfast disdain of the “democratic” music, enabled numerous people to experience it and stimulate their creative capacities.² Among the writers who experimented with jazz and tried their hands at jazz poetry were Carl Sandburg (who wrote his poem “Jazz Fantasia” as early as 1920), Sterling A. Brown, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and the playwright Tennessee Williams. The list of modernist jazz poets also includes many writers who are less well-known today: such as Frank Marshall Davis, Melvin B. Tolson, and Robert Hayden. Evidently, the jazz craze crossed boundaries of class, race, and gender. It continued to kindle the artist’s imagination long after the Modernist battle cry “Make it new!” subsided and, as the music spread around the world, became a transnational and transcultural source of creativity for many writers in France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and elsewhere. Several anthologies of jazz poetry published in recent years, such as Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa’s The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) and The Second Set (1996), Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey’s Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (1993), and Kevin Young’s Jazz Poems (2006), exhibit an abundance of jazz poems from around the world and testify to the creativity of jazz poets. It is therefore surprising that the growing body of criticism on jazz poetry pays little attention to the immense diversity of many jazz poems’ creative processes. Typically, critics approach these texts by providing diachronic accounts of developments they observed in jazz poetry over a certain period of time. By and large they select a few poems from ‘canonical’ jazz poets, such as Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), and from contemporary poets,

2 Although Adorno witnessed the change from the swing era to bebop (and to free jazz), which was no longer popular at all levels of society, he retains his entirely negative view of jazz; see, for instance, his article “Perennial Fashion – Jazz” (1953) in which he still refers to jazz as “light music” (122) and claims that “jazz has shown itself to be utterly impoverished” (123).

1 Introduction

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3

such as Michael Harper, Jayne Cortez, Ntozake Shange, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Nathaniel Mackey. Their analyses of the poems usually include several insightful observations on innovative experiments and poetic texts as well as biographical information to establish that the latter had or still have an intimate knowledge of jazz and embed them in a historical context.³ What is necessary, however, is an investigation of the intermedial process itself and a close analysis of the manifold creative ways poets developed to render jazz music into a written form. Sascha Feinstein, T.J. Anderson, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Meta DuEwa Jones, and other critics focus on jazz poetry’s creativity and celebrate selected poets’ inventiveness. Yet, in general they refrain from closely examining the relationship between jazz and poetry and rather use a wide range of vague expressions interchangeably to refer to jazz-poetry relations: jazz poems are “influenced” or “informed” by jazz, they are “modeled on” jazz or “jazzinfused” and “jazz-resonant,” they “capture,” “emulate,” “mimic,” “replicate,” “reflect,” and “mirror” innovative jazz qualities, or they “evoke” or “invoke” jazz music. These critics’ use of passive constructions (e.g., a poem “is informed” by jazz), unspecific terminology (e.g., a poetic text “evokes” jazz), and personifications of the text (e.g., a text “emulates” jazz) sidesteps the topic of agency and especially the topic of intermedial jazz-writing relations, instead pointing to a certain reluctance to engage in protracted interpretations of the poems to detail the poets’ creative intermedial transformations.⁴ Likewise, critics working in the field of “intermediality”⁵ focus on identifying intermedial references such as references to movies and music in literary texts,

3 Recent publications on jazz poetry include Sascha Feinstein’s Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present (1997), Lorenzo Thomas’s work Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry (2000), Tony Bolden’s Afro-Blue: Improvisation in African American Poetry and Culture (2003), T.J. Anderson’s Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry (2004), Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovation (2004), Meta DuEwa Jones’s The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (2013), and the collection of essays entitled Black Music, Black Poetry: Blues and Jazz’s Impact on African American Versification (2014) edited by Gordon E. Thompson. 4 In the recently published The Music is the Muse: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (2013), Jones investigates jazz poetry from Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey, among others, within the framework of performance studies and thereby touches on the ways in which these poets rendered elements from blues and jazz in their poetry. However, her focus lies on the actual performance of jazz poems. In this context, she does employ the terms “translation” and “transformation,” but she usually uses them to refer to a vocalized performance of a poem (e.g., the act of reading jazz poem), rather than to the intermedial process of turning jazz into a written form in particular. 5 Werner Wolf identifies an apparent “tendency towards intermediality in our century and especially in postmodernism” and hence adds the “intermedial turn” to the “linguistic and “meta-

4 | 1 Introduction

changes between media such as film adaptations of literature, and media combinations in plays, opera, and film (Rajewsky 2002: 15–19).⁶ Critics such as Werner Wolf proceed from the assumption that ‘music’ and ‘literature’ (and not ‘writing’) are two distinct media and presents a typology of intermedial relations between two media from a mimetic perspective (i.e., ‘literature’ imitates ‘music’). Even though such an approach permits critics to categorize a number of intermedial relations (e.g., imitations of rhythm), it precludes them from closely examining how authors and poets transformed music into writing from a ‘non-imitative’creative-angle and from discovering the metaphorical dimension of intermedial relationships between music and writing that lie outside of the previously established schemata. Both approaches to intermedial texts such as jazz poems, which I have presented separately above, exhibit a common thread: they view intermedial texts as mimetic reproductions of a medium (e.g., jazz). In the subsequent chapters, I will discuss the notion of “mimesis” (Gr. “to imitate”) in relation to intermedial studies and literary criticism and demonstrate that a mimetic perception of intermediality results in impoverished readings of these texts. I will adopt a new approach to intermediality by using George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual theory of metaphor to highlight intermediality’s metaphorical nature. After applying this theory to a corpus of jazz poems, I will conclude with the argument and put it into perspective. What follows is a brief overview of Chapters 2 to 5: In Chapter 2, I will demonstrate that the understanding of intermedial relations in terms of mimesis (a conceptual metaphor itself) leads to reductive interpretations of intermedial works. Critics who conceptualize the relationship between jazz poems and jazz music in terms of imitation treat both as dichomotous entities and, in comparing them with each other, determine similarities and differences. Practitioners of such an approach neglect the writer’s and reader’s roles in creating an aesthetic experience. To illustrate the limitations of their interpreta-

textual” turns (Wolf, Musicalization 2); for a brief reference to the “intermedial turn” and a short overview of the term “intermediality,” see also his entry on “intermediality” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 252–256. Regarding the term “intermediality” (Ger. “Intermedialität”) and the study of intermediality, Werner Huber, Evelyne Keitel and Gunter Süß point out that “German scholars have played a leading role in launching Intermedialität as a concept” (Huber 2007: 2). 6 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin also examine the relationship between different media and introduce the term “remediation,” which they define as “the representation of one medium in another” (45) in their often-cited study Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), but they focus on how ‘newer’ media refashion or represent ‘older’ media (e.g., how photography remediates painting) rather than on the creative process of transforming music into writing (and, on an imaginative level, the transformation of the written text into music).

1 Introduction

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5

tions of jazz poetry, I will first present the innovative ways Paul Blackburn developed to transform characteristic features of Sonny Rollins’s style of improvising on a popular tune into the jazz poem “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” (1964) and show that the poetic text invites readers to imagine it as music. The following discussion of a typological model currently used in intermedial studies to explain “musicalizations” in fiction and three recent critical studies on jazz poetry (two books and a chapter) will show that conceptualizing jazz poetry in terms of mimesis allows critics the detection of jazz imitations in jazz poetry (if they do not completely dismiss jazz poetry as a weak imitation of the original source) but, at the same time, hinders them from exploring the specificity of creative processes documented in poetic texts and investigating (and experiencing) the metaphorical realm of such jazz poems. In Chapter 3, I will first present the basic tenets of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor (and Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier’s Blending Theory) and argue that it helps critics to regard the intermedial relation between jazz poetry and music as the result of a cognitive process in which a writer understands music through writing and creates metaphorical correspondences between the two media. This metaphoric view allows critics to focus on the creative processes and explore what was formerly described as imitations of jazz and the imaginative dimension of jazz poems, for the metaphor theory enables them to see such poems as “metaphorical linguistic expressions” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 7), which can be understood literally and figuratively. However, Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory does not describe the conceptual procedure of understanding one medium in terms of another as a transformation process. To grasp this aspect of the cognitive mechanism, I will introduce the figure of translation because it foregrounds the process of transformation and then develop a communication model with which the writer’s and reader’s creative translation processes can be explained. In Chapter 4, I follow Lakoff and Johnson’s claim that conceptual metaphors structure the way we think and act and suggest a fresh approach to analyzing a large corpus of jazz poems.⁷ I proceed from jazz’s key elements – such as melody, tempo, hot- and coolness, and rhythm – and explore how poets translated a particular feature of it into writing. This method will be supplemented with a ‘transgressive’ approach that examines not only the poems that manifest one specific feature but also poems that display other ways of rendering the same feature. My

7 I am much indebted to Sascha Feinstein’s excellent annotated bibliography of jazz poems A Bibliographic Guide to Jazz Poetry (1998). It was an invaluable resource for compiling a large corpus of jazz poems and challenged me to track down jazz poems not yet included in the volume.

6 | 1 Introduction

findings, thus, corroborate another basic tenet of Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory: a conceptual metaphor always provides a selective understanding of a phenomenon. The method allows me to interpret a rich spectrum of creative ideas poets used when they conceptualized elements of jazz in terms of writing. In Chapter 5, I will discuss further advantages of shifting from ‘mimesis’ to ‘metaphor.’ I claim that the privileging of theory in the postmodern era has led to a unidirectional metaphorical conception of literary texts and other cultural artefacts: critics understand a text in terms of theory and, proceeding from theory to text, create metaphorical correspondences between them. However, a ‘metaphoric play’ between text and theory will lead to a better understanding of both. For instance, critics can reverse the directionality of the cognitive process and understand theories in terms of texts and thus detect new aspects of and gaps in the respective theories.

2 Mimesis: Intermediality and Reductive Interpretations of Jazz Poems A quick glance at a random selection of jazz poems raises one’s awareness of the typographic heterogeneity. The genre abounds with poems exhibiting words scattered across a page, irregular long lines disrupted with spaces and slashes, and phrases or whole sections set in italics, boldface or upper case. In conjunction with references to jazz, the unusual typography found points to experimental ways poets use to write jazz. Jazz poems, however, not only document the poets’ resourcefulness of transforming jazz into a written shape, but they also call on the readers to participate in the creation of music. The typographical ‘anomalies’ ask readers to imagine a certain portion of the text or even the whole poem as a musical performance: for instance, a line interrupted by several slashes (e.g., “and / I / felt / so / out of place”) may indicate staccato notes. The readers cannot simply read over such typographical signals but need to imagine themselves as partaking in the poem’s musical performance. Perhaps more than other types of poetry, jazz poetry allows readers to become active and ‘compose’ their own aesthetic experience. Paul Blackburn’s “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” (1964), for instance, asks readers to pretend that they are sitting in the New York club and listening to a Sonny Rollins saxophone solo. Blackburn initiates his improvisation on the melody of “There Will Never Be Another You” (Warren and Gordon, 1942) by capitalizing the first two words “THERE WILL” and thus indicating both an increase in volume and their simultaneous separation from the melody’s remaining notes. It marks the beginning of his improvisation in which he plays a thematic dual-tone motif (“someone”) and “stutters” (“another”). The poet thus transforms Rollins’s style of improvising on a musical motif into a play with the two syllables of the word “someone” (e.g., “one / someone / some-one / some”) and employs dashes to render the characteristic “stuttering” of Sonny Rollins (e.g., “anoth / noth / anoth-er / noth-er”). As an imagined version of a characteristic improvisation à la Rollins, the poem represents a hybrid intermedial text, recalling Rollins’s style of improvisation and revealing Blackburn’s creativity in the transformation. Most significantly, it demands that the reader not only interpret this text literally as a document but also participate in creating Blackburn/Rollins’s jazz solo:

DOI 10.1515/9783110339017-002

8 | 2 Mimesis: Intermediality and Reductive Interpretations of Jazz Poems

THERE WILL be many other nights like be standing here with someone, some one someone some-one some some some some some some one there will be other songs a-nother fall, another—spring, but there will never be a-noth, noth anoth noth anoth-er noth-er noth-er Other lips that I may kiss, but they won’t thrill me like thrill me like like yours used to dream a million dreams but how can they come when there never be a-noth— (Blackburn, “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” 316)

The text’s intermediality raises the question of appraising Blackburn’s artistic contribution. Does his improvisation à la Rollins strictly imitate Rollins, as current analysis of jazz poetry tends to assert? The tendency to recover the musical original in jazz poetry is perceivable in the emphasis on “imitation” and the neglect of the poet’s own musical creation. Jazz poetry thus is represented as being always secondary to jazz music. David Yaffe, a critic I revisit below, accordingly concludes that he prefers jazz music to poetry because the original is always superior to any imitation. The discussion about how one views the relationship between music and writing in jazz poems is essential since the adopted perspective – mimesis or metaphor – guides the interpretive act. If we view a jazz poem from a mimetic angle, then we will look for music-literary imitations primarily and ultimately

2.1 Mimesis and Intermediality: Werner Wolf’s Typology of Intermedial Forms | 9

evaluate writing as inferior. If, however, we regard the music-writing relation as a cognitive-metaphorical one, we will regard the process of transforming music into writing as an inherently creative act and emphasize the poet’s innovativeness in inviting readers to imagine the saxophonist’s music via the written text. The readers learn to go beyond the words’ literal meaning and discover jazz poetry’s metaphorical dimension, which, for instance, highlights a sequence of words as a melodic tune devised by the poet. Intermedial composing and intermedial reading focus on an aesthetic experience the written medium creates. By contrast, conceptualizing the intermedial music-writing relation in terms of mimesis only allows the detection of ‘literal’ imitations of music in poems. As I will show later in this chapter, critics’ pursuit of tracing the imitation of jazz music also misrepresents the medial interaction. Etymologically, “medium” is the neuter form of the adjective “medius” and simply means “middle” (“Medium,” OED). Speech and writing are the middle ground between speakers/writers and an audience and serve as a means of communication. Despite the widespread acceptance of this basic function of any type of medium, some critics like Wolf and Yaffe pass over this role of the media whenever they examine the intermedial relationship between speech and writing and, in turn, between music and writing (or, as I will show, ‘literature’). Proceeding from a mimetic view of intermediality, such critics perceive the relationship between speech/music and writing as a hierarchical opposition and treat the media as opposite, comparable entities, rather than as channels of communication. Their practice of comparing the higher ranked Object A (e.g., speech, jazz music) with the lower ranked Object B (e.g., a jazz poem, ‘literature’), that is, the weak imitation of Object A, which involves the detection of similarities and differences between the two entities, overlooks the nature of writing as a medium. They tend to neglect how writers have transformed music into a jazz poem and pay little attention to the interactive processes between the text and the reader. Their view of poems as ‘finished’ objects that can be contrasted with music leads to a reductive view of intermediality that precludes them from noticing the multiple meanings of written words and the poet’s creative potential in shaping the reader’s aesthetic experience of imagining music.

2.1 Mimesis and Intermediality: Werner Wolf’s Typology of Intermedial Forms Werner Wolf presents a typology of intermedial forms in The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (1999) which displays a mimetic understanding of what he calls “musico-literary relations” (Wolf 2015:

10 | 2 Mimesis: Intermediality and Reductive Interpretations of Jazz Poems

459). Based on Paul Sher’s tripartite differentiation between ‘literature in music’, ‘music and literature’, and ‘music in literature’ (Wolf 2015: 459–460), Wolf systematically categorizes the diverse musico-literary relations and examines the identified phenomena. In the wake of Rajewsky’s typology of intermediality – which draws on Wolf’s model but introduces a set of new categories such as ‘intermedial references’, ‘media transition’, ‘media combination’, and ‘transmediality’ (cf., Rajewsky 2002: 15–27) – Wolf revised his model (see Figure 2) to include the distinction between “extracompositional intermediality” and “intracompositional intermediality” (cf., Wolf 2015: 461–468). The former category incorporates Rajewsky’s notion of “transmediality,” which he defines as “phenomena that appear in more than one medium without being (viewed as) specific to, or having an origin in, any of them” (461), and “intermedial transposition,” which involves the “‘transfer’ of the content or of formal features from a medium A to a medium B” such as the transposition of a literary text into an opera (468). The latter category is subdivided into “plurimediality” (“two or more media with their typical or conventional signifiers are overtly present in a given semiotic entity in at least one instance,” 463) and “intermedial reference” which basically retains the categories and sub-categories of the earlier typology (discussed below). At the core of both models is the notion that the relationship between ‘music’ and ‘literature’ is mimetic. Wolf considers both music and literature – rather than ‘writing’ – as distinct media. This dichotomous view likely invites him not only to identify similarities and differences between them but also to perceive the music-literature relationship mimetically and discuss the different forms of musico-literary imitations. Rather than engaging with the minutiae of musicwriting relations, Wolf examines the mimetic relationship between music and literature as two self-contained entities, missing the metaphoric dimension of literary transformations of music. Wolf’s view of literary renderings of music as imitations guides how he examines the genres’ intermedial relation throughout The Musicalization of Fiction and subsequent revisions. He argues that any “musicalization of fiction” requires the comparability between music and literary texts in the first place: The idea of a musicalization of fiction and of literature in general presupposes some sort of comparability or similarity between literary texts and music. Otherwise, any transposition of music into literature, limited as it may be, would be unthinkable. In other words: the existence and the range of similarities between the two media or arts determine both the possibility (or impossibility) and the limits of a musicalization of fiction. (Wolf 1999: 11)

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His idea of “some sort of comparability” between music and literature presupposes his distinction between the two dichotomous entities, which runs into difficulties when he classifies music and literature as “the two medias or arts,” and allows him to investigate the similarities and differences between the two selfcontained entities. According to Wolf, literature has inherent musical properties that enable a comparison with music. Adopting the view that “music may be analyzed in semiotic terms and thereby be compared to (literary) language” (Wolf 1999: 14), he distinguishes between musical and literary signifiers and between musical and literary signifieds and then describes some similarities between the signifiers (see section 2.2 “Musical and literary signifiers: similarities and differences”). He claims, for instance, that music and literature have “a similar segmentation” and that the musicological term “phrase” correlates with “a phrase or sentence in verbal language” (15). Yet, he continues, below that level the correspondences become arbitrary: even if one accepts the basic possibility of such correspondences in some cases, it is often not clear whether it is single notes, parts of melodies or chords that can be compared to verbal words […]. (15)

This note is significant since Wolf appears to realize that his comparison of features between the two media runs into difficulties. Wolf attempts to level the difference between the two media and sets up an additional similarity resting “in their both being originally of an acoustic nature and in the fact that they dynamically unfold on the axis of time rather than in space” (1999: 15). The two types of acoustic signifiers also “may be transcribed into visual ones: both arts can therefore make use of written text as a channel” (15). Finally, the common correspondences between these acoustic signifiers include “the qualities of pitch, timbre, volume and rhythm (in rhythm an additional temporal element is involved)” (15). Wolf illustrates the last assertion with a brief comparison between Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Fuga IV” and William Blake’s “Laughing Song,” in which, he maintains, “there is a rhythmic element in the fugue (the alla breve time) that can be compared to the rhythm generated by the combination of metre and prosody in Blake’s poem” (16; his italics). This emphasis on the similarity between the two media allows for the comparison of musical and linguistic features. However, Wolf does not disregard the differences between the two media. The ensuing treatment of several dissimilarities between musical and literary signifiers expands the notion that music cannot be sufficiently represented in literature, but never abandons the practice of directly comparing the two media. He claims that “the kind of precision often reached in music as to pitch, timbre, volume and rhythm can never be attained in literature” (Wolf 1999: 16) and contends

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that “there is no viable means for verbal art to create a sustained and specific aural quality in the same direct and natural way as music does” (16). According to Wolf, musical and literary signifiers differ in relation to the phenomenon “polyphony”: in most cases a piece of (Western) music does not only consist of one sequence of sound, but often of several simultaneous sequences, while a work of (narrative) literature is made out of one linear sequence of words only. […] A similar kind of ‘pluridimensionality’ or ‘spatialization’ can never be fully attained in verbal art. (20; boldface in original)

With respect to “harmony” and “modulation,” he maintains that “[i]n literature ‘modulation’ can at best be a metaphor” and that “[f]or fiction only an imaginary and conceptual correlative of ‘harmony’ which is based on the level of signifieds can be assumed” (22). Despite the failure of language and literature to measure up to music, Wolf concludes, “music and literature seem, to a limited extent, to be related to each other” (22). Wolf subsequently turns his attention to the similarities and differences between musical and literary signifieds. He first announces that music and literature are “basically comparable” and “do have meanings” (Wolf 1999: 23) and then discusses the dissimilar relationship between signifier and signified with respect to each media: while the relation between signifier and signified in language is “usually of a symbolic and hence highly arbitrary kind” (24), the signifier-signified relation in music is “characterized in most cases by some sort of similarity and hence by a somewhat reduced arbitrariness” (24). A further distinction relates to the matter of reference: for Wolf, verbal signs are “hetero-referential” and musical signs “auto-referential” (25): “If musical units have a meaning, it tends to be a formal or a functional one with reference to intrinsic relations, not a conceptual and extrinsic one” (25). His elaboration of the difference between literary and musical signification leads to a judgment on the two arts’ aesthetic value: musical meaning can be entirely self-referential and hence ‘pure form’, verbal language never can […]. Hence there seems to be a radical asymmetry between the signifieds or meaning of the literary and musical medium. In this asymetry [sic] music as potentially ‘pure’ form seems to be the more aesthetic art […]. (26)

Wolf concludes his analysis of musical and literary signifieds with the assertion that both arts “can have meaning” (33; his emphasis) which allows at least a “partial translatability of music, or elements of it, into another medium” (33). Having determined general similarities between music and literature, Wolf presents his typological model of “Musico-Literary Intermediality,” in which he describes different types of “musicalization” in fiction. His diagram of the typology (see Figure 1: “B) Musico-Literary Intermediality”) helps us understand the short outline of his classification system.

2.1 Mimesis and Intermediality: Werner Wolf’s Typology of Intermedial Forms

Figure 1: First Version (Wolf 1999: 70)

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14 | 2 Mimesis: Intermediality and Reductive Interpretations of Jazz Poems INTERMEDIALITY (broad sense)

extracompositional intermediality

transmediality (the quality of non-media specific phenomena occurring in more than one medium)

intracompositional intermediality (intermediality, narrow sense)

intermedial transposition (‘transfer’ of the content or of formal features from a medium A to a medium B)

intermedial reference (reference to another medium using the means of the referring medium only)

implicit reference (individual or system reference through forms of heteromedial imitation)

e.g. the narrativity of music and lit.

e.g. novel into opera

formal imitation

(partial) reproduction

e.g. the ‘graphic’ description of a musical composition in a novel

e.g. structural analogies to music in a novel, to lit. in program music

e.g. re-presenting a song through the quotation of the song text

(music in literature/literature in music)

Figure 2: Revised Version (Wolf 2015: 468)

(the quality of a semiotic entity displaying signifiers that [appear to] belong to more than one medium)

explicit reference (individual or system reference through medium-specific signification without heteromedial imitation: ‘thematization’)

evocation

perceptibility of intermediality

plurimediality

e.g. the discussion of music in a novel

e.g. music and lit. text in 19th-cent. melodrama

(music in lit.)

(music and literature)

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After subdividing the musico-literary intermediality into “overt” and “covert” intermediality (see Figure 1: “B) Musico-Literary Intermediality”), Wolf contends that, in overt intermediality, “the ‘intermedial’ quality of the artefact is immediately discernible on its surface (hence ‘direct’ or ‘overt’ intermediality) and makes the work under consideration appear as a medial hybrid” (Wolf 1999: 40). Depending on the intensity of the musico-literary interrelation, the artefact can be positioned on a scale ranging from “the pole of mere contiguity between two (or more) media in one work […], to the pole where the maximum of mutual adaptation or integration of the respective media is located” (41; his emphasis). By contrast, Wolf defines covert intermediality as the participation of (at least) two conventionally distinct media in the signification of an artefact in which, however, only one of the media appears directly with its typical or conventional signifiers and hence may be called the dominant medium, while the other one (the non-dominant medium) is indirectly present ‘within’ the first medium. Consequently, this other medium is not present in the form of its characteristic signifiers but, at least minimally, as an idea, as a signified. (41; his emphasis)

According to Wolf, the “musicalization of literature” is a special case of covert intermediality: ‘musicalization of literature’ points towards a presence of music in the signification of a text which seems to stem from some kind of transformation of music into literature. The verbal text appears to be or become, to a certain extent, similar to music or to effects connected with certain compositions, and we get the impression of experiencing music ‘through’ the text. Hence the ‘musicalization of fiction’ is essentially a special case of covert intermedial imitation: the imitation of music in a narrative text. (Wolf 51; his emphasis)

Wolf regards musicalized literary texts as products of “some kind of transformation of music into literature” and perceives the “musicalization of fiction” as the imitation of music in prose writings, but does not indicate how music is transformed into literature. To specify the presence of the non-dominant medium music “within” the dominant medium literature, Wolf introduces three subcategories of covert intermediality (also included in his revised model): “thematization (‘telling’),” “evocation of vocal music through associative quotation,” and “imitation (‘showing’).” He divides in turn the first main form of covert intermediality – thematization – into three kinds of explicit thematization: intratextual, paratextual, and contextual. The term “intratextual thematization” applies to literary texts in which “figures” (“figural thematization”) or narrators (“narratorial thematization”) explicitly refer to music (Wolf 1999: 56). Adopting the term “paratexts” from Gérard

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Genette, who uses it to designate texts, such as titles, forewords, and footnotes, that frame the main text (cf., Gérard Genette 1997), Wolf speaks of “paratextual thematization” when references to music occur in titles of entire texts (e.g., Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge”), chapter titles, afterwords, and epigraphs (56). Finally, he employs the term “contextual thematization” to denote discussions of music which take place in the context of a literary work such as “in an author’s letters or essays on musical or literary aesthetics” (56). The second main form of covert intermediality that Wolf discusses is the “evocation of music through associative quotation.” Typically, it occurs as a specific reference to music, such as a title of a song, which activates the music in the reader’s mind (Wolf 1999: 68). According to Wolf, however, this main form of covert intermediality is less important to the musicalization of fiction than thematization and imitation (69). In the third category of covert intermediality, which represents the “core area” of the musicalization of fiction (Wolf 1999: 70), Wolf differentiates between three types of written imitation of music: “word music,” “formal and structural analogies,” and “imaginary content analogy.” Coined by Paul Scher, the term “word music” refers to “a musicalizing technique which exploits the basic similarity between verbal and musical signifiers” (58). Such musical signifiers, he states, can for instance imitate the pitch, timbre, and rhythm of music or establish “‘harmonies’ (or ‘dissonances’) through various forms of acoustic recurrences” (58). Also coined by Scher, the expression “formal and structural analogies” denotes formal and structural parallels between music and literary texts. As examples Wolf cites the text’s layout, typographical devices, the formal segmentation into stanzas, and “thematic or motivic recurrences creating patterns suggestive of musical forms” (58). In contrast to word music and formal analogies, an “imaginary content analogy” provides readers with a concrete referent: “imaginary content analogies, by their very nature as transpositions of a particular piece of music into a literary text, are usually linked with […] specific references” (64). To illustrate his category of “imaginary content analogies,” Wolf refers to the narrator in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point who employs poetic images to depict the effect Johann Sebastian Bach’s music has on him (62–63). The diagram of the manifold typological differentiations shown above and a discussion on “How to Recognize a Musicalized Fiction When Reading One” (Chapter I.5) bring the theoretical part of the study to a close. The three imitative types demonstrate that Wolf sees covert intermediality as a representation of similar elements between a work of art and another medium, whereby the researcher tries to determine an element of the genuine medium and the imitators’ accomplishment in getting close to it by mentioning, evoking or actually copying it. Wolf’s discussion of the typology thus analogously continues his

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approach of comparing elements of music with elements of writing from Part I of his investigation of musicality “in” literary texts. To be sure, histories of literature or music can profit from such generalizations based on comparable elements between other works of art created, for instance, in other periods. General structural similarities may also be identifiable or comparable, such as a tripartite structure in music and a novel (see below), but on this overarching level of comparison, the emphasis will be on which work is the original and which the derivative. His approach, for instance, does not give credit to the intermedial ‘artistic’ process of the reader who has to learn to appraise intermediality as a new aesthetic experience. The search for the original also dominates the second part of Wolf’s book, in which he gives examples of “musicalization of fiction” within English literature. Focusing on narrative texts from romanticism to postmodernism, he identifies different types of musical imitation in works by Thomas De Quincey, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Samuel Beckett, Anthony Burgess, and Gabriel Josipovice. For instance, he examines the “Sirens” episode in Joyce’s Ulysses (chapter 8) and draws parallels between a three-part fugue and the “Sirens” episode. Acknowledging the limitations of his “‘fugal’ reading” (Wolf 1999: 132), he argues that the three parts of a fugue correspond more or less with three (groups of) characters in the episode: a) the barmaids Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, the two ‘Sirens’, as treble, b) Bloom, the central character of Ulysses, as the tenor, and c) Blazes Boylan, together with various other male characters, as the bass, which, in baroque fugues, is especially important for the segmentation of the fugue […]. (131)

In the subsequent section 8.4, Wolf also mentions “Joyce’s imitation of contrapuntal polyphony” (138) and Joyce’s recurrent use of motifs such as the motif “Jingle jingle jaunted jingling” in the episode (139).⁸ Apart from noting such imitations of musical microstructures, he briefly mentions several examples of word music. He considers this “perhaps the most conspicuous device used in ‘Sirens’” (139), such as “the ‘trill’ in Leopold Bloom’s stream of consciousness when he thinks of his early relationship with Molly, ‘Her wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:’d’” or the “‘staccato’ passages such as the following: ‘Far. Far. Far. Far. / Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.’” (139).⁹ Wolf’s interpretation of Joyce’s musicalization of Ulysses shows that his approach enables him to identify a text’s diverse musical

8 Wolf’s quotation from James Joyce’s Ulysses stems from the following edition: James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, eds. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, 1986). He also refers to other instances in the “Sirens” episode where the motif “Jingle jingle jaunting jingling” appears as well (217, 220, 222, and 223). 9 Joyce, Ulysses 228, 236.

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properties, but it does not let him imagine a partial or complete text as a musical performance, which, however, is necessary in the case of Blackburn’s poem. In sum, an application of Wolf’s theory of intermediality to Blackburn’s jazz poem will help determine his approach’s explanatory power. Although his statement that authors engage in “some kind of transformation of music into literature” allows for perceiving Blackburn’s jazz poem as the product of a transformation process, Wolf’s theoretical model does not encourage any further investigation of Blackburn’s ways of transforming Sonny Rollins’s music into writing. Rather, it promotes the view of the literary text as a self-contained entity and as a special case of “covert intermediality,” that is, a written imitation of jazz. On the one hand, the typological model permits the identification of several mimetic “musicalizations”: first, the title of the poem explicitly refers to a jazz musician and a performance (category: “thematization (‘telling’)”) and second, the fragmented form of the poem is similar to Rollins’s style of fragmenting a melody (category: “formal and structural analogy”). Noticing such references to music and analogies between jazz poems and music is important to the analysis of such poems, because they often help make readers aware of a poetic text’s imaginative dimension. In the case of Blackburn’s poem, the references to music indicate to the readers that they have to move from a literal to a figurative mode of interpretation and imagine the poem as a Rollins solo. The mere identification of such references and analogies, however, does not explain the poet’s guidance of the reader to the aesthetic experience of imagining a jazz poem as music.

2.2 Mimesis and Jazz Poetry: Three Contemporary Studies on Jazz Poetry Since Wolf’s work deals with the general relationship between literature and music and does not discuss jazz poetry specifically – concentrating instead on comparability and imitation – we can investigate how much three current studies reflect Wolf’s approach. As a close reading of these studies reveals, they often repeat words like “mimic,” “imitate,” “reflect,” and “mirror,” which point to the notion of mimesis. Like Wolf, critics Sascha Feinstein and T.J. Anderson miss the imaginative dimension of ‘musicalized’ texts. Feinstein’s definition of the jazz poem as one “informed by jazz music” (2) in Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present (1997) is broad enough to include detailed studies of jazz poems as well as other, non-musical references to jazz contexts. Similarly, Anderson’s Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry (2004) regards the genre as “jazzinfluenced poetry” (3) by which he often means cultural similarities between jazz music (as a black aesthetic art form) and poems in his discussion of the poetry

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written by Bob Kaufman, Stephen Jonas, Jayne Cortez, and Nathaniel Mackey. Both critics provide valuable analyses of jazz poems and yet miss the imaginative dimension of such texts. Unlike Feinstein and Anderson, David Yaffe denies that jazz poems could ever match the musical greatness of the music and thus thematically foregrounds the impossibility of jazz’s poetry’s ‘imitation’ of jazz music in Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (2006). Since he primarily investigates the music, Yaffe’s claims are not surprising. Nevertheless, he assembles general arguments about the superiority of jazz music and appreciates some jazz poems that differ decidedly from the well-informed analyses of jazz poems found in Feinstein and Anderson.

2.2.1 Sascha Feinstein’s and T.J. Anderson’s Restricted Interpretations of “Jazz-Informed” Poetry In Jazz Poetry, Feinstein discusses prominent poets such as Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes and diverse movements in jazz poetry from its beginnings to the contemporary abundance of elegiac works. On occasion he discusses a jazz poem and compares it with jazz music. Feinstein defines a jazz poem as “any poem that has been informed by jazz music. The influence can be in the subject of the poem or in the rhythms, but one should not necessarily exclude the other” (1997: 2). This broad definition permits him to examine not only the relationship between jazz poems and their musical source but also references to musicians, clubs, and performances. He illustrates his approach with a strong interpretation of Etheridge Knight’s poem “For Eric Dolphy.” Introducing the analysis of the poem, Feinstein asserts that “the poet unites Dolphy’s sound with associative imagery of violence, racial and family conflict, as well as expressions of love” (3). For Feinstein, this is a jazz poem because its visual form (e.g., the vertical spelling of “doing”; see below) and subject (e.g., the title refers to the saxophonist Eric Dolphy) relate to jazz musicians and their music (4). He begins his analysis with the question “Why Eric Dolphy?” and, as an answer to his question, provides a paragraph of biographical information (4). He then describes Dolphy’s recorded live performance of “Hi Fly” (Eric Dolphy in Europe, 1961). Feinstein’s listing of this factual information becomes understandable if we relate it to the above-mentioned definition of a jazz poem as informed by the music. His subsequent discussion of Dolphy’s style of improvisation is apparently also information, but is compared to Knight’s poem in a brief separate section:

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Dolphy begins with sustained tones. He then slides into more-complicated phrases, rising (“spinning / spinning / spinning”) until he feels it is time to enter the tune itself, which is based on a minimalized, five-note theme. Against the low sounds of the bass lilting its steady beat, the flute soars and circles like clouds in a storm. Dolphy splits some of the notes with his aggressive attack, his staccato faster and faster with spitting rapidity. The sharp wisps of air string the phrases together in conjunction with the actual tones. Dolphy releases flurry upon flurry. His quick gasps for breath become audible, noticeable, part of the solo itself. (Feinstein 1997: 4)

Feinstein then draws specific parallels between Dolphy’s style of playing in “Hi Fly” and Knight’s poem: Knight’s “For Eric Dolphy”

Feinstein’s interpretation:

on flute spinning spinning spinning love thru/ out the universe

In the poem “For Eric Dolphy,” Knight refers to the gyrating quality of Dolphy’s fluteplaying style and adds extra spacing between the words, almost as though approximating the breath between phrases. The lines of the poem are extremely short, often just one word by itself, and so we read quickly yet emphasize each word much like Dolphy’s staccato phrasing. The third stanza breaks that rhythm with the longer line that concludes with the capitalized “LOVE,” followed by a still longer line that ends with the vertical spelling of “doing.” The verticality of the word creates a corner on the page, like the corner where the speaker must sit, and this technique extends the poem visually and thematically: We have to pause at the line, at the thought, before forcing our eyes to find where we left off and where the new phrase begins, and yet we have little trouble pausing at the end of a phrase and emphasizing the proper stresses in the lines.

i know exactly what chew mean man you like titi my sister who never expressed LOVE in words (like the white folks always she would sit in the corner and cry everytime ah got a whuppin (Knight, “For Eric Dolphy” 54; also qtd. in Feinstein 1997: 3)

d o i n g

(Feinstein 1997: 4)

Feinstein’s view of “For Eric Dolphy” as a jazz-informed poem enables him to identify several similarities between it and Dolphy’s way of playing a solo: for instance, he states that the poem (presumably its form and repetition of “spinning”) “refers to the gyrating quality of Dolphy’s flute-playing style” (4) and the short lines are “like Dolphy’s staccato phrasing” (4; italics mine). It also permits him to notice the

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capitalized noun “LOVE” and describe his associations triggered by the vertical spelling of “doing.” These are excellent observations, yet they reveal Feinstein’s neglect of the poem’s metaphorical dimension: While he perceives the short lines as (like) “Dolphy’s staccato phrasing” (Feinstein 1997: 4), Knight uses short lines such as “through,” the dash, and the space in “thru/ out” to convey that readers need to imagine the line as part of a fast solo with a sudden break.¹⁰ Likewise, Feinstein notices the capitalization of “LOVE” but neglects to point out that it might allow the reader to identify the word’s literal meaning while asking the reader to perceive it as a loud note played by Eric Dolphy. Feinstein overlooks that Knight’s poem requires readers’ imaginative participation. It all boils down to the difference between simile and metaphor: Feinstein regards the parallels between Knight’s poem and Dolphy’s jazz style as similes rather than as metaphorical correspondences. For him, the poem displays certain similarities to Dolphy’s music, but he does not move beyond this perspective and detect the poem’s metaphorical dimension: metaphorically, it’s a Dolphy solo. Feinstein likewise underanalyzes the musical dimension in his interpretation of Carl Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia.” He first mentions that it “has been ridiculed in recent criticism for its corny use of language and poorly conceived metaphors” and, agreeing with the severe critique, he states that “[v]arious passages seem to be improvisatory notes scribbled on cocktail napkins, and the flux of images clashes like the sound of a drumset thrown from a second story window” (Feinstein 1997: 26). Despite his overall negative view, he praises it for being inspired by slavery, blues, and especially urban violence. Thus he resorts to “information” to explain the poem and not to imagination: But it seems too easy and unfair to dismiss this poem entirely. “Jazz Fantasia” deserves praise for its energy and, even more so, for its endorsement of this controversial form of expression [i.e. jazz]. In an effort to conjure the images of slavery and southern blues, Sandburg weaved in the line “now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo,” but he also implied how violence has inspired the music and encouraged that sound: “make two people fight / on the top of a stairway and scratch each other’s eyes / in a clinch tumbling down the stairs” (Complete, 179). The violence of jazz reflected the age of urban upheaval, and Sandburg, as he did in so many of his poems, tried to celebrate and not flinch from these revolutionary changes. (26)

10 Kernfeld defines “break” as “a brief solo passage occurring during an interruption in the accompaniment, usually lasting one or two bars and maintaining the underlying rhythm and harmony of the piece” (Kernfeld, “Break”).

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In contrast to Feinstein’s literal interpretation, I suggest a figurative reading: the title “Jazz Fantasia” indicates that readers are supposed to interpret it as an imaginary performance in which the speaker instructs musicians to play hot jazz that first sounds like two people fighting and tumbling down the stairs and then shift to a smooth melody that sounds like “a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo.” In this view, the poem’s images are metaphors that should be imagined in terms of jazz. Feinstein, however, neglects the poem’s metaphorical possibilities and interprets it literally.¹¹ Feinstein’s underlying mimetic view of the relationship between jazz music and poetry is also clear in his disapproving critique of William Carlos Williams’s effort of writing “Ol’ Bunk’s Band.” According to Feinstein, “Williams tried to capture verbally the jagged, energetic trumpet lines: These are men! the gaunt, unfore- / sold, and vocal, / blatant” (1997: 63–64), but Williams’s attempt failed: Williams tried to accentuate the rhythmic qualities of jazz, but instead he enthusiastically scripted some disastrous lines, among them “drum drum drum drum drum / drum, drum!” and “torn, tears, term, / town, tense.” Like many poets to follow, he seemed unaware of the limitations of language to capture sound, and because the primary goal was to capture the rhythmic spirit of jazz, the poem as a whole fails to engage. (64)

Feinstein’s argument that Williams, like many other jazz poets, was oblivious to “the limitations of language to capture sound” and consequently failed in his endeavor, highlights his practice of interpreting some jazz-informed poems as unconvincing imitations of music. Instead of linking lines such as “drum drum drum drum drum” – which clearly suggest music – with other lines or phrases that ask for a musical imagination, Feinstein calls them “some disastrous lines” and seemingly dismisses that the poem tries to convey a hot drum rhythm and uses clashing images such as “ancient cry, escaping crapulence / eats through” (Williams 1986: 149) to reinforce the music’s ‘wildness’. Ultimately, the mimetic perspective prevents Feinstein from integrating Williams’s sole jazz poem “Ol Bunk’s Band” into the larger context of Modernism, when many (white) poets like Williams and e.e. cummings were inspired by jazz and regarded it as a source for creative, synesthetic experiments.¹²

11 For a detailed interpretation of Sandburg’s poem “Jazz Fantasia,” see Chapter 4.4.4. 12 Please see my comments on Williams’s poem “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” in Chapter 4.9.

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T.J. Anderson’s approach echoes Feinstein’s. Anderson changes his definition of jazz poetry from “informed by jazz music” (Feinstein 1997: 2) to “jazz-influenced poetry” (Anderson 2004: 3) and “[p]oetry that is informed by a jazz aesthetic” (7). Like Feinstein, Anderson is more concerned with contextualizing the poems than with analyzing their respective intermedial relations to the music. In his introduction to Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry, he postutlates that the titular innovators – Bob Kaufman, Stephen Jonas, Jayne Cortez, and Nathaniel Mackey – wrote work “strongly informed by a jazz aesthetic” (Anderson 2004: 2). His purpose, he asserts, is to examine the way jazz has been expressed in the poetry of these writers and to critique the jazz poem’s role in the transmission of African American culture. These particular poets have been instrumental in terms of bringing new and innovative methods to the creative and performative aspects of the “jazz poem,” and they are especially significant because their work spans a period (1960-90) during which jazz was undergoing tremendous changes. From bebop to free jazz to fusion, Kaufman, Jonas, Cortez, and Mackey all manage to skillfully create poetry rooted in an African American aesthetic that mirrors and responds to the challenges and subsequent changes that have occurred in the music. (2)

He also examines “the link between uses of distinctly African rhythms to diasporic discourse” (2) and offers general information about the jazz-informed poetry written by the four black poets (Chapter 3 to 6). In addition, he discusses the “The Jazz Impulse in Poetry” (Chapter 1), but rarely interprets a specific poem, except for Paul Blackburn’s “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” (see above). At first it seems that Anderson is concerned about the poet’s creative response to jazz, as he sees parallels between its improvisation and the poet’s “creation of poetry, particularly if the poet is responding to a piece of music” (Anderson 2004: 18). He considers Blackburn’s poem as an example of a response to music, but the reader is reminded of Feinstein’s view when Anderson states that the poet “captures the cadence of a Rollins interpretation of the standard ‘There Will Never Be Another You’” (18). After presenting the poem (left column), he briefly discusses the relationship between the poem and Rollins’s music (right column):

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Paul Blackburn, “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” (1964)

Anderson’s interpretation of the poem:

THERE WILL be many other nights like be standing here with someone, some one someone some-one some some some some some some one there will be other songs a-nother fall, another—spring, but there will never be a-noth, noth anoth noth anoth-er noth-er noth-er Other lips that I may kiss, but they won’t thrill me like thrill me like like yours used to dream a million dreams but how can they come when there never be a-noth—

The poem manages to simultaneously evoke the original sentimentality of the song’s lyrics and re-create the repetition of Rollins’s tonal variations. Thus, by emphasizing sound through the placement of word fragments and single words on separate lines, Blackburn is able to construct a poetic narrative that achieves both performance and textual unity. Additionally, the nonlinear appearance of the poem, particularly in the final lines, creates a visual shape that replicates the fluidity and sensuality of Rollins’s voicings. (Anderson 2004: 19; boldface mine)

(Blackburn, “Listening” 316)

Like Feinstein, Anderson makes valuable observations about jazz poetry – in this case Blackburn’s jazz poem – and, like Feinstein, he reads it mimetically without noticing that it metaphorically pretends to be a saxophone solo along the lines of Sonny Rollins. Also problematic is the analysis’s lack of specifics: Anderson points out that the poem “re-create[s] the repetition of Rollins’s tonal variations” and that its non-linear shape “replicates the fluidity and sensuality of Rollins’s voicings” (Anderson 2004: 19). However, the poem offers many more correspondences to Rollins’s style of improvisation (e.g., his characteristic ‘stuttering’,

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breaking up of melodic lines, irregular phrase lengths, and pauses).¹³ Apparently a few unspecific remarks on the “jazz-influenced” poem seem sufficient to Anderson, who touches upon the poem’s relation to Rollins’s jazz performance without digging into the creative ways the poet devised a Rollins’s version of “There Will Never Be Another You.”¹⁴ Anderson’s cursory treatments of jazz poems occur throughout the study. After a brief historical overview of jazz poetry in Chapter 2, he devotes Chapter 3 to Kaufman’s jazz-inspired poetry.¹⁵ At first, he sketches the origins of scat singing – that is, “[a] technique of jazz singing in which onomatopoetic and nonsense syllables are sung to improvised melodies” (Robinson, “Scat singing”) – and then claims that “scat, to some extent, and vocalese [vocal improvisation with lyrics] played an important role in influencing the poetry of Kaufman and his contemporaries” (Anderson 2004: 70). Subsequently, Anderson examines Kaufman’s biography “to gain insight into Kaufman’s appropriation of jazz materials” (71). For instance, he remarks that Kaufman traveled together with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs from New York to San Francisco where Kaufman, like other avant-garde writers, frequented San Francisco’s North Beach jazz clubs and coffee houses (73). Anderson furthermore points out that “[f]rom 1958 to 1959, Kaufman booked musicians at the Jazz Workshop on Broadway and North Beach because the owner did not know anything about jazz” (73). Having substantiated Kaufman’s acquaintance with jazz and its musicians, he turns his attention to the writer’s jazz-inspired poems, but again on a rather general level. According to Anderson, the first important collection of Kaufman’s poetic works, Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness (1965), “contains several poems that make use of jazz in a variety of ways” (Anderson 2004: 75). He calls some of the works “lyrical poems” and cites the last strophe of “Walking Parker Home,” for it demonstrates “how Kaufman had become a master in capturing the lyrical qualities of the music and bringing them to bear in his poetry” (76):

13 For a more detailed interpretation of Blackburn’s “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” see Chapter 3. 14 The poet and critic Nathaniel Mackey also neglects the imaginative dimension of Blackburn’s poem when he briefly treats the poem in the article “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol,” in which he refers to Sonny Rollins’s “stutterlike teasings of a tune, a quality Paul Blackburn imitates in ‘Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five Spot’ [sic]” (Mackey, “Sound” 46; italics mine). 15 Anderson discusses some of the same jazz poets, such as Langston Hughes, Melvin B. Tolson, and Jack Kerouac, as Feinstein but includes other poets – not treated by Feinstein – as well. Like Feinstein, he harshly criticizes William Carlos Williams’s attempt at verbally rendering jazz in “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” (Anderson 2004: 42–44). He thus extends the emerging ‘canon’ of jazz writers and reinforces Feinstein’s negative evaluation of Williams’s poem.

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In that Jazz corner of life Wrapped in a mist of sound His Legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams Inviting the nerveless to feel once more That fierce dying of humans consumed In raging fires of Love. (Kaufmann, “Walking Parker Home” 102)

Without analyzing the final strophe’s lyrical quality or mentioning the preceding lines’ abrupt rhythmic subdivisions, such as “Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/” (102), he continues his treatment of Kaufman’s use of jazz in poetry: “There are several poems that celebrate jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker, Ray Charles, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins” (Anderson 2004: 76). As an example he cites the poem “Mingus,” which “attempts to capture the musical essence of bassist and composer Charles Mingus” (76): String-chewing bass players Plucking rolled balls of sound From the jazz-scented night. Feeding hungry beat seekers Finger-shaped heartbeats, Driving ivory nails Into their greedy eyes. Smoke crystals, from the nostrils Of released jazz demons, Crash from foggy yesterday To the light Of imaginary night. (Kaufmann, “Mingus” 27)

Rather than showing where precisely the poem “attempts to capture the musical essence” of Mingus, Anderson mentions two more categories of jazz poems, namely the “experimental poems” such as “Jazz Te Deum for Inhaling at Mexican Bonfires” and “Cincophrenicpoet,” which “abandon the conventional linear form” (76), and the “surreal poems” such as “Battle Report” (76). After presenting the first strophe of “Battle Report,” he concludes his treatment by embedding Kaufman’s references to jazz in an African American socio-political context: “Throughout the collection, Kaufman makes numerous references to jazz music, thus indicating its importance toward his political and social vision of African American culture” (77).

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The other chapters are similarly structured: Anderson first presents biographical data on the respective poet to establish a link between the writer and jazz music and occasionally mentions “references to jazz music” (Anderson 77) in selected inspired poems. The factual information about a poet’s inspiration by a great musician is seen as the poet’s motivation to capture such greatness. But, this approach, like Feinstein’s, does not offer a close examination of the poets’ intermedial creativity.

2.2.2 David Yaffe’s Worship of Jazz and Dismissal of Jazz Poetry While Wolf, Feinstein, and Anderson intend to give credit to literature that is indebted to music, Yaffe outright dismisses jazz poetry that he interprets as competing with jazz music. Although his Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing (2006) is dedicated to jazz music and he is an engaging analyst of jazz, Yaffe’s using a farcical interpretation of a short story that is related to jazz to give his book a resounding initial point is problematic, especially as he reveals appreciation for Langston Hughes later in Chapter 3. Yaffe’s parody of jazz writings relies on a passage from Donald Barthelme’s short story “The King of Jazz,” in which an anonymous jazz aficionado employs a catalog of absurd similes to describe a breathtaking solo played by the trombonist Hokie Mokie: “You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like [a] herd of musk in full flight?” (Barthelme 1990: 237). But then Yaffe makes a serious point by comparing the aficionado’s ludicrous responses to jazz to “the folly of jazz writing” (1): “With each simile more useless than the last, Barthelme demonstrates the pomposity, hubris, and failure of language when it is applied to jazz” (2). For Yaffe, written transcriptions of jazz will always prove to be inadequate representations of the music. But as he does not want to simply dismiss jazz poetry, he includes a discussion of it in Chapter 3 where he intends to investigate “whether jazz-inspired poems can sufficiently address the poetics of jazz” (11). Yet instead of analyzing selected poems directly, he talks about the ability to produce such poems and argues that there are two types of poets, those “on the inside” of jazz music and those “outside” it (105). He is convinced that, to produce a jazz poem, a poet has to have a feel for and know the music. Yaffe later argues that Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens attempted to write jazz poems even though they had little knowledge of the “problematic muse”:

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It is not surprising that Crane and Stevens would not have the same understanding of jazz as those who regularly took in sets, listened to records, even talked and worked with musicians; what is surprising is that they tried to write jazz poetry at all. When poets wrote in empathy with jazz musicians, they spoke for the select few who understood the music, and it made sense that, say, the Black Arts movement embraced jazz. The jazz poems of Crane and Stevens reveal that the minstrel show was not confined to the vaudeville stage: in order to write poems of their climate, they had to engage in high modernist minstrelsy. (2006: 102)

Without any first-hand knowledge of jazz, Crane and Stevens, he claims, engaged in “high modernist minstrelsy” and created “poetic misreadings of jazz” (102). Yaffe denies them any ability to transpose jazz because they did not really understand the music. They were “stomping the muse,” to use the main title of Chapter 3, when they tried to render jazz in writing. Yaffe later provides a more detailed account of Crane’s failure to find a suitable language for jazz. He cites a May 16, 1922, letter from Crane to Allen Tate in which Crane bids his friend to “invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!” (qtd. in Yaffe 2006: 106). According to Yaffe, however, Crane was far removed from the music: “Despite jazz’s appealing immediacy for Crane, ironically he can only get to the music through layers upon layers of mediation and arcane reference” (107). Crane’s distance to jazz, Yaffe contends, is reflected in his early poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” in which a first-person narrator finds himself “in a jazz garden party with a soundtrack provided by minstrel-like angelic figures invoking revelry and ecstasy” (110): Brazen hypnotics glitter here; Glee shifts from foot to foot, Magnetic to their tremulo. This crashing opéra bouffe, Blest excursion! this ricochet From roof to roof— Know, Olympians, we are breathless While nigger cupids scour the stars! (qtd. in Yaffe 2006: 110)

“As rhapsodic as these lines are,” Yaffe states, “Crane never lets us forget the many layers of remove that exists between the poet and the subject” (110). He asserts that Crane employs his “rhapsodic language” to promote the record which would better “capture” the phenomenon called jazz:

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The transposition really will not do justice to preserving this phenomenon, and Crane uses his rhapsodic language to hype the medium that would in many ways displace the textual centrality of the modernist poetry in which Crane thrived: the record industry (“The siren of the springs of guilty song – / Let us take her on the incandescent wax / Striated with nuances, nervosities / That we are heir to”). That “incandescent wax” “striated” with grooves would end up replacing text as the medium that would best capture the phenomenon Crane was recounting. (Yaffe 2006: 111)

Yaffe perceives Crane as a visionary poet who imagined a future time period “when jazz records actually could begin to capture the spontaneous excitement he yearned to transpose into words” (112). He claims, in short, that Crane envisioned a mechanical transposition of jazz in his poetic lines that would no longer trample on the muse. Yaffe’s line of argument does not require him to engage in detailed analyses of jazz poems. He identifies poetic inspiration with being “inside” music (cf., 115). While a feel for jazz might indeed by a prerequisite for a jazz poet, his notion of “stomping the muse” indicates that the muse can only be found in the music and any poem would have to live up to the musical standard. Yaffe later posits Crane’s poetic renderings of jazz against those of Langston Hughes. “If Crane came to jazz poetry from the outside,” he maintains, “Hughes came to it on the inside” (Yaffe 2006: 115). Unlike Crane, Hughes had an intimate knowledge of the music and worked together with jazz musicians such as Charles Mingus. This knowledge not only helped Hughes to write blues poems: “As a poet whose verse adapted the twelve-bar blues for a distinctive AAB six-line stanzaic structure as early as 1926, Hughes showed poets that the blues could be a basis for poetry” (120). It also helped him transcend the limitations of language: “But when Hughes took on, say, the blues as a subject, he didn’t merely write about the blues, he wrote the blues itself ” (124; emphasis mine). Unlike Crane, whose distance from jazz resulted in inadequate verbal transpositions of it, Hughes’s proximity to jazz, especially the blues, allowed him to create a “direct representation” (124) of the music. No wonder Yaffe’s ideal jazz poem is written by an absolute insider: “The most successful jazz poetry results when the music has been, in the words of Keats, ‘proved upon the pulse,’ when it has become so internalized, the poet no longer needs to transpose at all” (149). Accordingly, he can refrain from examining the intermedial relationship between jazz music and poetry written by insiders. Yaffee thus reasserts his view that the ultimate goal of jazz poetry must be to accomplish a rendering of music that is equal to the original. Yaffe’s prioritization of music, in conjunction with his emphasis on the inadequacy of verbal transcriptions of jazz, results in his disregard of the poetry’s literary qualities. He fails to show in the context of an actual poem how a poet reveals that he is “inside” jazz music, and he does not discuss the potential goal of inter-

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medial creation. If the ultimate goal is pure music, then any intermedial attempt at rendering music must per se be impure. Again, his fixation on one medium only allows him to see jazz poems as being secondary to the genuine source. While insisting on discovering musicality in jazz poems, he has no suggestion for analysis other than the poet’s insider-status. Yaffe, like Wolf, Feinstein, Anderson, pays little attention to the concrete literary renderings of music – and especially to the poet’s endeavor of guiding the reader to an aesthetic experience of imagining music metaphorically.

3 Metaphor: Intermedial Translation as a Metaphorical Process As shown in the preceding chapter, the major drawback of current criticism is the mimetic perception of jazz poems, which leads to reductive analyses of literary renderings of music. In this chapter I will therefore probe a new approach to jazz poetry by mainly relying on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (and Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier’s Blending Theory) which describes relations between two different domains not as literal resemblances of inherent features but as metaphorical correspondences in which one domain is conceptualized in terms of the other. I intend to demonstrate that their theory helps to understand the intermedial relationship between music and writing in several ways. First, the mimetic view of jazz-writing relations is a conceptual metaphor – that is, the process of understanding the intermedial relationship between jazz music and writing in terms of mimesis is a conceptual metaphor, which allows for the detection of jazz imitations in jazz poems. Second, the conceptualization of the jazz-writing relationship in terms of metaphor helps critics to move beyond the limited mimetic view, as it can be used to explain ‘literal’ (or ‘mimetic’ relations between jazz music and poetry) and figurative ones. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory helps highlight similarities between jazz music and jazz poems as metaphorical correspondences, which can be read literally and figuratively, and it allows the reader to envisage the music metaphorically.¹⁶ Despite its usefulness in several respects, it does not account for the intermedial process of transforming one medium into another one. Many jazz poems, however, are the product of transforming music into writing.

16 Eric Prieto, like Wolf and Rajewsky, regards ‘music’ and ‘literature’ as two distinct media, but, unlike them, he claims that the relationship between the two media is purely metaphorical. In the first chapter of his study Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (2002) entitled “Music, Mimesis, and Metaphor,” he argues that “there can be no literal contact between music and literature short of the actual superimposition of the two, as in song, opera, and the like. Barring this situation of mutual supplementarity, the only relationship that can obtain between music and literature is a metaphorical one” (17). Like Wolf et al., he perceives ‘literature’ as a medium and not ‘writing’ and sees the dichotomous relationship between ‘music’ and ‘literature’ as a metaphorical rather than a mimetic one. His view of the musico-literary relationship, however, leads him to explore metaphorical interart analogies and actually prevents him from examining concrete transformations of one medium into another one (see also Regina Schrober’s critique of Prieto’s claims in her study Unexpected Chords: Musico-Poetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics (2011) 64–65). DOI 10.1515/9783110339017-003

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I will introduce the Master Metaphor Translation which will help to explore the immense variety of intermedial translations found in jazz poetry.¹⁷ Lakoff and Johnson attained international recognition when they proclaimed in Metaphors We Live By (1980) that metaphors are a conceptual phenomenon in which an abstract concept like “love” is understood in terms of another, more concrete concept like “journey,” as in “We are at a crossroads of our relationship.” They refer to such linguistic statements as “metaphorical linguistic expressions” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 7) and claim that metaphorical linguistic expressions make manifest the underlying “conceptual metaphors” (246). To describe a conceptual metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson developed the conventionalized format of using small capitals for the whole metaphor: for instance, love is a journey. The first term, love, represents the target domain to be understood, and the second term, journey, stands for the source domain, in terms of which the target domain is understood. Overall, the following sections will examine the explanatory power of applying Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor to jazz poems, specifically to Blackburn’s poem “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the FiveSpot,” but they will also discuss the limitations of their theory and suggest several ‘remedies’ in order to enhance the explanatory power of the essentially valuable Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The first section (3.1) present Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory and its innovative emphasis on the conceptual nature of establishing metaphorical correspondences between one domain and another. In the second section (3.2), the Conceptual Metaphor Theory will be applied to the study of jazz poems. Its explanatory power will be tested in the study of Blackburn’s poem to examine intermedial conceptual metaphors. I will show that the superordinate metaphor jazz music is jazz poetry informs a number of submetaphors in Blackburn’s poem that shed light on his cognitive process of envisioning jazz through graphic variations detectable in the poem’s form.

17 Regina Schrober also uses the expression “intermedial translation” in her study Unexpected Chords: Musico-Poetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics (2011). I became aware of her use of the term “intermedial translation” a few years after I finished my ‘Habilitation’project (Ger. Habilitationsschrift). Following the footsteps of Wolf and Rajewsky, she devises a tripartite typology of musico-poetic intermediality: (inter)medial conceptualization, intermedial translation, and modal intersections. She defines “intermedial translation” as “the process of representing any medial ‘text’ by means of another medium” (77). Highlighting the aspect of transformation, I use the term “intermedial translation” to denote the process of transforming music into writing and, reversely, the process of transforming writing into music. I furthermore define the process of intermedial translation as a metaphorical one in which music is understood in terms of writing and vice versa (see my explanations below).

3.1 The Domain conceptual metaphor theory: The Basic Tenets |

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Additionally, I claim that the ‘application’ of a theory to a text is itself a conceptual metaphor. When we ‘apply’ a theory to a text we actually conceptualize the target domain text in terms of the source domain theory. Following Lakoff and Johnson’s assertion that a conceptual metaphor always highlights several aspects while hiding others, I will illustrate in section two (3.2) that the metaphor text is theory highlights several aspects of a literary text while it hides others. This change of perspective from ‘application’ to ‘metaphorical conceptualization’ requires a rephrasing of my aims in the first two sections of Chapter 3: in the first section (3.1), I will define Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor as the domain conceptual metaphor theory and present its basic tenets. In section two (3.2), I will proceed from the source domain theory to the target domain text and establish metaphorical correspondences between the two domains. In the third section (3.3), I suggest that the reversal of the metaphor text is theory will reveal a text’s additional metaphorical and non-metaphorical aspects. Instead of proceeding from theory to text, I will proceed from text to theory and substantiate the technique of reversing the two terms of the metaphor text is theory.¹⁸ To explain the intermedial communication process, I supplement Lakoff and Johnson’s theory with another metaphor for “conceptual metaphor” in the fourth section of Chapter 3 (3.4) and introduce a new method in which I will inscribe the two domains text and theory into a differential play and add the metaphors theory is theory and text is text to the repertoire of the two meta-level metaphors text is theory and theory is text. As material for the metaphoric play, I use texts ranging from antiquity to modernity as well as linguistic and literary theories and, at times, illustrate the explanatory power of the emerging communication model of translation in brief interpretations of Blackburn’s jazz poem.

3.1 The Domain conceptual metaphor theory: The Basic Tenets As Lakoff puts it in his often-reprinted article “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” “the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another” (Lakoff 2007: 267). Specifically, a conceptual metaphor consists of two “conceptual domains,” that

18 Cf., Jacques Derrida’s critical theory of deconstruction, which he introduced in Of Grammatology (1967). For a general introduction to Derrida’s theory of deconstruction and his terminology (e.g., “différance”), see Norris 1982 and Culler 1985.

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is, a “target domain” and a “source domain,” and constitutes the process of understanding the target domain in terms of the source domain. Each conceptual domain encompasses a coherent organization of human experience. Typically, the target domain’s entities are abstract concepts – love, ideas, and argument – whereas the source domain’s are more concrete (or structured) ones: journey, money, and war. An example of the cognitive process of understanding love in terms of journey are the “metaphorical linguistic expressions” that document the underlying conceptual metaphor: love is a journey Look how far we’ve come. We’re at a crossroads. We’ll just have to go our separate ways. We can’t turn back now. It’s been a long, bumpy road. (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 44)

Note that the conventional format “A is B” or target domain is source domain (small capitals) refers to a conceptual metaphor (here: love is a journey) and that the metaphorical linguistic expressions are placed in italics underneath the conceptual metaphor. They represent surface realizations of the process of understanding the target domain love in terms of the more structured source domain journey. But how does the cognitive process of “understanding A in terms of B” work? Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor is again useful. The first point they make is that every metaphor involves the process of establishing a set of systematic correspondences between two conceptual domains. They use the Mapping Metaphor to describe such correspondences as “cross-domain mappings” or “metaphorical mappings” (Lakoff and Johnson, “Afterword, 2003” 246). In “It’s been a long, bumpy road,” for instance, the italicized portion literally refers to a long journey (in the spatial sense) with some obstacles. Within the context of people talking about love, however, the same expression means that the lovers have had a long relationship (in the temporal sense) and experienced various difficulties. Thus “long, bumpy road” represents an individual realization of the more general love is a journey and manifests the metaphorical correspondence between “the obstacles encountered” and “the difficulties experienced.” Zoltán Kövecses provides a set of systematic correspondences (or mappings) between the conceptual domain love and the conceptual domain journey in his book Metaphor: A Practical Introduction:

3.1 The Domain conceptual metaphor theory: The Basic Tenets |

Source: journey the travelers the vehicle the journey the distance covered the obstacles encountered decisions about which way to go The destination of the journey

→ → → → → → →

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Target: love the lovers the love relationship itself events in the relationship the progress made the difficulties experienced choices about what to do the goal(s) of the relationship

(Kövecses 2002: 7)

The second point Lakoff and Johnson make about conceptual metaphors is that such mappings are “unidirectional.” The convention of portraying a set of systematic correspondences as mappings of constituent elements from a source domain to constituent elements of a target domain with an arrow (see above) indicates the unidirectionality of the conceptual process. While people conceptualize love in terms of journey, they do not conventionally understand journey in terms of love: that is, they can perceive ‘lovers’ as ‘travelers’ but not ‘travelers’ as ‘lovers’ (Evans and Green 2006: 296–297). Thirdly, Lakoff and Johnson refer to conceptual metaphors such as love is a journey as “structural metaphors” (2003: 14), since the more concrete source domain partially structures the target domain. Love did not have the pattern of journey before the process of understanding love in terms of journey. Rather, it inherits the structure of a journey only via the mapping of a systematic set of elements from the source domain onto the target domain. Yet this metaphorical structuring is asymmetric and partial, not total: “If it were total, one concept would actually be the other, not merely be understood in terms of it” (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors 13; emphasis in original). Lakoff and Johnson assert that a conceptual metaphor highlights certain aspects of the target domain while it simultaneously hides others. For instance, the metaphor love is a journey highlights aspects of love related to a journey, but it hides aspects of love not related to a journey such as madness (“I’m crazy about her.”), magic (“She cast her spell over me.”), and war (“He is known for his many rapid conquests.”). Such aspects of love can be highlighted with other conceptual metaphors: for instance, love is madness, love is magic, and love is war (49). As Evans and Green put it, “metaphor can perspectivise a concept or conceptual domain” (Evans and Green 2006: 325). Lakoff and Johnson also claim that human thought is largely structured by a highly conventionalized metaphorical system. They observed that, depending on the degree of conventionality, conceptual metaphors are more or less deeply entrenched in human thought. If, for instance, a conceptual metaphor is highly conventional, then it is deeply ingrained in human thought processes and therefore happens mostly unconsciously and almost automatically. Both cognitive linguists

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argue that highly conventionalized metaphors such as love is a journey, time is money, and argument is war govern the way people reason and act in everyday life. They assert that conceptual metaphor allows inferences in sensory-motor domains (e.g., domains of space and objects) to be used to draw inferences about other domains (e.g., domains of subjective judgment, with concepts like intimacy, emotions, justice, and so on). Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives. (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 244)

Consciously or not, people often utilize one conceptual domain to reason about another one and structure their actions accordingly. Lakoff and Johnson’s argument about the human mind is very far-reaching, because it means that conceptual metaphors not only permeate our thinking in everyday life but also in cultural creations such as literary texts. Furthermore, Lakoff and Johnson link human thinking with human experience. They claim that conceptual metaphors are grounded in people’s everyday experiences with the world. For instance, the metaphor more is up, which underlies conventional linguistic metaphors such as “Prices rose” and “Stocks plummeted,” arises from the ubiquitous experience that an increase in quantity results in an increase in height. Such correlations between quantity and height give rise to conceptualizations of quantity in terms of height, as in the metaphor more is up. Following Joseph Grady’s theory of primary metaphor, who argues that primary metaphors arise from pre-conceptual bodily experiences and constitute building blocks for more complex conceptual metaphors, and Srini Narayanan’s neural theory of metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson assert that all conceptual metaphors are grounded in “embodied” experience (usually referred to as “embodied-mind hypothesis” or “embodied cognition”): “Our claim is […] that the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 37). In short, mind and metaphors are embodied. Cognitive linguists such as Lakoff, Johnson, and Mark Turner refer to the conceptual metaphors found in literature, which, they assert, represent extensions of our everyday conceptual system. In More Than Cool Reason (1987), Lakoff and Turner analyze several poetic texts such as Emily Dickinson’s “I Could Not Stop For Death” and Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 “That Time Of Year Thou Mayst In Me Behold” and demonstrate that the examined literary texts document the author’s creative combination of multiple basic metaphors: Dickinson’s poem manifests a complex composite metaphor which consists of a lifetime is a day, people are plants, and death is going to a final destination (Lakoff and Turner 1989: 4–8). Summing up the findings of the study, Lakoff and Johnson state:

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The analysis revealed an anatomy of imagination: new metaphorical ideas – that is, new ways of organizing and understanding experience – arise from the combination of simpler conceptual metaphors to form complex ones. Consequently, innovation and novelty are not miraculous; they do not come out of nowhere. They are built using the tools of everyday metaphorical thought, as well as other commonplace conceptual mechanisms. (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 251)

Novel metaphors include what Lakoff and Turner call “image-metaphors” or “image-based metaphors” as well. They define these as “one-shot” metaphors whereby people map one mental image onto another one. They cite André Breton’s line “My wife […] whose waist is an hourglass” and contend that the conceptual metaphor represents “a superimposition of the image of an hourglass onto the image of a woman’s waist by virtue of their common shape” (Lakoff and Turner 1989: 90). Both mental images display a common structure that permits the conceptual mapping of the hourglass onto the woman’s waist. Furthermore, the cognitive linguists distinguish the concept of “image schemas” from “image-based metaphors” and define the former as general structures (and not as rich mental images) which, following Johnson’s study on pre-conceptual “image schemas” in The Body in the Mind (1987), develop (or “emerge”) due to our interaction with the external world and give rise to more specific conceptual representations: the image schema container results from the recurrent experience of “containers” in our everyday life, such as rooms, wardrobes, and clothing, and consists of the properties interior, boundary, and exterior. In turn, it gives rise to more specific conceptual realizations such as “I am in the bedroom,” “I took my pants out of the wardrobe,” and “I climbed into my pants,” in which the prepositions in, into, and out manifest the abstract container schema.¹⁹ Lakoff and Johnson make several other claims, but the most relevant here is the distinction between “objective similarities” and “experiential similarities,” which the cognitive linguists introduce in Metaphors We Live By to emphasize the difference between their conceptual theory of metaphor and other theories. For objectivists, they claim, “similarities are objective, that is, they are similarities inherent in the entities themselves” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 154). For the cognitive linguists, however, “conceptual metaphors are grounded in correlations

19 For an excellent introduction to the notion of “image schemas,” see chapter 6.1 “Image schemas” in Evans and Green 2006: 177–190. See also Lakoff’s detailed discussion of “image schemas” in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (2006), 271–280, and Tim Rohrer’s essay “Image Schemata in the Brain” in From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics (2005), 165–198.

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within our experience” (154–155; their emphasis). Lakoff and Turner discuss the well-known linguistic metaphor “Achilles is a lion” in More Than Cool Reason: Cases like “Achilles is a lion” have given rise to a false general theory of metaphor, the similarity theory, which claims that metaphor consists in the highlighting of similarities. Metaphorical expressions like “Achilles is a lion” are commonly taken to be support for the similarity theory on these grounds: the sentence maintains that Achilles is similar to a lion with respect to what we take to be a property of the lion, its “courage.” For this argument to work, the “courage” of the lion would have to be “the same literal property” as the “courage” of Achilles. But we have claimed that, literally, lions do not have human courage; they have an instinctive behavior that we understand metaphorically in terms of human courage. The literal similarity that is claimed for the “courage” of Achilles and the lion is actually metaphorical similarity. (Lakoff and Turner 1989: 198)

Proponents of the similarity theory, thus, mistake the metaphorical similarity for the literal. Lakoff and Johnson maintain that “[i]n general, similarities do exist, but they cannot be based on inherent properties. The similarities arise as a result of conceptual metaphors and thus must be considered similarities of interactional, rather than inherent properties” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 215; their italics). In contrast to literal similarities, metaphorical correspondences have an experiential basis.

3.2 text is theory: Understanding Paul Blackburn’s Jazz Poem in Terms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory The process of ‘applying’ a theory to a text is a conceptual metaphor. The target domain is text, the source domain is theory, and the conceptual metaphor is text is theory. Critics proceed from theory and establish metaphorical correspondences (“mappings”) between it and text. Text is theory allows for a partial understanding of text by highlighting several of its aspects. The metaphorical procedure ends when the theory offers no more correspondences between the two domains. In this case, the critics have reached the point where they have exhausted the theory’s explanatory power. I will demonstrate the partial explicatory power of text is theory by understanding Blackburn’s jazz poem “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” in terms of Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor: paul blackburn’s jazz poem “listening to sonny rollins at the five-spot” is conceptual metaphor theory. The conceptual metaphor will clarify metaphorical aspects of Blackburn’s poem.

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First, the metaphor reveals Blackburn’s poem as an individual realization of the conceptual metaphor jazz music is a jazz poem. The cognitive procedure involves establishing a system of correspondences between the two domains (or “cross-domain mappings”) jazz music and jazz poem and produces a linguistic metaphorical expression, namely the poem (see left column below), which makes manifest Blackburn’s conceptual metaphor sonny rollins’s style of improvisation is paul blackburn’s jazz poem “listening to sonny rollins at the five-spot”: “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” (1964)

Conceptual Metaphors:

THERE WILL be many other nights like be standing here with someone, some one someone some-one some some some some some some one there will be other songs a-nother fall, another—spring, but there will never be a-noth, noth anoth noth anoth-er noth-er noth-er Other lips that I may kiss, but they won’t thrill me like thrill me like like yours used to dream a million dreams but how can they come when there never be a-noth—

forte is upper case (e.g., “THERE WILL”) “normal” dynamics is lower case a two-note tonal variation is a two-syllable variation (e.g., “some / one / someone”)

(Blackburn, “Listening” 316)

legato is a dash (e.g., “another—spring”)

staccato is a hyphen (e.g., “anoth-er / noth-er / noth-er”) a musical pause (hesitancy) is a visual gap (e.g., noth-er / Other lips that I may kiss”)

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The conceptual metaphor also permits critics to recognize the submetaphors of Blackburn’s poem (see right column above). Blackburn connected Rollins’s way of beginning his solo with a loud intro and the capitalization of the first two words of the poem. As such, he mapped the constituent element of writing (upper case) onto the Rollins’s style of starting a solo with loud musical notes. Hence Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor allows for perceiving the jazz poem as a “metaphorical linguistic expression,” which is the result of conceptual metaphors – and not as the product of a mimetic process. This view of the poem as a conceptual metaphor sheds additional light on the difference between mimetic and metaphorical interpretations of the poem. If critics perceive the jazz poem as an imitation of Rollins’s style of improvisation, they compare the music’s inherent properties with the poem’s (e.g., the fragmented poem imitates Rollins’s way of improvisation) and perceive the latter as a more or less inadequate representation of music.²⁰ In accordance with Lakoff and Johnson’s distinction between objective and experiential similarities, the critics interpret the similarities between music and literature as objective ones. Guided by the image schema container, they understand the literary text as a container that has inherent properties similar to the ones of music. The music is “in” the text. If critics, however, perceive the similarities between jazz and poems as metaphorical correlations between the two domains, they view the poem’s musicality as a metaphorical phenomenon that is not located “in” the text. For instance, the metaphor forte is upper case indicates that Blackburn metaphorically mapped upper-case letters onto the notion of loudness. Consequently, the poem does not contain the loudness, but the upper-case letters manifest it and, as I will demonstrate, ask the readers to imagine the capitalized words as loud music. Thus the metaphor paul blackburn’s jazz poem “listening to sonny rollins at the five-spot” is conceptual metaphor theory enables critics to perceive the process of rendering music in writing as a conceptual metaphor and not as an imitative process. It furthermore allows for perceiving Blackburn’s poem as a metaphorical linguistic expression that manifests the metaphor sonny rollins’s style of improvisation is writing and the submetaphors forte is upper case, “normal” dynamics is lower case, a two-note tonal variation is a two-syllable variation, among others. Finally, it clarifies the distinction between objective and experiential similarities.

20 See, for instance, Wolf’s comparison of objective properties of music with objective properties of literature (writing) in Chapter 2.1.

3.3 theory is text: Conceptual Metaphor Theory is Blackburn’s Jazz Poem

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3.3 theory is text: Understanding the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Terms of Paul Blackburn’s Jazz Poem The text offers several other metaphoric and non-metaphoric aspects, such as the reader’s cognitive processes and the poem’s literal meaning, which lie outside of the explanatory range of Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory. To detect these additional aspects of the poem, I will reverse the two domains of the metaphor text is theory and understand Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor in terms of Blackburn’s poem. Similar to Derrida’s theory of deconstruction in which the strategic movement of reversing the terms of a binary opposition destabilizes the hierarchical ranking, the reversal of the two terms of text is theory destabilizes it and generates theory is text. The interpreters are no longer guided by a theory in their effort of establishing metaphorical correlations but proceed from text to theory and first make observations about a text before they interconnect them with a theory. This procedure involves more than the detection of what is commonly called “differences” between a text and a theory, since it allows interpreters to test the theory, identify its limitations (or “gaps”), and extend its explanatory power. In the section below, I will demonstrate that the metaphor conceptual metaphor theory is paul blackburn’s jazz poem “listening to sonny rollins at the five-spot” foregrounds several limitations of the theory and, in turn, highlights additional metaphoric and non-metaphoric aspects of the poem, but not the aspect of transformation. Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner claim that the conceptual metaphors underlying literary texts are for the most part extensions of our everyday conceptual system. Like everybody else, poets and prose writers draw on “the same small set of basic metaphors” (Lakoff and Turner 1989: 26), which, they state, “tells us something important about the nature of creativity” (26): Poets must make the most of the linguistic and conceptual resources, part of the way members of our culture make sense of the world. Poets may compose or elaborate or express them in new ways, but they still use the same basic conceptual resources available to us all. If they did not, we would not understand them. (26)

Their view of literary creativity restricts it to the use of a limited number of basic metaphors and does not shed light on the possibility that literary creativity can be a metaphorical process in which the author creates conceptual metaphors. A glance at Blackburn’s poem shows the inspirational force of jazz that led Blackburn to adapt Rollins’s solo in written form. None of his other poems in The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn manifest the same degree of musicality as “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot.” They display a few jazz-related refer-

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ences and the idiosyncratic punctuation (e.g., the period) but otherwise remain bland in comparison to “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot.” This one was probably motivated by a concrete event and apparently composed after actually listening to Rollins.²¹ Living in New York and being interested in jazz (Jarolim, “Introduction” xxix–xxx), as several of his other poems testify, he presumably heard Rollins an improvised version of the standard “There Will Never Be Another You” (Warren and Gorden, 1942) at the well-known New York nightclub in 1964 and, perhaps still under the impression of the music, sat down at his typewriter to transpose the improvised solo.²² Whether Blackburn listened to Rollins performance or simply heard a recording is largely immaterial. What is important, however, is that Rollins’s music inspired Blackburn, who created a set of metaphorical correspondences between Sonny Rollins’s style of improvisation and his poem. Thus the creative process itself is metaphorical. Second, Lakoff and Johnson assert that conceptual metaphors such as more is up are grounded in human experience. Their view pays little attention to the possibility that some conceptual metaphors can be grounded in individual experiences. Blackburn was inspired by his experience of listening to Rollins’s solos. This personal experience stimulated him to create metaphorical correspondences between the music and the text. Third, the use of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to understand Blackburn’s poem highlights the conceptual metaphors that produced the poem. However, it does not highlight the reception-oriented cognitive processes of readers. Readers reverse the target and source domains of the poem’s metaphors. For instance, the readers do not perform the metaphor sonny Rollins’s style of improvisation is paul blackburn’s jazz poem “listening to sonny rollins at the fivespot” and, like Blackburn, create a set of correlations between the source and target domains. Instead, they reverse the order of the two domains and generate cross-domain mappings between the source domain sonny rollins’s style of improvisation and the target domain paul blackburn’s jazz poem “listening to sonny rollins at the five-spot.” A few other examples will help to illustrate the change in directionality of the cognitive process:

21 In the interview “Sonny Rollins and David S. Ware: Sonny Meets David” conducted by Franck Médioni, Ware’s remark that he saw “[Sonny Rollins] at the Five Spot in 1964” corroborates the assumption that Blackburn probably attended a performance by Rollins at the very same nightclub in 1964; for the whole interview, see Rollins. 22 Rollins recorded his jazz version of “There Will Never Be Another You” at least twice: February 20, 1963 (3 In Jazz, RCA) and live at the Museum of Modern Art on June 17, 1965 (There Will Never Be Another You, Impulse). It thus belonged to Rollins’s repertoire of standards and so he could have played it at the Five Spot in 1964.

3.3 theory is text: Conceptual Metaphor Theory is Blackburn’s Jazz Poem

Paul Blackburn

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Reader

forte is upper case The poet establishes a correlation between loud musical notes and upper-case words (e.g., “THERE WILL”).

→

upper case is forte The reader establishes a correlation between upper-case words and loud musical notes.

legato is a dash Blackburn correlates the legato technique with a dash (e.g., “another—spring”).

→

dash is a legato The reader correlates the dash with a legato technique.

staccato is a hyphen The poet equates the staccato technique with a hyphen (e.g., “anoth-er / noth-er”).

→

hyphen is a staccato The reader creates an equivalency between a hyphen and the staccato technique.

The readers establish equivalencies between the poem and music and thus imagine the text as music. The degree of their aesthetic experience is proportional to the number of metaphors they create: the more metaphors they generate, the richer their aesthetic experience. It also depends on their knowledge of Rollins’s music. The more familiar they are with Rollins’s music and style of improvisation, the better they can create precise metaphors and embellish them with connotations of Rollins and his music, which will greatly enhance their aesthetic experience of Blackburn’s poem. Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory to understand Blackburn’s poem foregrounds only the metaphorical aspects of the poem while hiding the significance of the poem’s literal meaning. Blackburn’s poem, however, requires a literal reading to gain a more refined understanding of it and its conceptual metaphors. A literal interpretation of the poem demonstrates that Blackburn relied on the lyrics of “There Will Never Be Another You” when he ‘composed’ his poem (Figure 3 and 4). The poem’s literal meaning indicates to the reader that Blackburn employed the lyrics of the popular tune “There Will Never Be Another You” (Warren and Gordon, 1942) to render Rollins’s improvisation. It therefore permits a more nuanced understanding of Blackburn’s metaphorical process: he created the poem by mapping the lyrics of the song onto the way Rollins improvises on its melody. As a result, the poem manifests the metaphor sonny rollins’s improvisation on the melody of “there will never be another you” is the lyrics of “there will never be another you.

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Figure 3: Leadsheet of “There Will Never Be Another You” (Refrain) (qtd. in Forte 1995: 150)

3.3 theory is text: Conceptual Metaphor Theory is Blackburn’s Jazz Poem |

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“There Will Never Be Another You” (1942)

“Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” (1964)

There will be many other nights like this And I’ll be standing here with someone new There will be other songs to sing Another fall, another spring But there will never be another you

THERE WILL be many other nights like be standing here with someone, some one someone some-one some some some some some some one there will be other songs a-nother fall, another—spring, but there will never be a-noth, noth anoth noth anoth-er noth-er noth-er Other lips that I may kiss, but they won’t thrill me like thrill me like like yours used to dream a million dreams but how can they come when there never be a-noth—

There will be other lips that I may kiss But they won’t thrill me like yours used to do Yes, I may dream a million dreams But how can they come true If there will never ever be another you (Warren and Gordon 1988: 355)

(Blackburn, “Listening” 316) Figure 4: Lyrics of the Song and Blackburn’s poem

Finally, Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor does not allow for the aspect of transforming a medium into a different one. Their use of the Mapping Metaphor to refer to the conceptual process of creating a set of correspondences between a source and a target domain (i.e., conceptual metaphor) enabled them to perceive several aspects of conceptual metaphor:

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We […] saw conceptual metaphors as mappings in the mathematical sense, that is, as mappings across conceptual domains. This metaphor proved useful in several respects. It specified exact, systematic correspondences. It allowed for the use of source domain inference patterns to reason about the target domain. Finally, it allowed for partial mappings. (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 252)

Despite its usefulness in understanding a conceptual metaphor as a cognitive process of mapping constituent entities from the source domain onto those of the target domain, the Mapping Metaphor cannot account for the aspect of transformation in general and the aspect of transforming a medium into another one in particular, as documented by Blackburn’s poem.²³ It does manifest Blackburn’s cognitive process of mapping elements of his poem onto Rollins’s improvisational style, but these mappings happen during his process of transforming one medium “music” into another. For instance, he cognitively maps the idea of upper-case spelling onto the loudness of musical notes and transforms Rollins’s way of playing loud notes into “THERE WILL” to open the poem. This observation points to another aspect of conceptual metaphor that lies outside the explanatory range of the Mapping Metaphor: the cognitive process of transforming one domain into another one, which I now turn to.

3.4 The Translation Metaphor: A Communication Model of Conceptual Metaphor Lakoff and Johnson also knew the Mapping Metaphor’s limited explanatory power and looked for a more adequate ‘master’ metaphor to understand the cognitive mechanism called “conceptual metaphor.” They outline their search for a new metaphor for conceptual metaphor (see Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 252) and notice the inability of the Mapping Metaphor to account for the fact that conceptual metaphors create target entities:

23 Likewise, the theory of conceptual blending (or conceptual integration) developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner does not allow for the conceptual process of transforming a medium into another one. Their theory is a combination of the Mapping Metaphor, the Projection Metaphor, and the Blending Metaphor, which permits critics to describe the cognitive process as a selective projection of elements from the input mental spaces to the blended space where the process of conceptual integration takes place but not to perceive the aspect of (intermedial) transformation; for a newer version of the conceptual blending theory, see Fauconnier and Turner 2003.

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Mathematical mappings do not create target entities, while conceptual metaphors often do. For example, time doesn’t necessarily have a use and isn’t necessarily a resource. Many people in cultures around the world simply live their lives without being concerned whether they are using their time efficiently. However, other cultures conceptualize time metaphorically as though it were a limited resource. The Time Is Money metaphor imposes on the time domain various aspects of resources. In doing so, it adds elements to the time domain, creating a new understanding of time. (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 252–253)

Lakoff and Johnson subsequently switched to the Projection Metaphor. “This metaphor for metaphor,” they state, “allowed us to conceptualize the idea that metaphors add extra entities and relations to the target domain” (253). Yet although the Projection Metaphor could explain the process of creating target entities, it did not allow for the idea that “some parts of the source domain are not mapped” (254). Leaving behind their search, they adopted a neural theory of metaphor in 1997, in which “the terms map and projection take on a whole new meaning. The maps or mappings are physical links: neural circuitry linking neuronal clusters called nodes” (256). Their central claim is: “Metaphor is a neural phenomenon” (256). In brief, Lakoff and Johnson abandoned their effort of understanding the concept of “conceptual metaphor” through the Mapping or Projection Metaphor in favor of a literal conceptualization of the cognitive mechanism. Picking up Lakoff and Johnson’s task of looking for an adequate “metaphor for metaphor” before their “neural turn,” I want to supplement the Mapping Metaphor with the Translation Metaphor, which highlights other aspects of conceptual metaphor. Whereas the Mapping Metaphor (and the Projection Metaphor) foregrounds the cognitive process of “mapping” (or “projecting”) constituent elements of the source domain onto constituent elements of the target domain, the Translation Metaphor highlights the metaphorical act of translating a medium into a different medium: for instance, the intermedial translation of music (source domain) into writing (target domain). I have purposefully changed around the two terms of Lakoff and Johnson’s formula for conceptual metaphor (that is, target domain is source domain) to indicate that any kind of translation begins with the source domain, which a person then translates into the target domain. Thus the formula of the Translation Metaphor is source domain is target domain. Table 1 illustrates the significant differences between the two metaphors.

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Table 1: Differences Between the Mapping Metaphor and the Translation Metaphor Mapping Metaphor (Projection Metaphor)

Translation Metaphor

target domain is source domain

source domain is target domain

A target domain is understood in terms of a source domain. Constituent elements of the source domain are mapped (projected) onto constituent elements of the target domain.

A person understands a source domain in terms of a target domain. A person translates constituent elements of a source domain into constituent elements of the target domain.

The directionality of the cognitive process moves from source domain to target domain (indicated by an arrow): source domain → target domain

The directionality of the cognitive process moves from source domain to target domain (see arrow): source domain → target domain

Example: life is a journey

Example: jazz music is writing (Blackburn)

Elements of the source domain journey are mapped onto the target domain life.

Blackburn translates elements of the source domain jazz music into elements of the target domain writing.²⁴

Correspondences/Mappings: A traveler → the person leading a life Destinations → the person’s purposes Crossroads → choices in life

Correspondences/Translations: Loud musical notes → upper case Legato → dash Staccato → hyphen

Metaphorical linguistic expressions manifest the underlying metaphor life is a journey and allow for identifying the metaphorical cross-domain mappings.

The metaphorical linguistic expression (the poem) is the result of the metaphor jazz music is writing and manifests the author’s transformation of the source domain jazz music into the target domain writing.

As Table 1 shows, the Mapping and Translation Metaphors provide different ways of understanding a “conceptual metaphor.” Using the Mapping Metaphor to conceptualize target domain is source domain shows the “conceptual metaphor” as a cognitive process of mapping elements of the source domain onto those of the target domain. By contrast, using the Translation Metaphor to conceptualize

24 N.B. I emphasize the agency of the cognitive mechanism called “conceptual metaphor” whereas Lakoff and Johnson typically use passive constructions, which omit the agency of a conceptual metaphor (e.g., “The target domain love is understood in terms of the domain journey.”).

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source domain is target domain describes the cognitive process of transforming elements of one medium into another and, for instance, permits to understand Blackburn’s conceptualization of jazz music in terms of writing as a translation process in which Blackburn translates Rollins’s jazz solo into writing. Additionally, it allows for perceiving the process understanding Blackburn’s poem in terms of Rollins’s music as a translation process in which the reader translates the poetic text into music. Both metaphors, however, are not mutually exclusive and do not allow for a more “adequate” understanding of “conceptual metaphor” than the other. The Mapping Metaphor and the Translation Metaphor foreground different aspects of the same cognitive mechanism referred to as “conceptual metaphor” and can be combined – a process that involves a slight terminological change: the Translation Metaphor highlights the aspect of transforming one domain into a different domain. The directionality of the mapping-process is not from source domain to target domain (Mapping Metaphor) but vice versa. In contrast to the Mapping Metaphor, the Translation Metaphor illuminates communication’s intermedial aspect and thus enables a model in which conceptual metaphors performed by both – author and reader – can be explored: for instance, Blackburn’s poem documents his conceptual metaphors and activates the reader to create conceptual metaphors (see the discussion of Blackburn’s poetic text in 3.2 and 3.3). In After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), George Steiner already perceives “understanding as translation” and presents a basic communication model of translation. He claims that the expressions “[i]nterprète/interpreter are commonly used to mean translator. […] When we read or hear any language from the past, be it Leviticus or last year’s best-seller, we translate” (Steiner 1975: 28–29; his italics). “The schematic model of translation,” he continues, “is one in which a message from a source-language passes into a receptor-language via a transformational process” and is also “operative within a single language” (29). Steiner’s model represents an ideal starting point for developing a communication model of translation-as-a-conceptual metaphor. However, a new approach is necessary to incorporate Steiner’s model into Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory. The process of understanding Steiner’s model of translation in terms of their Conceptual Metaphor Theory will undoubtedly neglect the aspect of intermedial transformation (see the discussion in 3.3). Another method for developing a model that includes the aspect of transformation can be derived from Derrida’s theory of deconstruction. He proposes to destabilize the “either/or”-logic governing a binary opposition by inscribing the terms of the binarism into a play of differences. Similarly, I will inscribe text and theory into a differential play, which allows me to explore the possible combinations of the two domains text and theory and create the meta-level concep-

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tual metaphors theory is theory and text is text in addition to the other two meta-level metaphors text is theory and theory is text. I will primarily rely on stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, because they ostensibly deal with the notion of transformation, but I will also use other literary texts (such as the medieval text Ovide Moralisé, Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondances,” and Blackburn’s poem), as well as Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign and Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory. In the process, I’ll explore different issues relevant to the communication model (e.g., transformation, transmission of linguistic meaning, types of correspondences, and the role of the reader in creating his or her aesthetic experience).

3.4.1 theory is theory: Understanding Lakoff’s and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Terms of Ovid’s Model of Transformation In this and other sections, I will view Ovid’s Metamorphoses as connected poetic narratives, in which the Roman poet explores and expresses his theories on various issues such as the process of transformation, immateriality and materiality, the transmission of meaning, and the different ways of understanding a metaphorical utterance. Proceeding from his theories, I will create metaphorical correspondences between them and current theories and make changes to the latter in order to account for the aspect of transformation. The metaphor conceptual metaphor theory is ovid’s model of transformation will lead to the view of transformation as a metaphorical process that involves cross-domain mappings only from the target to the source domain. In Ovid’s story about Apollo and Daphne, Apollo’s recent victory over a python makes him boastful; when meeting Cupid with his bow and arrow, he mocks Cupid’s ability to use the “brave men’s arms” (Ovid 1986: 14; Ovid I. 455).²⁵ Cupid replies that he will vanquish Apollo with his bow, draws out two arrows with opposite powers from his quiver, and shoots one arrow into Daphne’s heart and pierces Apollo’s heart with the second arrow: “At once he loves; she flies the name of love” (15; Ovid I. 476)²⁶. As soon as Apollo sees Daphne, he is overcome with desire for the chaste nymph and chases after her. Daphne, however, trying to escape Apollo’s fervent pursuit, prays to her father, the river-god Peneus, for help and is transformed into a laurel tree (Gr. daphne means “laurel tree”):

25 The complete Latin verse is: “‘quid’que ‘tibi, lasciue puer, cum fortibus armis?’” (Ovid 2004: 18; Ovid I. 456). 26 The Latin version is: “Protinus alter amat, fugit altera nomen amantis” (Ovid 2004: 19; Ovid I. 474).

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Latin text

English translation

uix prece finita torpor grauis occupat artus; mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro; in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt; pes modo tam uelox pigris radicibus haeret; ora cacumen habet; remanet nitor unus in ulla.

Scarce had she made her prayer when through her limbs A dragging languor spread, her tender bosom Was wrapped in thin smooth bark, her slender arms Were changed to branches and her hair to leaves; Her feet but now so swift were anchored fast In numb stiff roots, her face and head became The crown of a green tree; all that remained Of Daphne was her shining loveliness.

(Ovid 2004: 22; I. 548–552)

(Ovid 1986: 17)

Daphne’s metamorphosis conveys Ovid’s model of transformation: her transformation into a laurel tree involves changing her individual parts into those of the tree, which transfers her immaterial beauty from her body to the tree. Her “shining loveliness” is retained across the transformation process and allows the identification of a similarity between the laurel tree and Daphne. conceptual metaphor theory is ovid’s model of transformation allows for the creation of multiple correspondences (or “mappings”) between Ovid’s model of transformation and Lakoff and Johnson’s theory and calls attention to a “gap” in the theory. The laurel tree documents the metaphor daphne is a laurel tree, in which only elements of the target domain laurel tree are mapped onto the source domain daphne. The metaphor consists of several submetaphors and their respective mappings (indicated by the arrows): daphne is a laurel tree skin is bark thin, smooth bark bark overlays the wood of a tree

→ tender skin → skin “covers” Daphne’s human body

arms are branches thin branches of the laurel tree → Daphne’s slender arms branches are attached to the tree stem → arms are attached to Daphne’s human body hairs are leaves many leaves of a tree leaves are at the top of a tree

→ many hairs on Daphne’s head → hair is at the top of the head

feet are roots roots are at the bottom of a tree thin roots are attached to thick ones

→ feet are at the bottom of Daphne’s human body → thin toes are attached to thick feet

face and head are the crown of a tree the crown of a tree is on top of the stem → face and head are on top of Daphne’s torso the crown has a round shape → face and head have a round shape

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Yet not everything is changed: Daphne’s immaterial “shining loveliness” is retained. Thus conceptual metaphor theory is ovid’s model of transformation enables the perception of “metamorphosis” as the transformation of one physical entity into another one, which is a metaphorical process and involves the process of cross-domain mappings. After the transformation is complete, the transformed entity displays one or more equivalencies to the pre-transformed entity.

3.4.2 theory is theory: Understanding Saussure’s Theory of the Linguistic Sign in Terms of Ovid’s Theory of Transmitting Meaning The two domains of the meta-level metaphor theory is theory are Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign and Ovid’s story about Diana and Actaeon, in which he conveys his theory of metaphor and communicating linguistic meaning. Since Saussure’s linguistic theory does not allow for the aspect of transformation, I will introduce a few new terms to explain the process of transforming an immaterial, mental signifier into a material signifier and the reader’s process of transforming the material signifier into a mental one again. Saussure claims that speech and writing are two different sign systems and regards writing as a secondary imitation of speech: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first” (Saussure 2006: 23). A language is a structured system of linguistic signs, which consist of a “sound pattern” and a “concept”: A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical. A sound pattern is the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of his senses. (66)

For instance, the psychological impression of the sound / dog/ and the psychological concept of a dog, that is, a four-legged domesticated canine, constitute the two parts of a linguistic sign. These two elements of the linguistic sign, he asserts, “are both psychological and are connected in the brain by an associative link” so that “each triggers the other” (66). Saussure defines the “concept” as “signified” and the “sound pattern” as “signifier” and argues that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary and not an “internal connexion” (67): “the linguistic sign is arbitrary” (67; his italics). “A language,” Saussure states, “is a system in which all the elements fit together, and in which the value of any one element depends on the simultaneous coexistence of all the others” (113). For instance, the value of the signifier / dog / and its signified can only be identified in contrast to

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the other coexisting signifiers /fog/, /hog/, and /log/ and their respective signifieds within a structured linguistic system: In the language itself, there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact that, although in general difference presupposes positive terms between which the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no positive terms. Whether we take the signification or the signal, the language includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system. (Saussure 2006: 118; his italics)

His view of language as a system of differences holds only for the separate entities of a linguistic sign (118). A sign as a whole, he contends, “is positive in its own domain” (118). Ovid’s theory of transmitting linguistic meaning differs from Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign. In one story, Actaeon saw by accident Diana bathing naked in a pool where he came to rest from a hunting trip, and she in turn transforms him into a stag. Although the metamorphosis changes his physical shape, it does not affect his mind. Seeing his mirror image in a stream, he tries to speak to it: Latin text

English translation

‘me miserum!’ dicturus erat; uox nulla secuta est. ingemuit; uox illa fuit, lacrimaeque per ora non sua fluxerunt; mens tantum pristine mansit.

He tried to say ‘Alas!’ – but no words came; He groaned – that was his voice; the tears rolled down On cheeks not his – all changed except his mind.

(Ovid 2004: 71; III. 201–203)

(Ovid 1986: 57)

His own hounds notice Actaeon-as-a-stag and start to chase him. During his flight from their pursuit, he desires to tell them that he is their master, but – once again – no words come out of his mouth: Latin text

English translation

[…]. clamare libebat, ‘Actaeon ego sum, dominum cognoscite uestrum!’ uerba animo desunt; resonat latratibus aether.

[…]. He longed to shout ‘I am Actaeon, look, I am your master!’ Words failed his will; their baying filled the sky.

(Ovid 2004: 72; III. 229–231)

(Ovid 1986: 57)

His dogs fail to understand their master’s utterance and tear him apart. The story expresses Ovid’s theory of communicating meaning. Actaeon intends to speak “I am Actaeon, look, I am your master!,” but the act of speaking detaches the

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meaning from the words and transforms the mental statement into a stag’s physical expression. The meaning is not reattached to the sounds because they do not resemble the psychological words. The communication between Actaeon and his dogs fails because the dogs are unable to identify Actaeon-the-stag’s sounds as meaningful words so they tear him up. For Ovid, then, linguistic meaning is attached to mental words, and communicating meaning involves the transformation of the immaterial words into physical ones whereby the metamorphosis detaches the meaning from the mental words and reattaches it to the physical words if the latter resembles the former. The conceptualization of Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign in terms of Ovid’s theory of transmitting meaning permits two metaphorical mappings: first, Ovid’s concept of mental words maps onto Saussure’s concept of psychological signifiers; second, Ovid’s concept of a psychological meaning maps onto Saussure’s concept of a psychological signified. Yet two central ideas of Ovid’s theory cannot be mapped onto Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign: the process of transmitting meaning transforms an immaterial, mental word into a physical one, and a strong mismatch between a mental word and its physical counterpart results in a breakdown of communication. Both gaps in Saussure’s theory enable me to generate the following model of communicating and understanding linguistic meaning: the mental words are immaterial pre-linguistic signifiers (that is, psychological impressions of sounds) that are transformed into material linguistic signifiers in linguistic communication. If the linguistic signifiers resemble the pre-linguistic signifiers, then people can transform the material linguistic signifiers into immaterial post-linguistic signifiers and interconnect the latter with the signifieds conventionally associated with the respective signifiers. If, however, the pre-linguistic signifiers are transformed into linguistic signifiers that no longer bear an identifiable resemblance to the former, then people are unable to transform the linguistic signifiers into post-linguistic signifiers and interconnect them with their respective signifieds.

3.4.3 text is theory: Understanding the Medieval Text Ovide Moralisé in Terms of Conceptual Metaphor Theory Conceptualizing the medieval text Ovide Moralisé written by an unknown scribe in terms of Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory will clarify the metaphorical elements of two different types of translation processes: literal and figurative. It will also demonstrate that both kinds of translation involve transformations.

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In the Ovide Moralisé, the author follows a two-step exegetical approach to Ovid’s Metamorphoses: first, he translates one of Ovid’s stories from Latin into Old French and then he translates the story into the Christian belief system. The first procedure transforms the Latin text written in dactylic hexameter into an Old French version written in octosyllabic verses and involves the scribe’s effort of retaining the literal meaning across the translation process, as the following excerpt on Daphne’s metamorphosis shows (see above for the Latin version): Old French

Modern English

A paine ot dit ce que je di, Que toul li cors li enroidi : Ses ventres, qui pas n’iere ençains, Fu tous de tenvre escorce çains ; Ses crins dorez et flamboians Devidrent fueilles verdoians ; Ses bras sont en lons rains muez : Touz ses cors li est tresmuez : Li piez isneaus de la meschine Fu tenus a ferme racine. S’ele fu bele avant en cors, Elle est arbre aussi bele encors.

Scarcely had she spoken what she had said When her whole body went stiff: Her belly, which was not pregnant, Was completely covered with tender bark; Her golden and flaming tresses Became verdant foliage; Her arms were changed into long branches: All her body was transformed: The swift feet of the maiden Were held by strong roots. If she was beautiful in body before, She is still just as beautiful a tree.

(Boer 1915–1938: 126)

(Arthur 2000: 6)²⁷

Staying close to the literal meaning of the original, the medieval scribe translates, for instance, “uix prece finita torpor grauis occupat artus” (“Scarce had she made her prayer when through her limbs / A dragging languor spread”) into “A paine ot dit ce que je di, / Que toul li cors li enroidi :” (“Scarcely had she spoken what she had said / When her whole body went stiff:”). In establishing octosyllabic rhyming couplets, he sometimes adapts his translation to the poetic form: for instance, he uses the phrase “ce que je di” to produce the rhyme with “enroidi” and changes the image of a tender bosom wrapped in thin bark into the image of a non-pregnant belly covered with tender bark. Despite these and other transformations in form and content, the Old French text makes manifest the literal process of translating the Ovid’s Metamorphoses into the Old French Ovide Moralisé. After adapting Ovid’s Latin story into Old French, he allegorizes it by engaging in a figurative translation of Ovid’s heathen text into a Christian belief system. Proceeding from the literal (here: the story about Apollo and Daphne), he interconnects elements from it with elements from Christian religion: 27 I have adapted all excerpts from Arthur’s prose translation of the Ovide Moralisé to match the corresponding lines of the Old French version.

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1.

Old French

Modern English

— Autre sentence i puis poser. Par Dané puis prendre et gloser Cele glorieuse Pucele, Vierge pure avenant et bele, Que Dieus eslut premierement Sor toutes autres plainement, Que Jesus, ou tous biens habonde, […] , pot tant amer Qu’a lui se volt charnelment joindre, Si se lessa navrer et poindre Au cuer d’amoureuse pointure, Pour l’amour d’umaine nature. Cele beneöite Marie, Vierge mere en cui se marie Plentureuse virginitez Et vierge plentureusetez, […] Cele pucele vierge et pure C’est li loriers, plains de verdure, Dont li filz Dieu se coronna, […]

— I can set forth another meaning for it. By Daphne I can understand and gloss That glorious Maiden, Virgin pure, attractive, and beautiful, Whom God chose above All others. Jesus, in whom all good things abound, […] , loved her so much The He wished to join Himself to her physically, And allowed Himself to be wounded and pierced In the heart with the point of love, For the love of human nature. This blessed Mary, Virgin Mother in whom are married Virgin plenitude And virgin plenteous, […] This maiden virgin and pure Is the laurel, full of greenness, With which the Son of God crowned himself. […]

(Boer 1915–1938: 130; II. 3215–3247)

(Arthur 2000: 8–9)

2.

— Or vous dirai que senefie La tence et la contreversie De Phebus et dou dieu d’amours, […] (a) Cupido, cil qui nous avoie Et nous monstre la droite voie De bone amour, a mon avis, C’est Dieu, li rois de paradis, Qui en amours nous endouctrine, Se nous tenons bien sa doctrine. […] (b) Li dart sont li comandement De la loy, qui diversement Sont fet et de divers ouvraigne : L’une partie nous enseigne A amer, et l’autre a haïr, L’un a suivre et l’autre a fuïr ; La pointe est la compunction Dou cuer, et droite entention Doit estre la hanste apelee ; […] (Boer 1915–1938: 131–132; II. 3261–3333)

— Now I will tell you the signification of The quarrel and the controversy Between Phoebus and the god of love, […] Cupid, who guides us And shows us the right way Of good love, in my opinion, Is God, the King of paradise, Who indoctrinates us in love If we hold well to His doctrine. […] The arrow is the commandments Of the law, which are made differently And of diverse workmanship: One part teaches us To love, and the other to hate, One part to follow and the other to flee; The point is the compunction Of the heart, and the right intentions Must be called the shaft. […] (Arthur 2000: 9–10)

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The metaphor ovide moralise is conceptual metaphor theory allows for the perception of the scribe’s literal translation of Ovid’s Latin text into Old French as a metaphorical process: the source domain is ovid’s metamorphoses, the target domain is old french, and the metaphor is ovid’s metamorphoses is old french. This produces a metaphorical linguistic expression, namely the literal translations into Old French (see first excerpt) and leads the writer to make some transformations (e.g., he transforms the Latin text written in hexameter into octosyllabic lines). The second excerpt manifests the general metaphor ovid’s metamorphoses is a christian religion, whereby the medieval writer maps elements from the domain christian religion onto the domain ovid’s metamorphoses. Indeed, he is inspired by the source domain (here: Ovid’s story about Apollo and Daphne) and transforms the pagan text into a plurality of Christian texts by generating a series of metaphors (“I can set forth another meaning for it.”) such as daphne is the virgin mary (1), cupid is god (2. a), and cupid’s arrows are the commandments of the law (2. b). In contrast to the literal translation of the story into Old French, his figurative translation of Ovid’s pagan texts into his Christian belief system continually creates new and innovative conceptual metaphors.²⁸ Hence both translation processes – literal and figurative – are metaphoric and transform elements from one domain into elements of another domain. Such translations produce metaphorical linguistic expressions, that is, texts, which manifest the conceptual metaphors.

3.4.4 text is text: Understanding the Medieval Text Ovide Moralisé in Terms of Blackburn’s Jazz Poem The metaphorical process of establishing correlations between the medieval text Ovide Moralisé and Blackburn’s poem “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the FiveSpot” highlights the two types of translation processes. On the one hand, Blackburn translated mental words into written ones and, like the medieval scribe, retained the literal meaning conventionally associated with them across the transla-

28 The medieval scribe’s continuous process of allegorizing Ovid’s Metamorphoses produces constantly new conceptual metaphors. It is noteworthy that the Roman rhetorician Quintilian already defined “allegory” as an extended translation (i.e. a series of metaphors) in his Institutio Oratorio: “Prius fit genus plerumque continuatis tralationibus” (Book 8.6; “The first type generally consists of a series of Metaphors [sic]” 450 / “The first type generally is a continuous translation process,” my translation). His notion of “allegory,” thus, may be understood as an extended figurative translation process.

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tion. On the other hand, he translated one medium (“music”) into another (“writing”). Similar to the anonymous author of the Ovide Moralisé, Blackburn was inspired by a source domain and translated it into a target domain, that is, writing, which enabled him to create a series of innovate metaphors such as forte is upper case, “normal” dynamics is lower case, and a two-note tonal variation is a two-syllable variation. Thus his poem is the product of literal and figurative translation processes.

3.4.5 theory is theory: Understanding Iser’s Reader-Response Theory in Terms of Ovid’s Model of Understanding a Metaphorical Expression The process of conceptualizing Iser’s reader-response theory in terms of Ovid’s theory will highlight a gap: his theory does not deal with the actual process of reading written words. Nevertheless, his theory can explain Deucalion’s and Pyrrha’s different responses to a metaphorical linguistic expression in their Metamorphoses tale. Iser develops his theory most prominently in The Act of Reading, where Iser claims that the aesthetic object is created in a “dynamic happening” (Iser 1978: 22) between text and reader and where he defines the concept of the “implied reader” as a textual function: “The concept of the implied reader is […] a textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient without necessarily defining him: this concept prestructures the role to be assumed by each recipient” (34). According to Iser, it describes “a network of response-inviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp the text” (34). Apart from the concept of the “implied reader,” a text consists of a “repertoire,” which he defines as “all the familiar territory within the text” (99), and “strategies” which have the function of making the familiar unfamiliar: “the ultimate function of strategies is to defamiliarize the familiar” (87; his italics). The actual processing of a text involves what Iser calls a “wandering viewpoint,” that is, the continual procedure of switching from one perspective to another and interconnecting them with each other, and ideation (Ger. “Vorstellung”) with which readers primarily create the aesthetic object by generating images “not yet fully conceptualized” (136). After treating the text and the reader, Iser focuses on the communicatory process between them and argues that, like the indeterminate gaps or blanks in a face-to-face dialogue, “it is the gaps, the fundamental asymmetry between text and reader, that give rise to communication in the reading process” (166–167). Whenever a reader “fills in” such “indeterminacy gaps” (Ger. “Unbestimmbarkeitsstellen”), the reader communicates with the text.

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Ovid also explores the responses to a linguistic utterance in his story about Deucalion and Pyrrha, which follows soon after “The Creation” in Book I of the Metamorphoses. Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha are the only humans to survive a great flood, with which Jove intended to destroy the whole degenerate human race of the Bronze Age. Looking at the silent and desolate lands, Deucalion wishes to repopulate the earth and, together with Pyrrha, consults the oracle of the goddess Themis on how to achieve his objective. Pitying their lot, Themis tells them to “[l]eave my temple, veil your heads, loosen your robes, and cast behind you your great mother’s bones” (Ovid 12, italics mine).²⁹ The couple is puzzled by her command until Pyrrha, “not daring to offend her mother’s ghost by violence to her bones” (12),³⁰ finally refuses to do the goddess’s bidding and asks for her pardon. Deucalion, however, seeks the “hidden meaning” of the oracle’s utterance, “searching to and fro the baffling words’ blind coverts” (12),³¹ until he can cheer Pyrrha up with the figurative interpretation: Latin text

English translation

Mulcet et ‘aut fallax’ ait ‘est sollertia nobis aut pia sunt nullumque nefas oracular suadent. magna parens terra est; lapides in corporae terrae ossa reor dici; iacere hos post terga iubemur.’ coniugis augurio quamquam Titania mota est, spes tamen in dubio est; adeo caelestibus ambo diffident monitis. sed quid temptare nocebit?

[…] ‘Either my reasoning Misleads me or in truth (since oracles Are holy and will never counsel crime) The earth is our great mother and the stones Within earth’s body surely are the bones The oracle intends. These we must throw Over our shoulders as Themis directs.’ So he interpreted, and Pyrrha’s heart Was warmed, but still hope wavered, such distrust Oppressed them both; and yet what harm to try?

(Ovid 2004: 16; I. 391–397)

(Ovid 1986: 12)

Deucalion and Pyrrha decide to follow his interpretation and

29 Latin version: “‘discedite templo / et uelate caput cinctasque resoluite uestes / ossaque post tergum magnae iactate parentis’” (Ovid 2004: 15; Ovid I. 381–383). 30 Latin excerpt: “obstipuere diu rumpitque silentia uoca / Pyrrha prior iussisque deae parere recusat / detque sibi ueniam pauido rogat ore timetque / laedere iactatis maternas ossibus umbra’s” (Ovid 2004: 15; Ovid I. 384–387). 31 Latin version: “interea repetunt caecisque obscura latebris / uerba datae sortis secum inter seque uolutant” (Ovid 2004: 15; Ovid I. 388–389).

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Latin text

English translation

discedunt uelantque caput tunicasque recingunt et iussos lapides sua post uestigia mittunt.

They leave the temple, veil their heads, ungird Their robes and, as the oracle commanded, Behind them, past their footprints, throw the stones.

(Ovid 2004: 16; I. 398–399)

(Ovid 1986: 13)

Once cast over their shoulders, the stones lose their hardness and take on human shape: the ones thrown by Deucalion metamorphose into men and the ones thrown by Pyrrha become women. The metaphor iser’s reader-response theory is ovid’s theory of understanding a metaphorical expression shows a gap in Iser’s theory: it does not treat the process of understanding concrete linguistic utterances. Yet it can be used to fill this gap by perceiving a metaphorical expression as a response-inviting structure. Themis tells Pyrrha and Deucalion the metaphorical linguistic expression “cast behind you your great mother’s bones,” which impels them to interact with the oracle’s advice in order to grasp it. Pyrrha is the first one to respond to the oracle’s counsel and, missing the hint (“great mother”) at the figurative dimension, translates it literally. She assumes that the oracle’s utterance refers to her mother’s bones and refuses to act upon her literal understanding of the oracle’s statement, since it would mean the breaking of a taboo in ancient Greek culture (“since oracles / Are holy and will never counsel crime”). Deucalion and Pyrrha both know the incorrectness of her literal interpretation, and Deucalion deduces that he needs to respond to the oracle’s advice in another way. Deucalion subsequently recognizes that the oracle’s utterance is a metaphorical expression and interconnects “great mother” with “earth” and “bones” with “stones”: “The earth is our great mother and the stones / Within earth’s body surely are the bones” (Ovid 1986: 12). His strategy of defamiliarizing the familiar way of interpreting the oracle’s verbal metaphor represents a figurative interpretation that permits them to understand Themis’s counsel, follow her advice, and thus create humankind. Deucalion could not have moved from a literal to a figurative interpretation of the oracle’s metaphorical utterance without his wife’s mistake. Their marriage, in fact, underscores the interdependence of their literal and the figurative understandings of the oracle’s ambiguous metaphorical expression, and their act of creating humankind underlines Deucalion’s creatively inspired metaphor and the aspect of transformation.³²

32 The question arises as to why Themis created the ambiguous metaphorical expression in the first place when it may indeed “counsel crime” if interpreted literally. She knows that her metaphorical linguistic expression can be interpreted literally when she tells the expression to

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3.4.6 theory is text: Understanding Baudelaire’s Theory of Synesthesia in Terms of Blackburn’s Jazz Poem Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondances,” in which he formulates his theory of synesthesia, will be metaphorically correlated with Blackburn’s “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” in this section. The metaphor baudelaire’s theory of synesthesia is blackburn’s jazz poem will not only give emphasis to synesthetic correspondences in Blackburn’s poetic text, but it will also extend the French poet’s theory to other kinds of correspondences as well.³³ Baudelaire prizes the suggestiveness of symbols and develops a theory of synesthesia in “Correspondances.” He refers to evocative “forests of symbols” and perfumes which trigger infinite correspondences in the world of the senses: “Correspondances”

“Correspondences”

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Nature is a temple in which living pillars Sometimes emit confused words; Man crosses it through forests of symbols That observe him with familiar glances.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

Like long echoes that mingle in the distance In a profound tenebrous unity, Vast as the night and vast as light, Perfumes, sounds, and colors respond to one another.

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, — Et d’autres corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Some perfumes are as fresh as the flesh of children, Sweet as the sound of oboes, green as pastures — And others corrupt, rich, and triumphant,

Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.

Having the expanse of things infinite, Such as amber, musk, benzoin, and incense, That sing of the flight of spirit and the senses.

(Baudelaire, “Correspondances” 11)

(qtd. in Dorra 1994: 11)

her audience, Pyrrha and Deucalion. Themis also knows that Pyrrha will very likely interpret the metaphorical linguistic expression literally, because the latter is absolutely truthful and devout or otherwise she would have perished like the rest of humankind. She will stick to the literal “truth” of the oracle’s metaphorical utterance. So why does Themis tell them the ambiguous metaphor? Does she want to test Pyrrha’s devoutness one more time – even though Jove has already saved both, Pyrrha and Deucalion, from the flood because they were “both innocent, both worshippers” (Ovid 10)? Apparently, Ovid characterizes the oracle as a fool who intentionally gives Deucalion and Pyrrha an ambiguous counsel. 33 I gratefully acknowledge the conversations I have had with Michael Grimwood in which he called my attention to Baudelaire’s poem.

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As an example, Baudelaire generates a series of correspondences between “des parfums” and the senses in the third stanza: the speaker first links “some perfumes” to the smell of a baby’s skin and then synesthetically interconnects the fresh scents with oboes’ sweet music and with pastures’ greenness before he perceives other “perfumes” as “corrupt, rich, and triumphant” sounds. In the fourth stanza, the speaker reveals the vast realm of correspondences between the mysterious symbols and sensuous imaginations. The conceptualization of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” in terms of Blackburn’s poem highlights Blackburn’s practice of creating synesthetic correspondences between jazz and writing and the reader’s synesthetic experiences triggered by his “forests of symbols.” However, several aspects of Blackburn’s poem remain untouched by Baudelaire’s theory: writers and readers establish nonsynesthetic correspondences between words and meaning, be it literal or figurative, and texts not only activate synesthetic correspondences but also connotations of race, class, culture, and so on. There are several kinds of connotations in addition to the synesthetic correspondences Baudelaire celebrates in his suggestive poem. Saussure defines a linguistic signifier as a psychological impression of sound and pays little attention to the fact that the linguistic signifier is translated from its immaterial state into a material one due to his prioritization of sound’s psychological impression. To be sure, he privileges speech over writing, which Derrida has termed “phonocentrism” in Of Grammatology, but he favors the immaterial psychological impressions of speech to their material counterparts in speech and writing and thus misses the transformation of mental linguistic signifiers into spoken or written ones. As the following sentence from the entry on “candle” in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) shows, the scribe was engaged in translating his psychological impressions of sound patterns into writing: I. 1. a. 1398 TREVISA Barth. De P.R. VIII. xvi. (1495) 322 A glasse sette byfore a candle receuyth lighte of a candil. (“Candle,” OED; emphasis mine)

This helps redefine Saussure’s concept of “linguistic signifier” to explain the aspect of transformation. The two spellings of “candle” exhibit the scribe’s translation activity. During the process of translating the mental sound pattern / candle / into the written word “candle” and, four words later, into “candil,” he created a system of metaphorical equivalencies between the phonology of the respective word in his mind and individual letters (the arrows indicate the specific mappings of letters onto the phonemes):

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“candle”

“candil”

c a n d le

c → /k/ a → / æ/ n → /n/ d → /d/ il → / (ə)l/

→ → → → →

/k/ / æ/ /n/ /d/ / (ə)l/

Both words document the metaphorical process of translating (mental) speech into writing and thus represent “metaphorical linguistic expressions.”³⁴ I define such material metaphorical expressions as “linguistic signifiers” and their immaterial counterparts as “pre-linguistic signifiers” and perceive the author’s process of speaking or writing as a metaphorical translation process in which the author transforms immaterial pre-linguistic signifiers into material linguistic ones. Moreover, Iser portrays the act of reading as an interaction between text and reader and the actual processing of a text as the constant procedure of changing from one perspective to a different one and interconnecting the perspectives. He thus overlooks that reading begins with the act of processing written linguistic signifiers. As mentioned above, I regard material linguistic signifiers as responseinviting verbal metaphors. Readers translate such linguistic metaphors into immaterial “post-linguistic signifiers” and interconnect the latter with literal or figurative signifieds. I denote the process of translating material linguistic signifiers into literal meaning “literal translation” and the process of translating material linguistic signifiers into figurative meaning “figurative translation.” Out of the metaphoric play with the literary texts and theories emerges the following communication model of translation: an author translates an immaterial pre-linguistic signifier into a material linguistic signifier (immaterial is material). This translation process is metaphorical and always involves transformation (see Ovid’s story about Actaeon). The product of such transformation processes, which entails metaphorical mappings, is “metaphorical linguistic expressions” (see Ovid’s story about Daphne). The material linguistic signifiers and texts are metaphorical expressions, for only metaphorical expressions can be

34 After the orthography of a language becomes standardized, people effortlessly map standard written words (or “templates”) onto the pre-linguistic signifiers (that is, psychological impressions of sound patterns) without engaging in the laborious process of creating metaphorical equivalencies between single phonemes of pre-linguistic signifiers and (alphabetic) characters. The translation process comes to the fore in dialect writing when authors translate their mental versions of dialect speech into writing. For a discussion of different types of dialect translation, see Redling 2006: 127–130.

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understood literally and figuratively (see Ovid’s story about Deucalion and Pyrrha and his theory of metaphor which underlies the notion of metamorphosis). A text can invite literal or figurative or both translation processes (see Iser’s readerresponse theory). The reader’s literal translation of a material linguistic signifier into an immaterial post-linguistic signifier (material is immaterial) involves the process of retaining the literal meaning across the translation. The figurative translation, by contrast, enables the reader to generate “creatively inspired metaphors” which provide a creative aesthetic experience (see the anonymous scribes’ Ovide Moralisé). Finally, the reception process includes the creation of synesthetic and/or non-synesthetic correspondences as well as connotations (see Baudelaire’s “Correspondances”). To explain non-metaphoric cognitive process such as connotations triggered by a jazz poem, Fauconnier and Turner’s model of a “conceptual integration network of mental spaces” (or Blending Theory) can be used because it allows for the description of cognitive process that include more than two conceptual domains or “spaces” (e.g., Blackburn’s poem activates several mental spaces, such as recollections of a nightclub, photographs of Sonny Rollins, and other songs he played, which are conceptually integrated in what Fauconnier and Turner call a “blend”).³⁵ In the following discussion of jazz poetry, however, I will stick to the outlined communication model of translation which also permits to identify connotations and, as will be shown, offer new ways of investigating literary texts, enabling my exploration of the intermedial metaphor jazz music is writing and its creatively inspired submetaphors in the next chapter.

35 For a brief application of Fauconnier and Turner’s model of conceptual blending to jazz poetry, see Redling and Sielke 2014: 343–344.

4 “Oh Play that Thing you Jazz Mad Fools!” Exploring the Creatively Inspired Metaphor jazz music is writing in Jazz Poetry The previously outlined communication model of translation highlights the relation between jazz poetry and jazz music as a metaphoric translation from one medium into another. My claim is that in writing their poems, the authors were often thinking of music, but not in terms of copying a jazz musician’s notes, but rather in terms of inspiration. Regarding jazz music as a muse, they established metaphorical correspondences between the music and writing and translated such elements as a melody or the improvisation into written form, creating their own blues, swing, or bebop poems. These translated works echoed the styles performed by jazz personalities to whom they frequently dedicated their poems, especially as obits or honorary praises. In each case the poem with its metaphorically implied musical elements represents the poet’s personal view, rather than a mere transliteration of a given musical score, and presupposes the reader’s effort of translating the poetic text into music. This metaphoric view guides my approach of exploring the multiple ways poets translated jazz music into writing. I have chosen to group the sections of Chapter 4 around the elements of music in general and be wary of jazz music specifics, such as improvised melodies. The question therefore is how poets translated musical elements such as melody (sound, pitch, key, softness), rhythm (tempo, pulse), dynamics (loud, soft), timbre (tone-coloring, style), mood, and the “voices” of instrument (expression) into poetic texts and what roles the musical elements have in jazz poetry. I intend to make the readers aware of myriad written forms used to convey these fundamentals of music. This approach enables me to establish certain expected conceptual metaphors such as time is space: a sequence of notes is a line, which means that I will investigate how poets translated linear sequences of notes (e.g., a melodic phrase) into linear arrangements on the page, and sound is motion: fast and slow, which means that I will study how poets translated the notions of “fast” and “slow” jazz music into writing. Another conceptual metaphor I will examine is tempo is rhythm, and I will focus on the techniques poets used to convey this prominent jazz element. Similarly, I have treated all other fundamental elements of music and their metaphorical correspondences in writing:

DOI 10.1515/9783110339017-004

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hot jazz and cool jazz “tone-colors” are colors musical key is a mood dynamics (forte/piano and crescendo/decrescendo) acoustical pitch is a vertical scale “voices” of instruments

The overall metaphor is the creatively inspired jazz music is writing or, more generally, sound (speech, music) is vision (writing), which I will investigate in more detail via the submetaphors mentioned above. Jazz poets thus seem to assume that their readers will look for graphical and other cues in the jazz poems in order to discover the tunes or elements of music metaphorically referred to in the poetic texts, while being informed by their knowledge of jazz’s musicians, styles, and concerts, as well as topical references in the text. Readers may identify such cues in the poems and conceptually transform them into music. For instance, printed words or, in other words, written linguistic signifiers might not only have to be treated literally, that is, as ‘content’ words, but also figuratively, that is, as musical notes. Ultimately, the discovery of musical metaphors in writing requires not only knowledge of jazz music and musicians but also an openness toward the interpretation of written shapes, because typewriters or keyboards offer only a limited number of symbols usable as indicators of music: changes from lower- to uppercase letters, special arrangement of letters in shorter or longer lines, continual or interrupted sequences of words, the use of dots, apostrophes, spacing, italicizing or boldfacing of letters. The identification of metaphorically implied music is impeded by the fact that there are no standard equivalences, but each writer creates his or her own techniques so that upper case in one poem might indicate dynamics (upper case is loud) while in another poem it might indicate a sequence of notes. The limited resource of characters on the keyboard also makes it difficult to distinguish a ‘literal’ poem from a metaphoric or ‘figurative’ one since both types are the product of the same keys and techniques. To point out this difficulty I have included so-called ‘jazz-related poems,’ which mention names of famous musicians – such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Chet Baker – as well as jazzrelated words like “riff” or display arrangements in columns or lines similar to figurative jazz poems, but do not allow for a metaphoric translation of graphical elements into music. Such poems are incorporated in major collections but are not the main focus of this study about jazz poems. A second difficulty of discovering music by attending to written symbols lies in the nature of jazz. Since jazz compositions often work with improvisations, the original tune is only mentioned briefly as a theme at the beginning, while the majority of time is used to improvise on this tune and develop a new melody. The

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jazz poet who creates a comparable musical improvisation will be expected to follow a similar process by first graphically suggesting a short tune that he or she subsequently modulates in an improvisation. A good example of such a procedure represents the Blackburn’s “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot,” in which the modulation was identifiable in the changes of words like “someone” into “some-one / some / some / some / one.” Yet it remains difficult to identify the music if the distortion of words is recognizable in the poem but the initial tune cannot be identified. A third difficulty arises during a search for illustrative metaphoric musicwriting processes. In a number of poems, the poets seek to describe the envisioned music and prefer more direct means of referring to the type of music than a metaphorical rendering of it. Thus instead of using upper-case letters they might indicate the dynamics of a performance by making notes on the margin like “loud” or “soft.” This direct method, which does not involve the readers’ conceptual interconnection of two media, can become idiosyncratic in those poems pervaded by marginal annotations or instructions. Since such literal ways of referring to elements of jazz renounce the transformation of music into writing, I cannot treat these poems as manifestations of conceptual metaphors, but I want to illustrate the poets’ inventive attempts at treating musical elements and prove that such “literal” notes could inform the reader on how to interpret a poem. Frequently, a literal and figurative translation coexist, for instance, if a poem documents a metaphor such as a sequence of notes is a line and is supplemented by descriptions of the dynamics (e.g., “a loud solo”). It should also be noted that poets typically are aware that sound patterns can be created by their choice of vowels or consonants in words, such as the creation of a blue mood through a sequence of / ou / vowels or a staccato sound through a sequence of hard consonants like / t / or / k /. Additionally, poets may encourage readers by direct reference or by allusion to the music style of certain jazz figures to imagine a certain mood or music. Such sound- or mood-creating stylistic techniques will often complement literal and metaphorical translations of musical elements into writing. In face of these difficulties, which the readers of jazz poetry encounter often, I will focus on a specific musical element in each section by first highlighting the expected metaphorical treatment of the respective musical element, whereupon the initial hunch will be tested with the help of several jazz poems. General allusions and references to music or to a musical style, which aid the overall interpretation of the poem, will be discussed. This approach reflects the prioritizing of jazz metaphors, which are at the core of this study, and yet demonstrates the inclusion of other, non-metaphoric treatments of particular musical elements in the study. My research aims to show, being aware of the potential that the consideration of

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corresponding elements between two different domains (which is the cognitive task of conceptual metaphors by definition) creates new views, meanings, and aesthetic experiences. A second aim of each section is to demonstrate that, on a meta-level, understanding is always partial and therefore necessitates constant cognitive “transgressions” to gain a more comprehensive view of how poets rendered a particular musical element. The numerous metaphors and poems treated here should confirm such a methodological claim and provide the readers with an overview of jazz poetry from the perspective of intermediality.

4.1 time is space: a sequence of notes is a line The section focuses on how poets translate the progression of time in music into space and, in particular, on the ways they translate the source domain a sequence of notes into the target domain a line. I intend to exemplify one musical element in this section, that is, a melody or tune, which I expect to be realized by linear arrangements of words somewhat similar to the snake-like visualization of music in La Musica (1911–1912) by the Futurist artist Luigi Russolo³⁶ (Figure 5). Depicting a pianist who sits in front of an oversized keyboard from which a blue column rises in a snake-like manner to the top of the picture, the painting manifests the metaphor music is luigi russolo’s painting “la musica” and a set of cross-domain mappings between music and the picture: the pianist’s multiple hands map onto the dynamic motion of hands playing a melody on a keyboard, the multi-colored masks with the different facial expressions map onto the different moods the music evokes, and the blue, curvy column which increases in size as it rises to the top maps onto the melody – a sequence of notes.³⁷ Like Russolo’s translation of a series of musical notes, I expected to see many jazz poems with curvy patterns along the lines of concrete poetry, but various jazz poems document other ways of using lines to visualize a melody.

36 In a note on his own painting La Musica, Russolo states that “In this picture, the painter tried to translate the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, polyphonic, and chromatic impressions, which make up the whole of a musical perception, into painting” (qtd. in Maur 1985: 121; translation mine). 37 Apart from realizing the conceptual metaphor, Russolo also painted the movement of the masks from the margins towards the center of the picture and bluish white concentric circles surrounding the head of the musician to indicate to the audience that the musician’s mind is the creative force behind the music and the moods expressed with the music.

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Figure 5: Luigi Russolo, La Musica (1911); Estorick Collection, London, UK/Bridgeman Images

4.1.1 a sequence of notes is a line i: Translating Melodies into Lines A good example for the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line constitutes Thulani Davis’s poem “C.T.’s variation,” which manifests the poets’ translation of jazz. While the literal meaning of her poem refers to the occasional flooding of the Mississippi River due to heavy rains in springtime, describes the effects on people living along the banks of the river, and probably commemorates the Great Mississippi Flooding of 1927, the title’s referring to “C.T.” and the variation of the lines from the first stanza to the second hint at the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line and, in turn, translate the lines of the poem into a musical theme-andvariation solo played on the piano by one of the leading exponents of Free Jazz, Cecil Taylor:

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some springs the Mississippi rose up so high it drowned the sound of singing and escape that sound of jazz from back boarded shanties by railroad tracks visionary women letting pigeons loose on unsettled skies was drowned by the quiet ballad of natural disaster some springs song was sweeter even so sudden cracks split the sky / for only a second lighting us in a kind of laughter as we rolled around quilted histories extended our arms and cries to the rain that kept us soft together some springs the Mississippi rose up so high it drowned the sound of singing and escape church sisters prayed and rinsed the brown dinge tinting linens thanked the trees for breeze and the greenness sticking to the windows that sound of jazz from back boarded shanties by railroad tracks visionary women letting pigeons loose on unsettled skies some springs song was sweeter even so (Davis, “C.T.’s variation” 29)

The poem invites the readers to imagine that they are listening to Cecil Taylor, who is first playing a theme divided into two parts: “some springs the Mississippi” and “some springs song” (first stanza) and then a variation of the theme (second stanza). Unlike Blackburn’s poem “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot,” Davis’s poem neither specifies the setting in the title nor gives away the melodic theme of the improvisation in the text. Once the readers have identified the metaphor thulani davis’s poem “c.t.’s variation” is cecil taylor’s themeand-variation solo, they can translate the poem into a theme-and-variation improvisation played by the jazz pianist and realize conceptual metaphors such as a line is a sequence of notes, free verse is free jazz, impressionistic images are impressionistic jazz style, alliteration is the repetition of single note, and a series of short syllables is staccato. They create metaphorical correspondences between the lines of the poem and sequences of musical notes and between the free verse (no end-line punctuation) and Taylor’s free jazz style; a succession of impressionistic images such as “boarded shanties

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by railroad tracks / visionary women letting pigeons loose / on unsettled skies” points to Taylor’s impressionistic style, the alliteration of the consonant “s” in lines such as “some springs the Mississippi rose up so high” refers to the (harmonious) repetition of an unspecified single note, finally, the short syllables of the onomatopoetic line correlate with Taylor’s staccato. The poem creates the aesthetic experience of listening to Taylor play an impressionistic piece without a fixed rhythm and phrase length: Taylor introduces the musical theme in the first part of his performance and stresses a musical phrase (“it drowned”) by picking it up again a few sequences of notes afterwards (“was drowned”). Taylor then interrupts his performance, as indicated by the slash in the onomatopoetic line “sudden cracks split the sky / for only a second” and the subsequent phrase “for only a second,” before he continues to play his theme. In the second part of his performance, he starts out with the same two melodic sequences of notes of the theme (that is, the first two lines of the second stanza), but then inserts new melodic material (four lines: “church sisters prayed and rinsed […] and the greenness sticking to the windows”) and subsequently repeats a major segment of the earlier theme that appeared right after the first two series of notes (five lines: “that sound of jazz from back […] some springs song was even sweeter so”). The elision of the line “was drowned by the quiet ballad of natural disaster” indicates Taylor’s elision of this part of the theme and, since the poem ends with “some springs song was even sweeter so,” omitting the rest of the initial theme, Taylor concludes his variation with an up-beat musical phrase without repeating the final section. The readers have access to additional musical experiences if they notice other ‘musical’ clues in the text. For instance, the slash in the line “sudden cracks split the sky / for only a second” metaphorically stands for the cracks of lightening that split the sky and literally “splits” the line “for only a second.” In turn, “/ for only a second” implies that the slash is a one-second musical stop in Taylor’s performance, as illustrated above. Likewise, “the quiet ballad” taken from “the quiet ballad of natural disaster” and “soft” in “that kept us soft together” hint at the soft dynamics of the imagined musical piece. Also, the literal meaning and the pronunciation of the last word of the first verse – “high” – correlates with a rise in pitch at the end of the first musical phrase. Lastly, the literal meaning and the arrangement of verses allows for the identification of shifts in the mood of the jazz piece. The sudden change from “was drowned by the quiet ballad of natural disaster” to “some springs song was sweeter even so” signals a thematic break within the first strophe (“some springs the Mississippi” and “some springs song”) and a rise from a downbeat, melancholic mood to a more upbeat, cheerful one. Due to this interaction between a literal and figurative translation, the readers can produce a more nuanced musical experience.

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The title and the variation of the line-arrangement in the second strophe can make them aware of the poem’s emphasis on the translation of the poetic text into Taylor’s theme-and-variation solo and the necessity of shifting between analyzing the text, its strictly literal interpretation, and its figurative potential. At first, they establish the basic correspondences between the poem and the music and, having become attuned to the metaphorical process, they focus on the more subtle points of Davis’s poem. With each new correspondence they generate, they enhance their own aesthetic experience. The “aesthetic experience” depends on the active work of readers. The more metaphors they can create, the richer their imaginative experience. In contrast to poems along the lines of Davis’s “C.T.’s variation,” a number of poems do not visualize melodic phrases through written lines and thus do not manifest the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line. One of many possible examples is Billy Collins’s “The Invention of the Saxophone.” The title implies that the poem will deal with the invention of the saxophone and perhaps even exemplify its role in jazz by a metaphoric rendering of a jazz performance. However, the poem remains on a purely literal level: It was Adolphe Sax, remember, not Saxo Grammaticus, who gets the ovation. And by the time he had brought all the components together – the serpentine shape, the single reed, the fit of the fingers, the upward tilt of the golden bell – it was already 1842, and one gets the feeling that it was also very late at night. There is something nocturnal about the sound, something literally horny, as some may have noticed on that historic date when the first odd notes wobbled out of his studio into the small, darkened town, summoning the insomniacs (who were up waiting for the invention of jazz) to their windows, but leaving the sleepers undisturbed, even deepening and warming the waters of their dreams. For this is not the valved instrument of waking, more the smoky voice of longing and loss, the porpoise cry of the subconscious. No one would ever think of blowing reveille on a tenor without irony. The men would only lie in their metal bunks, fingers twined behind their heads, afloat on pools of memory and desire.

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And when the time has come to rouse the dead, you will not see Gabriel clipping an alto around his numinous neck. An angel playing the world’s last song on a glistening saxophone might be enough to lift them back into the light of earth, but really no farther. Once resurrected, they would only lie down in the long cemetery grass or lean alone against a lugubrious yew and let the music do the ascending – curling snakes charmed from their baskets – while they wait for the shrill trumpet solo, that will blow them all to kingdom come. (Collins, “The Invention of the Saxophone” 79–80)

The tone is warm, humorous and sometimes verges on the crude, as in the line “something literally horny.” The reference to Saxo Grammaticus, the historical date, and the broad range of the vocabulary point to a learned poet who easily associates the name Adolphe Sax with the obscure Danish medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus, who knows when Adolphe Sax was experimenting with the design of the saxophone, who employs the appropriate technical terms to describe a saxophone, such as “reed,” “bell,” and “alto,” and who sprinkles his colloquial language (e.g., “wobbled out of his studio”) with learned terms such as “reveille” and “lugubrious.” Yet the poem provides no clues about how readers can leave the literal translation behind and move on to a figurative mode of translation. Clearly, the poem displays a variation of line length but it is literal-oriented and not musicdriven like the lines of “C.T.’s variation.” Although the poem mentions jazz and manifests an image metaphor when the narrator describes the ascending music as “curling snakes charmed from their baskets,” it remains an unambiguous, literal text. Naturally such poems are interesting poems, but they are not jazz poems in the sense of this study because they lack metaphoric transformations of music into written forms and thus belong to the separate category “jazz-related poetry.” The next five poems, by contrast, can be regarded as intermedial jazz poems, as they manifest the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line. The use of a jazz pianist’s name, though spelled out and not abbreviated as in “C.T.’s variation,” recurs in Lawson Fusao Inada’s “Bud Powell.” However, the title alone is not enough to identify the general metaphor jazz poem is jazz music. Only the combination of several clues permits the readers to recognize that they can translate the poem into jazz: the subtitle “Parisian Thoroughfare,” which refers to Powell’s composition “Parisian Thoroughfare” (see his performance of the composition on the

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album The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1), and the unusual italicization of the poem’s main part help create another powerful aesthetic experience: Bud Powell “Parisian Thoroughfare” Shops gleaming wares, windows streaming with the streets of commerce as fragrance from a nearby bakery fills and gilds the air burgeoned to the brim with birds, butterflies, blossoms, rising and falling calls of children quickening the courtyards, women whisking walks in the sunlit briskness of rhythm propelling, pulsing the entire populace, the entire thoroughfare into action after the night’s refreshing rain promising spring thick with brilliance, the surprising turn of events where everything turns out happy … (“Hey, cut it, man!”) (Inada, “Bud Powell” 83)

The combination of the clues enables the readers to recognize the imaginative dimension of the poem and realize the metaphors lawson fusao inada’s jazz poem “bud powell” is bud powell’s jazz piece “parisian thoroughfare” and a line is a sequence of notes. Perceiving each italicized line as a series of musical notes, they can establish further mappings between Powell’s composition and the poem: the introduction of the actual composition maps onto the italicized section corresponds, Powell’s impressionistic style of playing the song maps onto the varying arrangement of the lines on the page and the succession of images such as “Shops gleaming wares” and “windows streaming with the streets of commerce as fragrance,” and the tonic chord in F major with which the composition begins maps onto the capitalized word “Shops.” The alliteration of a consonant, such as “b” in “burgeoned to the brim with birds, butterflies, blossoms,” the letter “w” in “women whisking walks in the sunlit,” and the letter “p” in “propelling, pulsing the entire populace, the entire,” underlines each image’s coherence with a different – though unspecified – musical note. The repetition of words or phonemes in the same or subsequent lines, such as the iterated phoneme /iːm / in the first verse “Shops gleaming wares” and the second one “windows streaming with the streets of commerce as fragrance” (my underlining), points to the repetition of similar notes, the literal meaning of “rising and falling” correlates with the rise and fall of

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the melody’s pitch, and the mixture of short syllables and the literal meaning of “quickening” in the verse “calls of children quickening the courtyards” (my underlining) is equivalent to an increase of the musical tempo. Finally, the abrupt shift from the italicized section to the normal line in parenthesis “(“Hey, cut it, man!”)” at the end and the literal meaning of the exclamation indicate that a possibly discontented or bored listener disrupts the performance and orders Powell or some other pianist to stop playing.³⁸ The poem documents Inada’s creativity in experimenting with the ways of translating the jazz piece “Parisian Thoroughfare” composed by Powell into a predominantly figurative literary text. Unlike other poems such as Billy Collins’s “The Invention of the Saxophone,” it demonstrates Inada’s knowledge of the polyvalent potential of written signifiers. Hence he explores the interaction between literal and figurative translation processes; his poem allows readers to create manifold correlations between poem and music even if they do not know the jazz piece. In fact, the poem motivates readers to imagine listening to a performance and enrich their aesthetic experience by establishing more nuanced correspondences between the works. Dedicated to Bud Powell, Gerald Early’s poem “Innocency, or Not Song X” also manifests the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line as well as another characteristic feature of Powell’s style: the permutation of a musical phrase. An excerpt from the second part of the A–B–A structured poem will demonstrate the technique³⁹: The high, white moon, which he could remember sometime ago, a shape of light, Sometime ago, in his cell, amply detained as mad, he could remember through The mesh wiring, through it, the high, white moon, there, circular, oracular, A center of something not held, staring blankly, calmly back, as if It were the expression of some impossibly contained oneness of fellowship Like being alone in the church upon the hill called home, sweet home of the Lord. (Early, “Innocency, or Not Song X” 68; emphasis mine)

38 See also the brief discussion of Inada’s poem “Bud Powell” in Chapter 4.9. 39 See also the discussion of the first part of Early’s poem “Innocency, or Not Song X” in Chapter 4.4.5.

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The improvisatory lines and the frequent repetitions of words and phrases point to a figurative, musical reading of it. The slightly changed position of “high, white moon” (italics) in the first and sixth lines as well as the alteration of the sequence of words in “could remember sometime ago” to “Sometime ago, in his cell, / amply detained as mad, he could remember through” (my emphasis) indicates Powell’s technique of reworking musical phrases. The improvisatory use of words correlates with Powell’s style of improvising and the systematic alternation between unindented and indented lines relates to Powell’s using both hands to play the melodic lines. The excerpt’s literal meaning also refers to Powell’s hospitalization at the Creedmore Hospital due to his mental illness and complements the figurative interpretation of the lines as a series of notes played by the jazz pianist. Like Davis and Inada, Cornelius Eady also employs the title of “The Sheets of Sound” to show the poem’s metaphorical nature, which documents the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line. Together with the title, the graphical arrangement of the lines as steps on the page and the prompt “He says:” at the beginning of the poem serve as cues for a figurative reading of the seventeen-page long poem as a lengthy musical solo:⁴⁰ The Sheets of Sound for Xam I He says: What do I have to lose, Actually, By coming right out And saying What I mean To say? Like this, And like this, And like this Breathing Rickety steps To the heart Of the matter? Loose A black spirit

40 See also the discussion of an S-shaped pattern in Eady’s poem “The Sheets of Sound” in Chapter 4.1.2.

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Around the joint? Mr. Coltrane, floating a line […] If only for These brief seconds, Close the world, Its silly wounds And hard manners With a yell. I hear you push it, […] (Eady, “The Sheets of Sound” 73–74)

The title points to Coltrane’s distinctive improvisational style described by the jazz critic Ira Gitler as “sheets of sound”: “A term coined by Ira Gitler […] to describe the rapid, sweeping lines, in which individual pitches are indistinguishable, played by John Coltrane from the late 1950s” (“Sheets of Sound”). As soon as the readers connect the title with Coltrane and his idiosyncratic style of playing solos, they recognize that the third-person pronoun “he” in the verse “He says:” stands for Coltrane and they notice the ambiguity of “says,” which literally refers to the act of speaking but figuratively refers to Coltrane’s performance on a saxophone. The figurative perspective permits them to perceive all of the following verses as series of musical notes (a line is a sequence of notes) and correlate the visual step-like arrangement of the lines with Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” played over arpeggiated chords. At the same time, the narrator pretends to translate Coltrane’s lengthy solo into language. The phrase “He says:” informs the readers that the speaker acts as if he or she is listening to Coltrane’s free jazz music at the moment, which he or she is simultaneously translating it into words: for instance, the narrator translates Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” (short recurring musical ‘bursts’) into the step-like arranged phrases “Like this, / And like this, / And like this” (see above), which sustains the illusion of immediacy. For ten parts (I to X), the speaker tells the audience his or her thoughts which include, among other things, fantasies (IV: “I try to imagine that first attempt, / on the bandstand,” 77), stories (V: I heard a story, once, / Told on Miles Davis and / The young pup, John / Coltrane,” 78), and memories (VII: “I am driving / With a friend / In New Jersey: / Two poets discussing / Jazz,” 80). At the end of part X, the talkative narrator concludes his or her translation with the two verses “How we can never / Get it all out.” This statement offers the reason for the poem’s uncommon length:

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the speaker assumes that Coltrane wants to “Get it all out” when he plays sheets of sound on the tenor saxophone and, likewise, tries to “Get it all out” himself. Compared to the four parts Coltrane plays on A Love Supreme (Part 1: “Acknowledgment”; Part 2: “Resolution”; Part 3: “Pursuance”; and Part 4: “Psalm”), which Eady mentions in part VIII and puts in quotation marks (“A Love Supreme,” 81) to indicate that the narrator is aware of Coltrane’s masterpiece and perhaps has identified a motif from the album, the translator speaks for ten parts without nearly exhausting his thoughts. In turn, the poem invites the readers to translate it into a lengthy solo of Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.”⁴¹ In contrast to Eady’s “The Sheets of Sound,” Tennessee Williams’s poem “Tenor Sax Taking the Breaks” consists of two-part stanzas: the initial part, which manifests the metaphor a line is a sequence of notes, and (italicized) lines, which does not document the metaphor. Typically known for The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams, probably “infected” by the jazz fever of his time, wrote two blues poems and developed a novel way of translating jazz into writing in his only jazz poem. Rather than italicizing the musical lines (Inada) or arranging the lines in a special way (Eady), Williams uses incoherent, associative word constructions and variations of alliteration to highlight the figurative dimension of the initial parts of his poem. His poem calls for the readers’ ability to imagine and perhaps concretize the poem’s vague setting without naming a concrete source or jazz musician. To achieve this goal, the poem alternates between groups of lines which asks readers to translate them into an antiphonal “call-and-response” between the imaginary performance and the audience’s response to it:

41 Coltrane was known to play very lengthy versions of their numbers at concerts in the mid1960s, his late period, and his two recordings of the forty-minute avant-garde piece “Ascension” (Ed. 1 and 2) in June 1965 are perfect examples of long pieces. Indeed, the length was integral to Coltrane’s purpose of “getting all in,” as Giddins points out at the end of his entry on Coltrane in Visions of Jazz: “‘The main thing a musician would like to do,’ Coltrane said, ‘is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe.’ When Miles asked him why he played so long, he answered, ‘It took that long to get it all in’” (Giddins 1998: 490). The final two verses thus allude to Coltrane’s philosophy of expressing “the wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe” in his lengthy pieces and the speaker follows Coltrane’s philosophy by narrating all the wonderful stories, anecdotes, and memories he or she knows during the translation of the music into words.

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TENOR SAX TAKING THE BREAKS 1. We have come down by the moon brilliantly swinging on spangled trapeze skeins of thin silk the lunar moth’s milky cocoon Singing the latest jazz tunes with trumpets, with trombones the tenor sax taking the breaks! Ride out, boy! Send it solid! Or at high noon on beaches disporting our bodies that imitate bronze While the drums beat out a quick rhythm the tango, the rhumba the blues-singer shouting the chorus! She’s in the groove, that baby! She’s tearing it down! Jitterbugs snakes swing addicts! Boy in blue trunks surf-rider girl with your breast half-naked Where is disaster? Only in newspaper headlines! Swing out! Give it the gun! […] (Williams, “Tenor Sax Taking the Breaks” 147–148)

The lyrical juxtaposition of incongruent, dazzling images in the first stanza metaphorically corresponds to an inspired improvisation of a nameless jazz saxophonist. Also, his playing with the vowel /uː / in “moon” and “cocoon” correlates with a repetition of a note during the improvisation, the sandwiching of the fricative consonant / z / (lenis, voiced) in-between the fricative consonants / s / (fortis, voiceless) in the series of words “swinging – spangled – trapeze – skeins – silk

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(s-s-z-s-s-s) relates to an alternation between strong and weaker articulations of the same note, and the alliteration in “moth’s milky” refers to an emphatic repetition of the same note. The speaker then interrupts the “romantic” jazz improvisation with the next, grammatically “correct” stanza, in which the speaker uses the linguistic metaphor “singing,” which is not translated into music, to describe the jazz tunes played by the brass section with the tenor saxophone taking the breaks. Positioned below and aligned to the right, the italicized lines “Ride out, boy! / Send it solid!” represent encouraging shouts by members of the audience to the – most likely – young male saxophonist. The next stanza picks up the solo where it had been interrupted: the use of the vowel / uː / in “noon” refers back to the repetition of the same vowel in “moon” and “cocoon” of the first stanza and correlates with the improvisational playing of a single note, and the sandwiching of the plosive consonant / p / (fortis) in-between the plosive consonants / b / (lenis) in the series of words “beaches – disporting – bodies – bronze” (b-p-b-b) corresponds to a succession of voiced (weak) and voiceless (strong) articulations of the same note. The speaker breaks off the solo again in the next stanza with a description of a quickening percussive rhythm, which changes from a tango- to a rumba-inspired rhythm, and the “bluessinger shouting the chorus.” As in the second stanza, the italicized lines aligned to the right represent two comments made by anonymous audience members. They note that the singer is female and that her performance wins their approval, perhaps the whole audience’s as well. Williams changes the pattern of alternating between a figurative interpretation of a group of lines as a part of a solo and literal descriptions of the jazz performance in the subsequent stanza. Unlike the step-like arrangement of the lines in Eady’s “The Sheets of Sound,” the step-like arrangement of the lines “Jitterbugs / snakes / swing addicts!” in Williams’s poem allows for two interpretations. The expressions and the recurrence of the fricative, voiceless consonant /s/ in the stanza “Jitterbugs / snakes / swing addicts!” could point to short ‘bursts’ and the repetition of the same note played by the saxophonist. Or, the expressions could stem from the speaker who utters staccato-like the words “Jitterbugs,” “snakes,” and “swing addicts!” to describe the crowd of people listening and dancing to the music. The next stanza, however, returns to the familiar pattern and allows readers to connect the literary technique of alternating between voiceless and voiced pronunciations of a particular consonant (e.g., “Boys – blue – breast – newspaper” and “trunks – surf-rider – half-naked – disaster – headlines”) with the change in articulation of a repeatedly played note, the question with a rise in pitch at the end of the phrase, and the exclamation “Only in newspaper headlines!” with a musical statement played in forte. Deviating from the pattern that two italicized

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lines follow a literal descriptive passage, the two italicized lines “Swing out! / Give it the gun!” follow right after the solo part and represent shouts of encouragement by members of the audience who cheer for the saxophone player. Overall, the first part of Williams’s poem asks readers to envision themselves as spectators at a live performance, in which the brass section plays the latest jazz tunes while the male saxophonist plays solos in the breaks between the pieces. It begins in media res with a lyrical solo performed by the saxophone player whose signature techniques involve the “rhyming” of sounds at the (near) end of musical phrases and the playing of strong (fortis, voiceless) and weak (lenis, voiced) articulations of a single note. To create a more comprehensive aesthetic experience of the concert, the poem shifts between the solo and descriptions of the music played by the other band members, changes in rhythm, shouts of a female blues singer, and cheers from the audience. Another kind of mixture between lines that call for a figurative musical reading and those that ask for a literal reading makes up Langston Hughes’s “The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.).” Hughes defamiliarizes the typography of several verses to indicate the conceptual metaphor a line is a sequence of notes and presents the reader with a poem that alternates between “regular” and capitalized lines: EVERYBODY Half-pint, – Gin? No, make it LOVES MY BABY corn. You like liquor, don’t you, honey? BUT MY BABY Sure. Kiss me, DON’T LOVE NOBODY daddy. BUT ME. Say! EVERYBODY Yes? WANTS MY BABY I’m your BUT MY BABY sweetie, ain’t I? DON’T WANT NOBODY Sure.

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BUT Then let’s ME, do it! SWEET ME. Charleston, mamma! ! (Hughes, “The Cat and the Saxophone” 89)

A literal translation of the capitalized words helps readers to identify them as part of the lyrics from the song “Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Don’t Love Nobody But Me)” (lyrics and music by Jack Palmer and Spencer Williams, 1924). This information, together with the defamiliarized lines’ rhythm and the poem’s title, in turn, reveals the metaphors a line is a sequence of notes and, more specifically, the lyrics of the song “everybody loves my baby” is the melody of “everybody loves my baby” and metaphorically translate the typographically altered lines into the melody of “Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Don’t Love Nobody But Me)” performed by a saxophone player in a jazz venue at 2 a.m. For instance, the first verse “EVERYBODY” refers to the first word of the lyrics and the capitalization instructs the readers to translate it figuratively into the first few notes of the song’s melody. Hughes took the first two strophes of the original lyrics, omitted the third and fourth line (“nobody but me, / Yes”), and changed the last line of the second strophe (“sweet me” rather than “that’s plain to see”) to indicate slight musical deviations performed by the saxophonist: Lyrics of “Everybody Loves My Baby”

Hughes’s Text (lines in upper case)

Everybody loves my baby but my baby don’t love nobody but me nobody but me Yes everybody wants my baby but my baby don’t want nobody but me that’s plain to see!

Everybody / loves my baby but my baby / don’t love nobody / but me.

Everybody / wants my baby but my baby / don’t want nobody / but me, sweet me.

(Palmer and Williams 1924: n.p.)

Unlike Blackburn, Hughes capitalizes to indicate the melody of a jazz standard and not the dynamics of a musical piece. The poem’s regular lines, by contrast, describe a brief exchange between a hip black man, the “cat” from the title, and the bartender and a conversation between the “cat” and his girlfriend (“honey”) in a cabaret. Both dialogues take

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place while a saxophonist performs the melody “Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Don’t Love Nobody But Me)” as the alternation between the regular and upper-case lines signals to the readers. The latter dialogue, in addition, evinces a technique similar to jazz’s “sudden surprise” technique: the man’s statement “Then let’s / […] / do it.” builds up the reader’s expectation that the two lovers will have sexual intercourse, but Hughes surprises the readers when he puts the exclamation “Charleston, / mamma!” into the cat’s mouth and gives it additional force by means of another exclamation mark. The poem ends with a bang.⁴² The contrast between Davis’s “C.T.’s variation” and Collins’s “The Invention of the Saxophone” as well as the discussion of the subsequent five poems, which exhibited several other ways of making the readers aware of the musical dimension, illustrated the difference between poems that enable readers to switch from literal to figurative reading processes and poems that remain on a purely literal level. Obviously the latter kind of poems is interesting, but, due to their onedimensionality, they do not allow readers to imagine such poetic texts in terms of jazz music.

4.1.2 a sequence of notes is a line ii: Snake Patterns in Jazz Poetry Whereas Russolo’s painting La Musica documents the metaphor a sequence of notes is a snake-shaped line and invites readers to interpret the blue S-shape as a melody played by a musician on an oversized keyboard, the snake pattern found in T.J. Hummer’s “Poem in the Shape of a Saxophone” documents the metaphor the fluidity of jazz music is a snake pattern, rather than a sequence of notes is a line. The patterns discovered in Kenneth McClane’s “Harlem Jam” and Quincy Troupe’s “Snake-Back Solo” do not manifest a sequence of notes is a line and ask readers to move from a literal to a figurative mode of reading. However, the S-shaped patterns in Eady’s “The Sheets of Sound” and Ron Welburn’s “Streams: Sam Rivers” let readers create a musical aesthetic experience. The following discussion will alternate between literal and figurative interpreta-

42 Several critics have mentioned the experimental techniques Hughes used in his poem “The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.)” and placed it firmly in the modernist period of American literature without pointing out that the capitalized lines ask the readers to imagine them metaphorically as music; see, for example, Jean Wagner’s comparison of the poem to an “orchestra score” and her claim that the “poem consists of two parts, bass and tenor” (1973: 412) in Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, 412, and James Smethurst’s assertion that the poem consists of two simultaneous “vernacular voices, that of each poem’s speaker (or speakers) and that of jazz” (102) in his study From The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (1999), 102–103.

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tions of poetic snake patterns to demonstrate the difference between the two types of S-shapes in jazz poetry. An illustrative example for a snake pattern that does not document the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line is Hummer’s “Poem in the Shape of a Saxophone.” The title raises the expectation of seeing a poem shaped like a saxophone, but that is not what readers notice when they take a cursory look at an excerpt: Refracted through years, this neon light comes back, Blue in the etched lines of a bar’s lead-glass windows. Somebody in an apartment, high Over the asthmatic August streets of one more city In the whipped-out heart of the old northeast, Tries to make the horn sound sweet, like Hawk. That’s hip to know, who he wants to sound like, What it is in his jaw that trembles a little wrong Back of the reed – but the woman on the barstool knows. She is a woman I loved for what she remembered About the breath, how if you don’t move it Exactly right the tones won’t round, how the tongue Has to do what it has to do precisely. Now she sits on the barstool in the past, where I put her, Blowing a smoke ring delicately stained with the predictable Bloodred lipstick of the early 1940s. I put her there and keep her there, Dressed in blue silk she would never have chosen herself, Years before she was born. I want her to hear the stillborn Choruses waffle over the apartment window ledge and down Into the street, into the bar where she sits, theme music From a bad old movie. I want her there so I can speak of her In the past tense, where it’s safe, where nobody cares If I say I loved, or if the horn in the high window lifts Its minor third a shade […] (Hummer, “Poem in the Shape of a Saxophone” 39)

Hummer toys with the expectations of the readers and surprises them with a “curvy” poem that does not look like a written visualization of a saxophone. The snake-like shape of the poem – due to the enjambments linking one stanza with the next one and the “stream-of-consciousness” narration of the speaker

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who improvises on a memory⁴³ – allow to perceive such techniques as ways of translating the “fluidity” of jazz music into writing (the fluidity of jazz music is a snake pattern). Yet, the poem does not reveal a musical dimension to its readers, instead representing an S-shaped literal narrative that does not manifest a sequence of notes is a line. By contrast, the snake-like shape in Eady’s “The Sheets of Sound” invites a figurative reading. As discussed above, Ira Gitler coined the phrase “sheets of sound,” which signals that readers can engage in a metaphorical translation of the step-like arranged verses into Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” Apart from these “sheets of sound,” the poem also evinces a curvy italicized section: For what? Surely this love, I hear you sing, This Sort Of Love Will ruin me. A wonder operates here. Pushes away (Eady, “The Sheets of Sound” 74)

Guided by the overall metaphor the lines of eady’s poem “the sheets of sound” are john coltrane’s “sheets of sound,” readers will translate the snake-like arranged lines into notes played by Coltrane who interrupts his “sheets of sound”-technique for a short “curvy” solo (“This / Sort / Of / Love”) before he continues to play his high speed succession of notes over falling arpeggios (“Will ruin me. / A wonder operates here. / Pushes away”). Simultaneously, the literal meaning of “I hear you sing” and the italicized words and phrases inform the readers about the narrator’s reminiscence of a blues song and lyrics. A snake-like shaped poem can also stand for the capital letter “S” as Kenneth McClane’s “Harlem Jam” illustrates:

43 E.g., the speaker plays with the idea of a woman sitting on a barstool “where I put her” and dresses her “in blue silk she would never have chosen herself.”

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at night when dark ribs into every last hue bongoes coil warmed bellies of harlem into serious design. (McClane, “Harlem Jam” 42)

The sexual connotation of the title (“Jam”), the description of black people dancing (“bongoes”) in a Harlem nightclub, and the ambiguous references to humans and snakes (e.g., “ribs,” “hue,” and “coil / warmed bellies”) justify the interpretation of the S-shape as a snake-like intermingling of black bodies and as the initial letter of “Sex,” which ostensibly denotes the “serious / design” of the “warmed bellies.”⁴⁴ Yet, the poem does not warrant a figurative translation of the poetic text into jazz music. The same assertion applies to Quincy Troupe’s “Snake-Back Solo.” Contrary to McClane’s “Harlem Jam,” it exhibits no upfront visual S-form and yet Troupe’s improvisation on the word “on” in the first stanza, the phrase “is a blues” in the second stanza, and the alternation between “to see through” and “can become” in the third stanza display a not so easily detectable literal snake-like shape (excerpt): SNAKE-BACK SOLO (For Louis Armstrong, Steve Cannon, Miles Davis & Eugene Redmond) with the music up high boogalooin bass down way way low up & under eye come slidin on in mojoin on in spacin on in on a riff full of rain riffin on in full of rain & pain spacin on in on a sound like coltrane my metaphor is a blues hot pain dealin blues is a blues axin guitar voices whiskey broken niggah deep in the heart is a blues in a glass filled with rain

44 The repetition of the phonemes / s / and / z / in the last two lines “serious / design” onomatopoetically creates the hissing sound of a snake.

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is a blues in the dark slurred voices of straight bourbon is a blues dagger stuck off in the heart of night moanin like bessie smith is a blues filling up the wings of darkness is a blues & looking through the heart a dream can become a raindrop window to see through can become a window to see through this moment to see yourself hanging around the dark to see through can become a river catching rain feeding time can become a window to see through […] (Troupe, “Snake-Back Solo” 69; emphasis mine)

The title sensitizes readers to potential snake-like patterns and enables the detection of the highlighted S-form as well as the interpretation of the poem as the product of a stylized linguistic “solo” which has no concrete musical source. Rather, it suggests a general metaphorical correspondence between Troupe’s linguistic improvisation in “Snake-Back Solo” and jazz improvisation without inviting interpretations of the lines as sequences of musical notes. Unlike Troupe’s “Snake-Back Solo,” Ron Welburn’s “Streams: Sam Rivers” refers to a specific jazz performance and documents the poet’s playful ways of translating Rivers’s avant-garde concept of “streams” into writing. Aside from the wordplay on Sam Rivers’s name, the title refers to a live recording at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival on July 6, 1973, performed by Sam Rivers on various instruments. (Rivers was joined by Norman Connors on drums and Cecil McBee on bass: Sam Rivers – Streams: Recorded in Performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival [Impulse, 1973].) The recording consists of a single long piece divided into three parts (1. Spoken Introduction, 2. Tenor Saxophone Section/Beginning of Flute Section, and 3. Conclusion of Flute Section/Piano Section/Soprano Saxophone Section) and represents a “stream of consciousness” meditation by the small group of musicians. As the first part of the poem illustrates, Rivers’s concept of “streams” inspired Welburn to experiment with various types of “streams” and, for instance, transform Rivers’s concept of “streams” into a “stream-of-consciousness” narrative technique and a snake-like pattern:

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STREAMS: SAM RIVERS where the music is surviving as music, and you are compelled to hear it as lives spoken. units getting together a sound within obscurity a unit making “streams” is of music as of music is of consciousness as consciousness is flowering, and certainly not static unless expression and pure song itself are taken out of who you are when you are sitting standing walking sleeping or laying back. (Welburn, “Streams: Sam Rivers” 20)

The group’s free jazz improvisation – which, as the literal meaning of the first stanza shows, is “a unit making ‘streams’” – maps onto the improvisational runon lines. The improvisation’s “stream-of-consciousness” style also alluded to in the lines “is of music as / of music / is of consciousness as / consciousness” maps onto the poem’s narrative technique. This latter technique, which exhibits the speaker’s thought processes and associative wordplays (e.g., the word “flowering” of the verse “flowering, and certainly not static” refers to the flowering plants and to the flow of streams), and the S-shape of rivers and streams fits onto the poem’s S-shape (see especially the last part). A further “stream” occurs a few lines later, where the “stream” of graphemes (and phonemes) “w,” “o,” and “s” metaphorically interconnects with a “stream” of notes:

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Rivers working out of streams a conceptual format in motion toward recital and where the image was in the revolution of time alfred lion, hear us now! you made sam sing like a silly sow tunes for show. (20; my emphasis)

The iteration of the graphemes (and respective phonemes) “o,” “w,” and “s” as well as the combinations “wo” and “ow” correlate with a flow of musical notes. At the same time, the speaker describes Rivers’s technique of “streams” as “a conceptual format” which governed the musician’s avant-garde jazz style in the “revolutionary” period of Free Jazz and marked a change from Rivers’s jazz style recorded on earlier albums for Blue Note Records, co-founded by Alfred Lion in 1939, to the free jazz style found on the Streams album (see the statement “alfred lion, hear us now!”). Finally, the speaker metaphorically understands Rivers’s concept of “streams” in terms of water and spirituality: In the structural complex of his music Rivers’ sound is breeze and fire kinetic and fluid streams of water molecules as a body rushing over rocks or resting in wide space. The music is not just about the water – should water be taken by one definition – but the spiritual banks of rivers its ledges overhanging and felled trees its waterlife and sound The music as streaming is a totality of where we are in the world and in time looking for the cast down bread to rescue our minds and souls from this sphere. (21)

The excerpt manifests the conceptual metaphors sam rivers’s ‘streams’ are water and sam rivers’s ‘streams’ are spiritual. The lengthy poem, however, leaves it unclear whether it pretends to be a long improvisational piece recorded on Streams or simply displays Welburn’s effort of experimenting with new ways of rendering the concept of “streams.” If the former is the case, then the poem manifests the general metaphor sam rivers’s “streams” recording is ron wel-

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burn’s poem “streams: sam rivers” and the embedded metaphor a sequence of notes is a line, which, in turn, asks readers to interpret the poem’s snakeshaped pattern as a musical “stream” Rivers and his band play. Rivers’s “Streams” echoes the snake-patterns that, like the blue S-shaped column in Russolo’s painting La Musica, call for a figurative (and a literal) reading. It also exemplifies the creativity of poets who invent new, idiosyncratic ways of relating jazz music to S-shaped patterns.

4.1.3 a sequence of notes is a line iii: Improvisation on a Theme According to Barry Kernfeld, riffing on a given musical theme constitutes the most common form of improvisation in jazz: By far the majority of pieces of jazz involve variations on an existing theme, such as a popular song, the blues progression or a newly composed piece. Two statements of the theme in a more or less fixed form customarily frame a series of variations, several or all of which involve improvisation by a soloist or soloists over an accompaniment supplied by the ensemble. The freedom with which the theme is treated varies from piece to piece and according to the style of the players; indeed, the main reason for the popularity of this form is that it offers so adaptable a scheme within which improvisatory skills can be explored. (Kernfeld, “Improvisation”)

Thulani Davis’s poem “C.T.’s variation,” we’ll recall, manifests Davis’s transformation of the practice of improvisation on a musical theme into a variation (second stanza) of a pre-established theme (first stanza), illustrating her technique of translating a sequence of notes into a line. Not all poems, however, fit into this pattern. Some poems document the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line and, in turn, invite readers to interpret them as jazz improvisations and imagine the lines as sequences of notes. The following discussion will illustrate the difference between a purely linguistic or verbal improvisation: i.e. poets engage in a strictly literal approach when they improvise on words, and poems that ask readers to imagine them as improvisational jazz solos. The musical term “riff” used in the title of Gilbert Sorrentino’s poem “Riff” denotes a jazz improvisation on a short melodic phrase and prepares the readers for the encounter with an improvisation on a short theme:

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In the mood is what I’m in. The mood On Monday is Tuesday mood. On Tuesday Is Wednesday. Mood on Wednesday is Thursday mood on Thursday Is Friday. Mood on Friday. Is Saturday Mood on Saturday is Monday mood. I’m in the mood the mood Seven times a week. Not in the mood For sprouts or avocado bread. No Fresh juice with raw fish. They can’t make a pizza So I don’t want a pizza. I’m in the mood like you know In the mood like normal like you know Regular like New York coffee. (Sorrentino, “Riff” 366)

Indeed, the poem riffs on “in the mood” that correlates with the technique of improvisation in jazz, but this type of theme-and-variation improvisation is purely a linguistic practice. Although the title “Riff” connotes a jazz riff, the term denotes a verbal “riff,” in which the speaker describes him- or herself as being in a normal – nothing fancy or exciting (“Not in the mood / For sprouts or avocado bread”) – and unexciting mood (“Regular like New York coffee”) on Monday through Saturday. On Sundays, the speaker implies, he or she becomes more lively and exciting. Lacking a concrete reference to a musical source and clear typographical clues such as the italicized lines in Inada’s “Bud Powell,” the poem documents a strictly verbal improvisation and calls for a literal reading, but not for a figurative translation of the lines into a sequence of notes. Likewise Clayton Eshleman offers theme-and-variation in his poem “Variation on a Line by Pound.” The title already notes that a verse written by Ezra Pound will serve as the theme for an improvisation without specifying the line’s exact source. Quotation marks indicate that the first line “[t]he humane man has amity with the hills” stems from Pound’s in “Canto LXXIII” of his The Pisan Cantos (Pound 1996: 107), the sixth book of The Cantos. Eshleman begins with the line as his starting point and playfully varies it in his poem:

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“The humane man has amity with the hills” the main hue is an amity in the hills the human hue is an am, an I am of the hills an am I am, to be haunted always by am I of the hills and to keep in amity in spite of the humane, the human amity that as an I am would replace the hills. All these hues are so much has with the hills, their having is without amity, amless hills onto which man projects amity. The humane man projects and sees through amity, his amity is hued, hewn, so much hooha – to be nitty with the hills? Hills infest the humane man with what he is, a hill hue, a who of amless hill. Words that are not in any sentence paw as if to break down fragile amity. The humane man has amity with the hills for his amlessness depends, as well as his am, thus does the hill man have amity with what is humane. One might call oneself Hillman to offer amity the mane of hill. (Eshleman, “Variation on a Line by Pound” 134)

The poem begins with the theme “‘[t]he humane man has amity with the hills” and continues with variations of the line. For instance, the next line “the main hue is an amity in the hills” shows that Eshleman changed the capitalized “The” into the lower-case “the,” split the word “humane” into the homophone “main” and the word “hue” (that is, “hu” plus “e”), and transformed the last part of the line “has amity with the hills” into “is an amity in the hills.” His variations also manifest expressions not included in the initial theme such as “haunted,” “to keep in,” “in spite of,” and “would replace.” Eshleman repeats this theme at the beginning of the last stanza and once again modifies it in the last few verses. Like Sorrentino, he translated the improvisatory practice – and not jazz music – into a verbal improvisation. “Variation on a Line by Pound” calls for a literal reading, and not a figurative translation of the lines into a series of notes, because it neither relies on a musical source nor does it cue readers to perceive it as music.

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Similarly, Linda France’s “Blues for Bird” shows her translating the technique of theme-and-variation improvisation into writing without providing instructions for an interpretation of the poem as jazz. It commemorates the death of Charlie Parker whose nickname was “Yardbird” or simply “Bird” and who often improvised on blues songs in his fast, technically challenging bebop solos. France, however, does not translate his jazz improvisations into a written form but engages in a linguistic improvisation on the sequence of six words (“blues,” “bird,” “glass,” “liquid,” “free,” “horn”), each of which she positioned at the end of a line of the first stanza (boldface), and varies the sequence of the six words in the subsequent stanzas (underlined): What you did to the blues was the sound of a bird trapped behind broken glass beating at the liquid light, struggling to fly free. You crushed bones with your horn. They all told you a horn shouldn’t be blown that free and fast. You played the blues hot as neon, liquid gas. Your sax and a glass of booze – you were a bird. And they called you Yard bird too, singing back home blues twitching that brassy horn full of amber liquid – those notes that shone like glass made you dream you were free. Say who of us is free? We all live under glass wishing we were bird, sky gold with angel horn. But we swim in the blues – indigo, turquoise, liquid as the sea. Your liquid cocktail was spiked with horn of horse. Nothing is free. On the streets, doing bird they followed you, those blues – tears just mirrors of glass.

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But still you’d fill your glass, pick up, polish your horn. The tune spilled like liquid from your lips. You were free as death – your soul a bird. You earned your breath, your blues. Bird, you’re a ghost of glass, liquid mid all those blues – free at last, your horn, you. (France, “Blues for Bird” 14–15; emphasis mine)

In each stanza, France changes the word order of the initial sequence “bluesbird-glass-liquid-free-horn” but deviates from her practice in the third and fourth stanza when she places “blues” and the following dash at the end of the fifth line. She also surprises the readers with a three-line stanza at the end. Having encountered six stanzas with six lines each, the readers expect to see another six-line stanza with another variation of the six words, but they come across an unexpected alteration: France begins and ends the first two lines of the last stanza with one of the six words and, in the last verse, changes the pattern slightly to stress the personal pronoun, which stands for Parker, in the last strophe. Although France creates variations of the words “blues,” “bird,” “glass,” “liquid,” “free,” and “horn,” she creates a linear narrative about Parker, which, at no time, signals that it can be translated into a jazz tune or melody. By contrast, the improvisations in Jay Wright’s “Twenty-Two Tremblings of the Postulant (Improvisations Surrounding the Body)” act as twenty-two jazz improvisations on several themes. Wright offers two clues to help readers switch from a literal to a figurative reading: first, he follows the practice in music of using Roman numbers (I, IV, and V) for chords and places them above one or more stanzas to indicate the harmonic framework of the blues used in the “jazz improvisation”; second, he concludes with a statement in parenthesis, which signals that readers have to imagine each stanza as a one-bar long improvisation. A few “tremblings” and the final statement will suffice to illustrate the poem’s overall structure: I 1 (arm) Candles, ribbons and a cross gaud my sash and tux. My derby and white gloves stand erect over my coffin.

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This music greets death, the winking, prancing lid that lies still with longing for a bone that has flared, an embryo with the power to appear.

2 (forearm) […]

4 (fingers) for Albert Ayler Patron of a dap, a dapper sound, let us here recall breath, presence and desire. Witch moss listens for the elephant horn, the dirge of imprisoned light. Darkness charges your bell’s light; its emptiness endures in your free light, point without closure, space without beginning. Your fingers must endure the astringent eyes your horn wears.

IV 5 (thigh) To him who has not killed it is forbidden to drink the virgin’s beer. […] (The last two bars are tacit.) (Wright, “Twenty-Two Tremblings of the Postulant” 30–42)

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Each of the twenty-two improvisations focuses on a different body part. The fourth “trembling,” for instance, which Wright dedicates to the avant-garde jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, represents an improvisation on Ayler’s fingers, as the lines “Your fingers must endure / the astringent eyes / your horn wears” illustrate, his saxophone (see the multiple references to the “horn”), and on titles of Ayler’s recordings: the word “Witch” refers to the title “Witches and Devils” of the album Spirits (1964), the improvisational play with “Darkness” and “light” points to the song “Light in the Darkness” originally released on The Dedication Series, Vol. II: The Village Concerts (Impulse, 1966), and the term “bell’s” refers to Ayler’s tenor saxophone and probably to the song “Bells” (see, for instance, Love Cry, 1967). Moreover, the expression “in your free light” refers to Ayler’s free-jazz style. The Roman numerals placed above some of the “tremblings” indicate the basic three chords of the blues progression (I, IV, and V) and, in conjunction with the poem’s last statement, invite the readers to translate the twenty-two improvisations plus the two silent ones into a twenty-four bar piece played over the chords of the blues progression. A comparison between the poem’s standard twelve-bar blues progression and the cycle of two twelve-bar chord sets will only show a slight modification of the latter from the basic harmonic pattern of the blues. For instance, the first four bars of a standard blues song are typically played over the first chord (see first four chords depicted in Table A) and, similarly, the first four “tremblings” are played over the first chord in Wright’s poem (see the first four chords depicted in Table B): (A) The Standard Twelve-Bar Chord Progression⁴⁵ 1: 5: 9:

I IV V

2: I or IV 6: IV 10: IV or V

3: I 7: I 11: V

4: I 8: I 12: V

(B) The Cycle of Two Twelve-Bar Chord Progressions in Wright’s Poem 1: 5: 9:

I IV V

2: I 6: IV 10: V

3: I 7: I 11: I

4: I 8: I 12: I

13: I 17: IV 21: V

14: I 18: IV 22: V

15: I 19: I 23: —

16: I 20: I 24: —

45 I gathered the information about the harmonic structure of the twelve-bar blues progression from the entry on “Blues Progression” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, see Kernfeld and Moore, “Blues Progression.”

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The comparison of the standard blues progression with the cycle of the two twelvebar chord progressions indicated in the poem demonstrates that Wright asks the readers to imagine the series of twenty-two stanzas as a series of twenty-two brief improvisations (plus two silent bars) – each improvisation takes place within a single bar – played over a slightly transformed basic harmonic structure of the blues (see, for instance, the change of the chords in bar 11 and 12 of the first twelve bars from V to I). Each line, in principle, documents the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line and asks readers to translate it into an imaginary melodic phrase, but the main focus lies on the more general process of understanding the stanzas as brief jazz improvisations. Similarly, Dionisio Martínez’s two interrelated poems “Three and Four Shades of Blues” and “Three and Four Shades of Blues (2)” cue the readers to move from a literal to a figurative interpretation of them as jazz improvisations without overemphasizing the individual lines. Both titles refer to “Three and Four Shades of Blues” by Charles Mingus, which were recorded on March 9, 1977 and released on the album Three or Four Shades of Blues (Atlantic, 1977), and, in conjunction with the italicized statement “ – after Charles Mingus” at the end of the first poem and the parenthesis “(2)” in the title of the second poem, they ask readers to read the two poems as two different jazz improvisations on “Three or Four Shades of Blues” (“Take 1” and “Take 2”): Three or Four Shades of Blues These days in Europe no one is safe. The terrorist who works at the newsstand will tell you his country’s government is like a jazz band that improvises badly and too often. His accomplice will say the Prado museum is not a good shelter: if someone walks in with a saxophone full of explosives, Guernica will burn again. He has figured out what it will take to blow up the canvas, to bring down every building in Madrid. The streets will swallow you like night rain. These days the European rain falls through the roofs of the jazz clubs, but no one seems to notice: no one leaves before the last note of Cryin’ Blues is dead and the last wine glass broken.

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Then they all go out for walks thinking that the streets are only streets. They pass the museum and make plans to go in someday. A woman says she’s well acquainted with an architect who assures her that those walls will outlive every jazz musician in the continent. One of them overhears this and says he’s not convinced. He wants to hock his five trombones and move to Mexico before the next night rain. — after Charles Mingus (qtd. in Feinstein and Komunyakaa 1991: 142; boldface and underlining mine)

The title connects the poem, jazz in general, and Mingus’s composition “Three or Four Shades of Blues” in particular: for instance, the bipartite structure of the poem with the similar phrases “These days in Europe” and “These days the European” (underlined) and the similar topics “jazz” and “museum” (underlined) corresponds to an improvisation that begins with a melodic phrase “These days in Europe” and displays several melodic motifs (jazz, museum, streets) and then returns to the initial but slightly modified melodic phrase “These days the European” only to play another improvisation with the same motifs (jazz, museum, streets); the casual tone of the narrative voice correlates with the relaxed tone of “Three or Four Shades of Blues”; the combination of the relaxed tone and the topic of explosives point to a trademark of Mingus’s style (and personality) which the critic Giddins calls “disciplined turmoil” (Giddins 1998: 455): “Charles Mingus and his music gave the impression of howling assurance and terrifying emotions. His bass echoed like a giant’s threat, to be soothed by balmy melodies” (455); and the reference to the blues song Cryin’ Blues corresponds to the hodgepodge of allusions to blues songs in Mingus’s “Three or Four Shades of Blues.” Sascha Feinstein’s comment on Martínez’s two poems in A Bibliographic Guide to Jazz Poetry helps detect another correlation between the two poems and jazz music. “Martínez’s two poems for Charles Mingus,” he states, “read like two independent solos on the same chord changes” (Feinstein 1998: 62). Figuratively speaking, Martínez’s two poems are two independent solos on the same chord changes. Indeed, the sequence of nearly identical words in both poems indicates a chord progression (boldface):

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Three or Four Shades of Blues (2) If the revolution stops we’ll have to find work. — from the dialogue of a silent movie The streets of Gijón are wider in the dark. The tourists at the sidewalk cafés reach for the stars that hang like overripe fruits from the trees by their tables, and squeeze them until your music comes out of their hands. Charlie, they know the titles better than the names of their own children. They know that the newsstand is dangerous, but they’ll go like pilgrims to buy yesterday’s edition of The Herald Tribune as if it were a relic. Everybody knows it’s published in Paris, but it’s the closest thing to home. They’ll read for the first time about the jazz festival and the drummer whose house blew up one morning while he slept or listened to an old composition you might have played. Even music is dangerous. On any wall along these streets, behind the posters advertising next week’s concert, there are political slogans. I’m like the drunk I met in Madrid, who kept telling me he didn’t care who ran the country as long as he was free to sell his poetry and buy a few beers. But I’m intrigued by anyone who tries to cover up an ideal on a wall, intrigued by anyone who wants to make us forget a date, say, 4 October 1934. Charlie, even music is political out here. They pitched a circus tent on a square, showed silent movies all night long and played your records instead of an old piano. I imagined you behind the screen, laughing at us, knowing that the revolution isn’t over until the last mercenary spends all his blood money at the jazz club like a recently divorced tourist. — for Charles Mingus (qtd. in Feinstein and Komunyakaa 1991: 143; boldface mine)

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Nevertheless, the individual chords and the chord progressions of the two improvisations differ: – First chord progression (first poem): “terrorist” – “newsstand” – “blow up” – “Madrid” – “jazz clubs” – Second chord progression (second poem): “tourists” – “newsstand” – “blew up” – “Madrid” – “jazz club” – “tourist” The harmonic structure of the two “improvisations” is nearly identical. The different spellings between “terrorist” and “tourists” (underlined) translate into a difference between the third of the first and second chords while the root note and fifth of the two chords stay similar. That the second series of “chords” ends with a near identical repetition of the noun “tourist” translates into the idea that the second chord progression ends with a slightly changed initial chord. Further metaphorical correspondences between the poems and Mingus’s jazz piece are as follows: the same general theme about violence in Spain is the same general theme of the two improvisations (yet the topic of violence becomes more specific in the second poem in which the date “4 October 1934” refers to the Austurian miners’ revolt in Spain), the conversational style of the poem (see also the reference to “dialogue” in the epitaph), in which the speaker addresses Charles Mingus as “Charlie” and “you,” is the characteristic dialogue between Mingus’s bass and other instruments), and the political issues of the poem correlate with the political content of Mingus’s songs and his political activism. The two poems manifest the conceptual metaphors the first improvisation on charles mingus’s piece “three or four shades of blues” is dionisio martinez’ poem “three or four shades of blues and the second improvisation on charles mingus’s piece “three or four shades of blues” is dionisio martinez’ poem “three or four shades of blues (2).” These metaphors, however, are imaginary, because the poems are not really the product of Martínez’s experimental translation of concrete music into writing. Rather, his poems are receptionoriented and pretend to be two jazz solos. The texts invite readers to translate them into two improvisational jazz solos or “takes” on Charles Mingus’s piece “Three or Four Shades of Blues.” Hence the two poems encourage readers to perform two conceptual metaphors, in which the source and target domains of the previously mentioned metaphors are reversed: dionisio martinez’ poem “three or four shades of blues is the first improvisation on charles mingus’s piece “three or four shades of blues” and dionisio martinez’ poem “three or four shades of blues (2)” is the second improvisation on charles mingus’s piece “three or four shades of blues.” It follows that each line of the two poems “manifests” the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line and, in turn, invites the readers to metaphorically translate each line into a sequence of notes.

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The investigation of the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line (i.e., how poets have translated a sequence of notes into a line) has demonstrated the difference between lines that simply call for a literal reading and lines that call for both a literal and a figurative, musical interpretation. In contrast to purely “literal” poems such as Collins’ “The Invention of the Saxophone,” other poems contains clues, which signal that the lines can be understood as a series of notes. These clues can range from the title (e.g., Davis’s “C.T.’s variation”) to typographically altered words and lines (e.g., the italicized section in Inada’s “Bud Powell” or the upper case lines in Hughes’s “The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.)”). Often poems display a combination of clues, which reveal whether the poet intended the poem to be translated into music. Such decisions are sometimes straightforward, as in the case of Inada’s poem “Bud Powell,” but they can also be tricky and even outright difficult to make, especially if poems are ambiguous and leave it unclear whether they want to be understood as musical pieces or exhibit intricate mixtures between “literal” and “figurative” lines (see the innovative rendering of a performance in Williams’s “Tenor Sax Taking the Breaks”). Also, curvy shaped lines and poems that are related to jazz music do not always require a figurative reading. To be sure, the blue S-shaped column in Russolo’s painting La Musica documents the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line and, in turn, asks the viewers to translate the snake-shaped line into a melody. Yet many snake-patterns in jazz poetry have other literary functions and do not ask to be metaphorically interconnected with jazz (e.g., McClane’s “Harlem Jam”). Finally, I intended to show the difference between poems that are the result of linguistic (or verbal) improvisation and poems that pretend to be jazz improvisations such as Wright’s poem “Twenty-Two Tremblings of the Postulant (Improvisations Surrounding the Body)” and Martínez’ two poems “Three and Four Shades of Blues” and “Three and Four Shades of Blues (2).” The poems’ lines may help readers imagine the musicality, the tunes or the jazz performances, but the clues need to be recognized as clues. Thus, jazz poems require informed readers who know about jazz musicians, jazz pieces, and jazz styles in general – in short, they need to have knowledge of the domain jazz music – or otherwise they are unable to detect the poems’ metaphorical musicality.

4.2 sound is motion: Translations of fast and slow jazz in Jazz Poetry Apart from exploring the metaphor a sequence of notes is a line, poets experiment with different ways of translating jazz’s fast and slow tempos into written form. In art, the Italian Futurists Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla were fascinated

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Figure 6: Luigi Russolo, Dinamismo di un automobile (1912/1913); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Peter Willi/Bridgeman Images

by speed and technology and visualized the fast motion of cars and trains by multiplying some aspects of the horizontally moving object and by painting “force lines.” In the abstract picture Dinamismo di un automobile (1912/1913), Russolo paints triangular force lines to make the directionality and the speed of the car visible (see Figure 6). But how do poets translate jazz’s various tempos? Do they also portray the fast tempo of a jazz piece as horizontal (force) lines? As expected poets often realize conceptual metaphors and/or make passing references to the musical tempo when they relate a jazz performance in their poems. For instance, the verse “elvin drums a 1939 ford / 99 pushing miles per hour” (Henderson n.p.) in David Henderson’s “Elvin Jones Gretsch Freak” documents the poet’s translation of the jazz drummer Elvin Jones’s percussive tempo into the image of a fast moving car; Sascha Feinstein describes a nameless tenor saxophonist “playing ‘Blue Monk,’ slow for the mood” (21) in his prose poem “Buying Wine.” The conceptualization of speed via an image of a fast-moving vehicle and explicit references to fast and slow jazz appear frequently in this poetry, but do not exhaust the creative ways poets used to translate jazz’s tempos. Instead, they merely represent the tip of the iceberg, exploring the metaphor sound is motion. Some poems exemplify the submetaphors fast tempo is a vertical column and slow tempo is a horizontal line while others display variant techniques of rendering the tempo of jazz.

4.2.1 fast tempo of jazz is a vertical column We might expect jazz poets – like Russolo – to visualize speed horizontally and, for instance, translate the music’s fast tempo into long horizontal lines with no spaces between the words. Yet they often surprise us with poems that manifest the metaphor fast tempo of jazz is a vertical column rather than fast tempo of jazz is a horizontal line. Typically, the columns are ‘thin’ and ask readers to

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read quickly and, at times, interpret them figuratively as fast jazz solos. But they can also be ‘thick’ columns. As we might assume, they are usually centered on the page, yet some columns are left- or right-aligned. Such literary renderings of fastplayed jazz are products of inventive minds that experiment with the possibilities of the medium writing in order to enable the readers to imaginatively create the aesthetic experience of ‘musical speed.’ Written by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the poem “The Speed” collected in The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987) displays a thin column with a few longer horizontal verses and partially documents the metaphor fast tempo is a vertical column. Both the short lines and literal meaning of the two initial short lines “The speed / The speed” establish a fast paced rhythm as well as a rapid reading speed: The speed The speed we dis appearing is appearing The speed The speed raise it raise it from 4s to 8s to 16s to 32nds From Pres to Bird to Trane the speed the speed we di sappearing higher life higher making sense at faster and faster speeds from feet to horse to car to plane the speed the speed its dis appearing onward and upward the constant raising spiral the speed the speed we dis appear ing (Baraka, “The Speed” 50, excerpt)

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The grouping of an unstressed and a stressed syllable in the first line, “The speed,” forms a single iambic foot. The repetition of the basic rhythmic unit in the following line, “The speed,” not only adds force to the iambic rhythm, but also creates a larger rhythmic unit: the four-syllable couplet “The speed / The speed.” As indicated by the excerpt above, the couplet recurs throughout the poem and thereby establishes the fast rhythmic pulse of the poem. Between the rhythmic backbeats (“The speed / The speed”) occur different kinds of rhythmic deviations. The first rhythmic digression happens after the initial couplet has laid down the basic rhythm and constitutes a few short improvisations on “we disappearing”: / / we dis × / × appearing / × / × is appearing

The literary improvisation fragments the brief theme in two different ways (“we dis / appearing” and “is appearing”) while the rhythm changes – in quick succession – from a spondee (“we dis”) to an amphibrach (“appearing”), and finally to another amphibrach delayed by the accented syllable (“is”) at the beginning of the line. Both the written solo and the change in rhythm coincide with a shift from two two-syllable lines (“The speed / The speed”) to an ascending number of syllables in the subsequent lines: from two syllables (“we dis”) to three (“appearing”) to four (“is appearing”). The literal meaning of the three fragmented lines might puzzle readers at first, because the reference of the personal pronoun “we” remains ambiguous: Does the pronoun “we” stand for human beings? The pronoun’s immediate context points to the interpretation of “we” as a reference to anthropomorphized musical notes or words, “who,” in a self-reflexive moment, consider their own gradual disappearance and reappearance: they fade away in “we dis / appearing” and, for the most part, come back in “is appearing.” Baraka underlines this theme by omitting the letter “d” in “is appearing,” for the missing “d” turns the phrase “dis / appearing” into the phrase “is appearing.” Similarly, the improvisation on the theme disappears and reappears several times in the first third of the poem (see above) until it vanishes after the fourth improvisation on the same theme: first variation, “we dis / appearing / is appearing”; second variation, “we di / sappearing”; third variation, “its dis / appearing”; and the fourth variation; “we / dis / appear / ing.”

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Following his playing with the phrase “we disappearing,” Baraka usually restores the piece’s fast pulse with the couplet “The speed / The speed” before he introduces a new theme: pulse variation of the familiar theme new theme:

echo of pulse pulse

the speed the speed we di sappearing higher life higher making sense at faster and faster speeds from feet to horse to car to plane the speed the speed (Baraka, “The Speed” 50; my emphasis)

After the backbeats there follows a variation of the familiar phrase “we disappearing,” a new facet of the theme “speed,” and then the pulse again. The additional context provided introduces another possible interpretation of “we,” which could refer to humankind (“life”) who gradually disappear from view in their pursuit of flying higher and who make sense of the world at ever-increasing speed. Moreover, the number of words decreases in the lines “making sense at faster / and faster / speeds” from four to two to one and so the increasing pace of reading underscores the subject matter expressed in the three verses. After the digression, though, the backbeat kicks in and reestablishes the regular but driving pulse. Baraka also presents another rhythmic deviation. Having reinstated the basic rhythm after the first improvisation on the theme “we disappearing,” he presents two longer lines that are realizations of the metaphor fast tempo is a horizontal line. In the first one, the speaker urges the jazz musicians to increase the tempo progressively from the note duration of quarter notes all the way to the note duration of 32nd notes: “raise it raise it from 4s to 8s to 16s to 32nds.” Instead of repeating the “raise it” vertically just as he did with “The speed,” Baraka places them adjacently and then uses Arabic numbers as shorthand versions for the different note durations to keep the individual orthographic units short and succinct. The series of short utterances achieves a visual speed, a rapid staccato, yet the translation of the shorthand versions into speech decreases the velocity of reading. The second line picks up the topic of musical tempo but establishes a progression of speed of jazz music performed by major jazz musicians: “From Pres to Bird to Trane.” As in the previous line, Baraka employs short forms of nearly identical length (“Pres,” “Bird,” and “Trane”) to generate a fast-paced line. The nicknames

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denote three saxophone players who stand for different historical stages of jazz and who execute their solos in various tempos: swing/cool (Pres), bebop (Bird), and free jazz (Trane). Dubbed “Pres” (a short form for “President”) by Billie Holiday, Lester Young played, as Gary Giddins phrases it, “a light, cool, gravity-free style, but he also introduced to jazz a carnal earthiness that prefigures modern notions of funkiness” (Giddins 1998: 177). By contrast, the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker (“Bird”), who came from the swing tradition, developed the revolutionary bebop style and tended to play complex rhythmic themes at break-neck speed. John Coltrane or simply “Trane,” in turn, experimented with “a rapid-fire attack in an attempt to play all the notes in every chord, unleashing what Ira Gitler described as ‘sheets of sound’” (Giddins 1998: 479). Thus the consecutive row of the three famous saxophone players – Young, Parker, and Coltrane – refers to the historical succession of stages in jazz and especially to the progression of tempos played by the individual jazz saxophonists. Another progression in speed occurs a few lines afterwards: “from feet to horse to car to plane.” Like the other two verses discussed above, it consists of a series of short monosyllabic words, which results in a fast reading pace. Thematically, the verse outlines four consecutive historical stages: at first, humans merely had their feet to get from one place to another; their speed of mobility increased when they started riding horses; finally, the inventions of the car and the airplane (“plane” rhymes with “Trane” and creates an intratextual connection between two types of transportation – plane and train) led to major boosts in speed respectively. Baraka devised several ways to translate the notion of speed into written form. He uses a series of short verses to generate a fast reading tempo, yet he disrupts the short lines with longer, horizontal ones and so the poem only partially fits the metaphor fast tempo is a vertical column. Yet, he relies heavily on a quick rhythmic pulse and variations of the topic “speed” such as “raise it raise it from 4s to 8s to 16s to 32nds” and “from Pres to Bird to Trane” within the longer horizontal lines. Baraka thus achieves the increase in speed through both the vertical and the horizontal lines, which emphasize the forward moving speed. Overall, the poem calls primarily for a literal but also for a figurative understanding (e.g., iambic meter is a rhythmic pulse in jazz) to create the multifaceted experience of speed. Likewise, William Waring Cuney’s “Charlie Parker, 1922–1955” requires the interaction of literal and figurative translation processes. It consists of a fairly ‘slim’ poem placed on the left-hand side of the page and documents the metaphor fast tempo is a vertical column. The title raises the expectation of encountering an elegy on the famous bebop musician. Indeed, the poem serves as a small, fascinating monument to Parker (actually born in 1920), for the mixture of many constitu-

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tive elements, such as title, the thin vertical poem as well as the literal meaning, ask the readers to imagine that they are listening to a bebop piece played at a fast tempo by Parker and his band. The title provides the first clue to the figurative translation of the poem into jazz, for the subtraction of 1922 from 1955 results in the number 33 which roughly refers to the speed of a long play record album: 33 13 rpm (rounds per minute). Put differently, the poem asks the readers to realize the metaphor the poem “charlie parker, 1922–1955” is a recorded bebop piece played by charlie parker and his band. Before, however, readers can interpret the poem as a bebop performance, they need to analyze this carefully constructed poem by Cuney and notice several equivalencies between the poem and Parker’s bop standards such as “Ornithology” and “Moose the Mooche” collected, for instance, on the album Charlie Parker: In a Soulful Mood (Music Club, 1995). Parker’s bebop pieces frequently exhibit the “theme – improvisation – theme” arrangement in AABA form: a small band plays a short theme (or “head”) twice in unison (AA) before the reed section performs a string of solos improvised on the chords of the theme (B) and then it returns to the short theme which the band plays again in unison (A). The theme is usually a 12-bar blues or a 32-bar one and introduces the melody and the chord-structures upon which the improvisations are loosely based. In general, Parker’s bebop style consisted of racing tempos, virtuoso technique, asymmetrical phrasings, and harmonic and melodic complexity. The effect of Parker’s improvisations on the chord progressions of popular jazz numbers such as “I Got Rhythm” and “How High the Noon,” as Powell puts it, “is of a steady mellow light transformed into dazzling prismatic refractions” (Powell, “Bebop” 19).⁴⁶ Cuney’s “Charlie Parker, 1922–1955” also evinces the standard AABA form. It begins with a twelve-syllable long statement (“List-en, / This here / Is what / Char-lie / Did / To the Blues.”), which represents the 12-bar blues theme (A), and then repeats the theme with a minor change: “This” becomes “That” in the second statement. Like Parker’s bebop pieces, the improvisational section makes up the largest part of the poem (B), and it ends with a slightly altered statement of the initial theme (A):

46 For more information on Charlie Parker’s bebop style, see Patrick, “Charlie Parker,” and Owens’ entries “Forms: Bop” and “Bop.”

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Formal Scheme (Bebop)

A

A

B

A

“Charlie Parker, 1922–1955” Listen, This here Is what Charlie Did To the Blues. Listen, That here Is what Charlie Did To the Blues. This here, bid-dle-dee-dee bid-dle-dee-dee bopsheep have you any cool? bahdada one horn full. Charlie filled the Blues With Curley-cues. That’s what Charlie Did To the Blues. Play That again Drop A nickel in, Charlie’s Dead, Charlie’s Gone, But John Birks Carried on. Drop A nickel in, Give The platter A spin, Let’s listen To what Charlie Did To the Blues. (Cuney, “Charlie Parker, 1922–1955” 85–86)

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The two attention requests at the beginning (AA), the caesura after “Listen,” the full stop at the end of each statement, and the exact repetition of the spatial arrangement of the words from the statements on the page correspond to the precise and aggressive phrasing of Parker’s bebop style: Each note is articulated with focused energy, each phrase smoothly executed but infused with an acerbic aftertaste. Phrases start and end with crisp precision. No moody rubato timing stretches out the melodic line. There are no lingering breaths, à la Ben Webster, to impart an expansive, velvety quality to the music. Each phrase is attacked with clear intent. All in all, no saxophonist before Charlie Parker had such a cutting sound. (Gioia 2011: 193)

Similarly, most of the syllables of the predominantly monosyllabic, compact words of the two statements (and of the whole poem) carry a stress and call for a pronunciation with “focused energy.” The lines are short and “crisp” and do not contain long words with several unstressed, weak syllables. Additionally, the self-referential nature of the literal statement “Listen, / This here / Is what / Charlie / Did / To the Blues” connects the poem’s formal structure and Parker’s transformation of a slow blues melody with a pensive, melancholic quality into a fast paced piece with a “cutting sound.” The poem’s self-referential statement alludes to Parker’s reworking of a simple twelve-bar blues theme with harmonic and melodic complexities, and it manifests Cuney’s creative translation of Parker’s virtuoso way of fragmenting a melody into a written form. Instead of repeating the same statement once more, Cuney omits “Listen” (with its two syllables) and begins the improvisation section (B) with the second line of the statement (A): “This here.” Like Parker who abruptly breaks off a theme and introduces another one, Cuney deviates from the statement (A) again and inserts three lines made up of nonsense syllables: bid-dle-dee-dee bid-dle-dee-dee bopsheep (Cuney, “Charlie Parker, 1922–1955” 85)

The nonsense syllables often employed in scat singing offsets the three lines from the former thematic statement and points to Parker’s technique of playing musical ornamentations: the hyphenation of the four nonsense syllables in the first verse (stress pattern: / × / / ) refers to Parker’s fluid and fast but precise articulation of notes. After the repetition of the four-syllable phrase, Cuney presents a rhythm change in the next line: “bopsheep.” He combines the short form “bop” for “bebop” or “rebop” with “sheep” and thereby creates a half-nonsensical ono-

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matopoetic word phonetically linked to the previous two verses: like the other two lines, the expression “bopsheep” begins with the phoneme /b/; the phoneme /iː / (“ee”) of “sheep” reiterates the same vowel as in “dee-dee”; and the phoneme / p / in “sheep” repeats the phoneme / p / of “bop” in the same word. The second word of the half-nonsensical expression “bopsheep” neatly transitions from the nonsense part to Cuney’s literary improvisation on the nursery rhyme “Bah, Bah a black sheep”: Nursery Rhyme

“Charlie Parker, 1922–1955”

Bah, Bah a black Sheep Have you any Wool? Yes merry have I, Three Bags full, […] (Baring-Gould 1962: 33)

Bopsheep have you any cool? bahdada one horn full. (85)

Each phrase of the pattern “half-nonsense – sense – (half-)nonsense – sense” differs in length and so the pattern of asymmetric lines corresponds to Parker’s jagged bebop style. As mentioned above, the phrase “bopsheep” combines the scat expression “bop” with “sheep” and, as the comparison with the relevant part of the nursery rhyme shows, the consonant “b” of “bop” correlates with the consonant “b” used in the verse “Bah, Bah a black sheep.” Cuney thus replaces the first part of the verse with “bop” and links it to the last word of the verse “Sheep” to create the scat-phrase “bopsheep.” In the subsequent verse, he exchanges only the capitalized consonant “W” from the noun “Wool” with the consonant “c” and produces the verse “have you any cool?” He then omits the whole third phrase “Yes merry have I” and inserts instead the scat-like expression “bahdada” of which the onomatopoetic syllable “bah” echoes the nursery rhyme’s initial “Bah, Bah.” Cuney, moreover, adapts the fourth line of the nursery rhyme – “Three Bags full” – to the jazz context of the poem and transforms it into “one horn full.” Also, the second and fourth lines exhibit a call-and-response pattern: after the scat-like expression “bopsheep,” Cuney places the question “have you any cool?” and then delays the response to the question – “one horn full” – with another scat-like phrase. Cuney underlines the call-and-response pattern with the imperfect rhyme “cool” / “full.” In this instance, the poem pretends that Parker communicates with himself when he plays the solo on his saxophone: he “asks” the question “have you any cool?” and, after an ornamental “bahdada,” he answers his own question with a short, assertive phrase: “one horn full.” In the subsequent section, Cuney translates Parker’s melodic intricacies into a transformation of the statement “Listen, / This here / Is what / Charlie / Did /

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To the Blues”: first, Cuney mentions the word “Charlie,” replaces the two words “Did / To” with “filled,” and completes the phrase with “the Blues”; he then adds the lines “With / Curley-cues” and thereby generates a full rhyme between “Blues” and “-cues.” His changes create a phrase with a different literal meaning than the original statement, as it describes Parker’s typical style of enriching the twelve-bar blues with ornamental melodic phrasings (“Curley-cues”) and other melodic complexities. Second, Cuney repeats the initial statement (A) with only slight changes: “That’s what / Charlie / Did / To the Blues.” Omitting the words “Listen, / This here / Is,” he puts “That’s,” the contracted form of “That is,” but otherwise retains the rest of the phrase. These two transformations of the statement correlate with Parker’s style of altering and fragmenting a melodic theme (A). In the final section of the middle part, Cuney introduces a new topic, interrupts it with an allusion to a nursery rhyme, and then returns to the same topic. The first two short phrases “Play / That again” and “Drop / A nickel in” represent a previously unmentioned theme: people listening to a record played on a coinoperated jukebox. An unidentified speaker asks another person to play the record again and to drop a nickel into the slot of the jukebox. Cuney interrupts this topic with a transformation of the nursery rhyme “Jack be nimble” into a Parker version: Nursery Rhyme

Cuney’s Adaptation

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over The candlestick.

Charlie’s / Dead, Charlie’s / Gone, But / John Birks Carried on.

(Baring-Gould 1962: 194)

(86)

Cuney’s transformation of the nursery rhyme “Jack be nimble” into a Charlie Parker version retains several correspondences to the original: like the original nursery rhyme, it has two short phrases – each separated by a comma – and a long one, but Cuney breaks up the individual lines to emphasize the idea of speed. He splits the three-word line “Jack be nimble” into two one-word lines and changes the imperative “Jack be nimble” to the contracted form “Charlie’s / Dead.” Similar to the nursery rhyme “Jack be nimble,” the first two phrases of Cuney’s version begin with a first name. In both cases, however, Cuney replaces “Jack” with “Charlie.” He deviates further from the nursery rhyme’s pattern when he substitutes the first name of the third phrase (“Jack”) with the coordinating conjunction “But” and then continues with Dizzy Gillespie’s original name “John Birks” (the letter “J” of John reestablishes a slight correspondence to “Jack”) and not with Parker’s. Likewise, Cuney preserves the abb-rhyme scheme of “Jack be

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nimble” (“nimble … quick … candlestick”) and the feature that “nimble” and “quick” are synonymous in the jazz version, yet he achieves it with different words. He uses the synonyms “Dead” and “Gone,” which he probably derived from the idiomatic expression “dead and gone,” and sets up the end rhyme between “Gone” and “Carried on.” The transformation process thus changes the text’s literal meaning: while “Jack be nimble” calls on Jack to jump over a lighted candle, the jazz version states that Parker may be deceased but Dizzy Gillespie will carry on his bebop legacy. After the short digression with the Parker version of “Jack be nimble,” Cuney returns to the topic of people listening to a record played on a jukebox when he repeats the phrase “Drop / A nickel in,” thereby framing the jazz nursery rhyme with a familiar phrase. He follows it up with an imperative statement within the same context: “Give / The platter / A spin.” He subsequently merges this topic with the one introduced in the initial statement of the poem: “Let’s listen / To what / Charlie / Did / To the Blues.” In one respect, the statement continues along the lines outlined above: a nameless speaker asks another person to throw a coin into a jukebox and play the same record, and then comments: “Let’s listen to what Charlie did to the blues.” Since the phrase refers back to the beginning of the poem, it creates a circular structure that points to the spinning of a record. In another respect, the poem’s final statement resembles its first two statements (AA) and thus concludes the AABA form. A detailed analysis of the poem prepares the readers for its translation into one of Parker’s fast-paced bebop pieces. Readers can imagine that they are listening to a jukebox: Parker plays the melodic theme in unison with his band and repeats it once more before he embarks on his solo. Skipping the first two bars of the theme, he plays the third and fourth bar of the theme and then abruptly shifts from the melody (“This here”) to a flurry of accented notes (“bid-dle-dee-dee”) which he plays again in the same precise manner. He then continues to improvise on the nursery rhyme “Bah, Bah a black Sheep” and alternates between ornamental melodic phrases and a “cool” call-and-response pattern (“have you any cool? / […] / one horn full.”). Picking up the melodic theme once more, he elides two more bars of it (“Is what”) and plays the next two bars (“Charlie”), and, omitting two bars of the theme again (“Did / To”), he inserts a bar of notes unrelated to the theme (“filled”). He then plays the final bar of theme (“Blues”) and adds an ornamental melodic phrase (“With / Curley-cues.”). Cuney follows up the fragmented melody with a slightly changed statement of the whole melodic theme and, in the next two phrases, presents a new theme (“Drop / A nickel in”), which he interrupts for a short improvisation on a well-known nursery rhyme. Returning to the previously introduced theme, he repeats the same melodic phrase (“Drop / A nickel in”), elaborates on the theme, and manages to create an elegant transi-

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tion from the last theme to the initially stated theme, playing it in unison with his band again. In contrast to the string of solos in a number of Parker’s other bebop pieces, this imaginary music piece does not evince a string of solos but only the solo played by Parker. Ultimately, Cuney’s techniques of triggering a metaphorical conceptualization of the poem in terms of a speedy Parker solo are manifold: for instance, he deliberately uses a thin vertical column like Baraka, adopts the AABA standard form favored by Parker, and, in analogy to Parker, makes use of nursery rhymes. These and other creative transformations of features of Parker’s music result in a poem that serves as an homage to a great musician. Another fast solo takes center stage in Frank London Brown’s “Jazz.” The column represented by the body of the poem is much ‘thicker’ than Cuney’s thin column and falls short of encouraging a fast-paced reading. Positioned in the middle of the page, the block-shaped column does not clearly visualize the metaphor fast tempo is a vertical column. Still, the subject matter is “speed”: it tells the story of a “young boy” who stands in his room and plays the notes extremely fast in his search for “the right burst of notes” (Brown, “Jazz” 103). Simultaneously, the poem allows readers to connect the text and general techniques of playing “Jazz.” Brown introduces the topic of speed at the beginning. The speaker recounts that his interest in jazz began with his playing an alto horn. As a young boy who had grown up faster and had gained fame sooner, he had sought the source of his inner feelings earlier than was normal for a boy of his age: It started with an alto horn, and a young boy who’d grown faster than he should have, and who’d become great before he should have, and who sought for the source of the feeling deep inside before he should have. […] (Brown, “Jazz” 103)

The paratactic construction of the three subsequent clauses, which begin with the conjunction “and,” introduce and vary the idea of speed, and end with the same phrase “he should have,” corresponds to phrases played by a jazz musician who always starts out with a similar phrase (“and a young / boy who’d,” “and who’d,” and “and / who”) before he or she varies the theme of speed and ends all three phrases with the same arrangement of notes (“should have”) to create an endstressed rhythmic pattern. Despite the equivalencies between the poem and jazz, it remains primarily narrative when it treats the topic of speed. The next passage describes the boy’s unsuccessful attempts of playing the tone he felt deep inside him:

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[…] He stood in his room and started with a short burst of notes, and then sought the tone he’d felt inside him, but which he couldn’t match he couldn’t match by blowing. (Brown, “Jazz” 103)

The repetition in the verse “he couldn’t match he couldn’t match by blowing” underscores the boy’s repeated attempts at finding a matching tone on his horn for the tone he feels inside him – again a purely narrative recollection of his attempts of playing fast notes. In the long passage below, the speaker characterizes the young boy’s way of playing as “fast, and beautifully” (Brown, “Jazz” 103) and, empathizing with the boy, he or she becomes caught up in the description of the boy’s search for the “right / burst of notes” (103): He blew, fast, and beautifully; seeking the right burst of notes, notes blown so fast that only God’s perfection would be a match for it. He tried for a tone that he’d never heard, but which he knew as a sensation of mystery, of greatness, a feeling that he was bigger than he seemed to be, could blow faster than his fingers were letting him, could cry out the tone that cried within him. All this strained inside him, strained and drove him, pushed him and made him whip his fingers upon the valves of his horn until they hurt. And his lungs seemed to bleed inside; his eyes ran water, and he kept blowing, and blowing, with his eyes closed to the white of the daytime and the touch of the wind and the sound of the fists banging at the door, and the bark of the voices outside his door, shouting: “Open up! It’s the police! What’s going on in there?” (Brown, “Jazz” 103)

The fluid quality of the speaker’s narrative “solo” corresponds to that of the music. It stops abruptly in the penultimate line when the police are standing outside the boy’s room and shouting: “Open up! It’s the police! / What’s going on in there?” Apparently, Brown’s technique of concluding “Jazz” with a question corresponds to the often-used technique of concluding a jazz piece with a rise in pitch – that is, a musical “question.” Overall, Brown’s poem is a literal narrative about a young boy who plays fast solos on his horn, and yet it permits readers to establish a few

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metaphorical correspondences between the narrative structure and techniques in jazz. But, unlike Cuney’s poem “Charlie Parker, 1922–1955,” Brown’s “Jazz” does not ask the readers to imagine it as a fast-paced jazz solo. Although Cornelius Eady’s jazz poem “Hank Mobley’s” consists of a thin column on the right-hand side of the page, it displays a few metaphoric equivalencies to the mid-tempo jazz solos routinely played by the titular saxophonist. Principally, the poem is a personal obituary, in which the speaker apologizes to the deceased musician (“Sorry, Hank.”) that he found out about the latter’s death when he read an album cover several “[y]ears later”: Hank Mobley’s Sorry, Hank. Found out The Hard Way. Back Of an Album cover, Years later, Browsing in a Record store. It’s The wrong way To find out. The guy who Wrote the Notes on The liner Was pissed. It appears That a lot Of papers Decided not To run an Obit since By then you Were not Quite John Coltrane. So this poem Could be about The breaks, And this poem Might be about Fire, or The lack Of it,

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Or this poem Could deal With the also-rans, —You know, The joke About the Guy who Invents 1 through 6 Up Then quits, Throws up his hands In desperation, But it was Your breath In my ears As I stood there, Dumbly speaking To whom? (Eady, “Hank Mobley’s” 38–39)

Reading the title, the readers want to know the head known to which this possessive phrase refers (“Hank Mobley’s” [WHAT?]), but instead finds a blank for the missing reference. A literal reading provides several clues to clarify the poem’s visual arrangement: the speaker apologizes to Mobley for finding out about his death only years later from the liner notes on the cover of one of his records. The author voices his anger about the fact that most newspapers did not deem Mobley’s œuvre worthy enough to honor him with an obituary because Mobley did not have the status of John Coltrane. With this information in mind, the readers recognize the suggestiveness of the blank space and begin to speculate on its meaning: the gap could indicate the missing obituaries on Mobley’s death and the centrality of the gap and the location of the poem at the fringes of the page could signal his marginalization; the blank space could also mean that Mobley’s death left an enormous gap in the jazz scene, which silenced a great voice. The unusual spatial arrangement could also mean that the speaker does not want to write a typical obituary and repeat what the others said but emphasize the underrated Mobley. Mobley may not be Coltrane, but he played music, which deeply impressed the speaker. Hence the blank space literally constitutes an “indeterminacy gap,” to use Iser’s term, which permits various readings. Additionally, the speaker brings up the idea of ambiguity when he muses on the topic: “So this poem / Could be about / The breaks” or it “Might be about / Fire, or / The lack / Of it” or it “Could deal / With the also-rans.” Without giving a final answer, the speaker abruptly switches back to the moment when he or she stood

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in the record store and read the liner notes on a Hank Mobley album: “But it was / Your breath / In my ears / As I stood there, / Dumbly speaking / To whom?” This last section of the poem makes references to Mobley’s jazz style and, together with other ones, prepare the readers for a figurative reading of the poem: the “breaks” refer to musical breaks, the “Fire” to his hot jazz performances (or coolness of other ones), and the joke (“With the also-rans […]”) to Mobley’s practice of playing “pranks,” as indicated by the piece “Hank’s Pranks” on The Complete Blue Note Hank Mobley Sessions in the Fifties (Mosaic, 1998). Moreover, the unusual use of the capital letter “H” in the line “The Hard” ties the word “Hard” to the name “Hank” in the first line (“Sorry, Hank.”) by establishing an alliterative bond between both words and enables the educated guess that the link between “Hank” and “Hard” – together with the information that the speaker has been reading the liner notes on a Hank Mobley album – points to the interconnection between Hank Mobley and Hard Bop and, perhaps, to his Hank Mobley – Hard Bop (Savoy, 1956), in which a long dash interconnects “Hank” and “Hard” and both words are supplemented with the last name of the artist and with the second word of the style “Hard Bop” respectively. The literal reference to Mobley’s jazz style (e.g., “breaks”), the vertical column with the short lines, and the erratic rhythm highlight a few parallels to Mobley’s music. Some background information will help to identify the metaphorical correlations between the poem and Mobley’s jazz style, which the critics Michael James and Barry Kleinfeld describe as follows: The hallmark of Mobley’s playing is his precise and idiosyncratic use of rhythm. Initially this led him to produce very intricate improvised melodies whose impact was sometimes jeopardized by the extreme strain they imposed on his technique and timing. But he soon evolved a style in which his harmonic and rhythmic inventiveness was matched by an immaculate adherence to the beat, a subtly expressive use of tone, and a beautifully relaxed delivery. (James and Kernfeld, “Hank Mobley”)

Their characterization of Mobley’s bebop assists the process of creating a set of equivalencies between the poem and his style: the short phrases, caesuras, and line breaks (e.g., “Sorry, Hank. / Found out / The Hard / Way. Back”) produces an erratic rhythm which corresponds to Mobley’s idiosyncratic rhythm with its abrupt breaks; the colloquial diction and speculative statements (e.g., “Could be about […] / Might be about […] / Could deal […]”) correspond to Mobley’s “relaxed delivery” and his sometimes meditative way of playing jazz; the joke and the sudden change in topic (“Throws up his hands / In desperation, / But it was / Your breath” – emphasis mine) correspond to one of Mobley’s “pranks” and to an unexpected break (“But”); and the interrogative phrase at the end of the poem

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(“Dumbly speaking / To whom?”) correlates with a question-like rise in musical pitch at the end of the solo. Thus a literal reading hints at the meaning of the blank space and highlights Mobley’s style of playing solos on his tenor saxophone. The conceptualization of cornelius eady’s poem “hank mobley’s” in terms of a hank mobley solo enables them to create various correlations between the poem and Mobley’s hard bop style. But although a thin, vertical column often indicates a fast jazz solo, the idiosyncratic, quirky rhythm, the poem’s meditative tone, and the speculative statements point to a characteristic mid-tempo solo by Mobley, not to a bebop solo played at breakneck speed à la Charlie Parker. Richard Elman’s “Beets” in Homage to Fats Navarro, by contrast, invites readers to translate the poem into a fast bebop solo performed by Fats Navarro. The poem consists of one thin column on the left, one thin column on the right, and a slightly thicker column in the middle of the next page. Centered and positioned above the first two columns is the title “Beets,” a homophonic reference to “beats,” since both words have the same pronunciation. The word “beats” denotes musical beats and provides readers with a first hint of an additional metaphorical dimension of the poem: BEETS Startled the heron soars to the nearest branch. plovers hovers, cows graze, pigs take cover. The deer shows his flag to the bush. Racoons don’t shy where he has oak

nearby; cypress, cabbage palms, and dolphin at sea

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sound their fictions, trumpet his windy coming. Two beets a line away sunk in the Earth he adores. Cold air freshly washed glassware brilliance. People and camelias squeak when you touch them. My fingertips ache. Live oak leaves rattle trees overhead. There are snakes in these woods, they say , the alligators hibernate. Light, which denies Malevolent possibilities, lingers everywhere at once, falling across these groves, laundering the idle cows. The pigs racing near my feet. A deer shows his flag among the donkeys. (Elman, “Beets” 80–81)

A quick glance at the grammatical constructions shows that Elman focused not on creating a coherent poem but on rendering the process of jazz improvisation in written form. The literal meaning of “beets” activates an improvisational wordplay from the semantic fields “animals” and “plants.” In the first column, his

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improvisation on “animals” exhibits the frame structure “wild animals” (heron), “domestic animals” (cows, pigs), and “wild animals” (deer, raccoons). In the second column, Elman’s improvisation on “plants” displays another frame structure: “trees” (cypress), “vegetables” (cabbage), and “trees” (palms). Deviating from the patterns, Elman presents the non-existent word “plovers” together with “hover,” which, following the poem’s logic, enables the view of “plovers” as a variation of “clovers.” He moreover sprinkles words from other semantic fields across the first and the second column: the pronoun “he” at the end of the first column does not fit the immediate context and neither refers to an animal nor to a plant but to an unspecified man. The term “fictions” of the second column alludes to the poem’s fictional status while the verses “trumpet his wind- / y coming” refer to the trumpet player Theodore “Fats” Navarro for whom Elman wrote his collection of poems Homage to Fats Navarro (1978). Also, the two verses “Two beets / a line” constitute a meta-linguistic self-reference in which Elman improvises with the concept of two beats per line (see the analysis of the beats below). The phrase “sunk in / the Earth / he adores” continues to elaborate on the theme “he” introduced in the first column. In addition, Elman improvises on the phonological vowels represented by the letter “o” (and surrounding grapheme clusters) in the first column and on the different phonological vowels represented by the letter “y” (and surrounding grapheme clusters). For practical purposes, I have placed the columns sideby-side, highlighted the respective vowels (boldface), and put the corresponding phonetic symbols from the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) next to the respective vowels (Table 2). The analysis of the grapheme-phoneme relationships between the letter “o” and the respective vowels in the first and second columns shows that Elman not only employs words spelled with a single letter “o” and deviates from the pattern with the double letter sequence “oo” in “Racoons” but also improvises with the phonology indicated by the same grapheme: every word spelled with the grapheme “o” indicates a different pronunciation of the grapheme and illustrates his improvising on the phonological “shades” of the grapheme “o.” Elman’s improvisation on the grapheme “o” and the respective vowels turns into an improvisational playing with two graphemes when he introduces the grapheme “y” with the word “shy” (“y” is underlined above) at the end of the first column. In the second column, he changes the end-position of the “y” in “nearby” to a frontposition in “cypress” without changing the phonological vowel marked by the letter “y” and then returns to the improvisation on the grapheme-phoneme relationship specified by the letter “o.” Elman interrupts the play with the grapheme “o” once more when he emphasizes the letter “y” by placing it in the unconventional front-position: “his wind- / y coming” (see above). After continuing his

4.2 sound is motion: Translations of fast and slow jazz in Jazz Poetry

Table 2: Phonological Improvisation on the Letter “o” First Column Startled the heron soars to the nearest branch. plovers hovers, cows graze, pigs take cover. The deer shows his flag to the bush. Racoons don’t shy where he has oak

Vowel

Vowel

Second Column

/ aı / / aı /

← nearby; ← cypress, cabbage palms, and /ɒ/ ← dolphin at sea / aʊ/ ← sound their /ə/ ← fictions, trumpet his wind/ ı / + / ʌ / ← y coming. / uː / ← Two beets a line / eı / ← away sunk in the Earth / ɔə / ← he adores.

→ /ə/ → / ɔə / + / ʊ /

→ / əʊ/ → /ɒ/ → / aʊ/ → / ʌ/ → / əʊ / → / ʊ/ → /u/ → / əʊ / → / oʊ/

Table 3: Improvisational Play of Stressed and Unstressed Syllables First Column

Scansion

Scansion

Second Column

Startled the heron soars to the nearest branch. plovers hovers, cows graze, pigs take cover. The deer shows his flag to the bush. Racoons don’t shy where he has oak

/ × / × / / / / / / × / / × × / / /

× / / / / × / / / × × × × × / × ×

nearby; cypress, cabbage palms, and dolphin at sea sound their fictions, trumpet his windy coming. Two beets a line away sunk in the Earth he adores.

× / × × / × × × / / × / / × / / / / /

/ × × × × / / × × / / × / / / × / /

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playing with the grapheme “o” for two times, he brings up the letter “y” again before he concludes the second column with the letter “o” in “adores.” As the phonological reference of the title word “beets” to the homophone “beats” already suggests to the reader, both columns demonstrate Elman’s improvisational playing with stressed ( / ) and unstressed ( × ) syllables. For the sake of convenience, I have positioned the first and second columns opposite to each other in order to make visible the different beat-patterns (Table 3). Aside from two triple-beat lines at the beginning, the single beat (“branch”), and the same triple-beat line in the second column (“y coming”: × / ×), the poem displays “Two beets / a line.” Starting off with a regular beat pattern until the single stressed syllable “branch,” the two columns then evince an improvisation on two-beats per line: for instance, the second column begins with the rhythmic “chiasmus” × / (“nearby”) and / × (“cypress”). Elman breaks away from the two-beat improvisation when he emphasizes the “y” in the triple-beat line “y coming” but returns to the schema of two beats per line afterwards. The scansion of the first and second column shows, furthermore, that his improvisational playing with stressed and unstressed syllables follows a general pattern, in which he favors the stressed syllable in the first column and the unstressed syllable in the second one. Elman brings together the various patterns observed above when he merges them in the third column. Overall, the poem’s movement corresponds to the dialectical method developed in classical philosophy for the sake of controversy. Elman first moves his column to the right side of the page (thesis) and then the next column to the left side of the page (anti-thesis) before he combines the features of both columns in his third dialectical movement: the synthesis of the features in the third column positioned in the center of the next page (see above). In the following analysis, I will not only trace some of the features back to their origin, but I will also show that the combination or synthesis of features leads to a higher order (Table 4). Although Elman continues to improvise with the letters “o” and “y” and their respective vowels and, mainly at the outset of the third column, retains the twobeat or triple-beat lines introduced in the first two columns, he adds new types of improvisation to the previous ones: for instance, he presents the alliteration of the consonant sound “l” and the consonance indicated by the letter “v” within the words “Live,” “leaves,” and “overhead” (see italicized words below) as well as an associative way of generating “word-chains”:

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[…]. Live oak leaves rattle trees overhead. There are snakes in these woods, they say , the alligators hibernate.

The first word-chain begins with the sound of “Live” and the literal meaning of “Live / oak” which triggers the sequence “leaves → trees → overhead → woods”: the noun “leaves” is sonically connected to “Live” and “trees” and semantically linked to “Live / oak” and “trees,” the noun “trees” activates the hyperonym “woods,” and the initial vowel / oʊ / of “overhead” refers back to “oak” while Table 4: More Possibilities for Improvisational Play Third Column (center)

Vowel (“o” and “y”)

Scansion

Cold air freshly washed glassware brilliance. People and camelias squeak when you touch them. My fingertips ache. Live oak leaves rattle trees overhead. There are snakes in these woods, they say , the alligators hibernate. Light, which denies Malevolent possibilities, lingers everywhere at once, falling across these groves, laundering the idle cows. The pigs racing near my feet. A deer shows his flag among the donkeys.

/ əʊ / / ı/

/ / / / / × / / / / / / × × / / / / × × / / × / / / ×

/ i/

/ uː / + / ʌ / / aɪ / / oʊ/ / oʊ/ / ʊ/ + / ɪ / /ɪ/ + /ə/

/ə/ + /ɑ/ / wə / /ɒ/ / əʊ/ / aʊ/ / ɪ/ / əʊ/ / ʌ/ + / ɒ / + / ɪ/

/ × / / × × / / / / / × × × / × × × × × × / / / / / /

/ × × / × / / × / / / × × × × / × / / × × / ×

× / / × × × / / × / × × / / × × / / / ×

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the consonant sound “v” of “overhead” links the word “overhead” to “Live” and “leaves.” The second word-chain starts with the verb “rattle” and prompts the associative series “snakes → alligators → hibernate”: the combination of “rattle” with “snakes” generates the noun “rattle snakes,” the term “snakes” elicits the connotations “alligators” and “hibernate” – a word linked semantically and sonically to “snakes,” since both display the same vowel / eɪ /. The synthesis of columns one and two also opens the door to new possibilities of improvising with stressed and unstressed syllables. Whereas Elman restricted the improvisational play with syllables to lines containing no more than three syllables in the first two columns, his third column includes lines of up to six syllables which multiplies the improvisational combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables (see, for instance, the middle section of the third column). In addition, he picks up some words and phrases from the first column such as “oak,” “cows,” “pigs,” and “The deer / shows his / flag to / the bush” and places them in a new context with a different rhythm: for instance, “pigs take / cover” becomes “The / pigs racing near / my feet” and “The deer / shows his / flag to / the bush” turns into “A deer / shows his flag / among the donkeys.” In short, the synthesis of columns one and two within the third column produces a higher order with new possibilities for improvisation. In addition to the literal analysis, “Beets” invites readers to metaphorically understand it in terms of Fats Navarro’s fast bebop style. The readers thus realize the metaphor richard elman’s poem “beets” is a jazz solo played by fats navarro. Navarro starts out his solo with a fast-paced improvisation and modulation on individual notes (e.g., the modulating play with the letter “o”), exploring different sonic “shades” of specific tones in his short, end-stopped phrases (a period is a pause), and sprinkles his beat-variations with sudden breaks (“wind- / y”: hyphenation is a break). The horizontal overlapping of the last two lines from the first column “where he / has oak” with the first two lines from the second column “nearby; / cypress” instructs the readers to imagine that Navarro’s trumpet solo overlaps with itself for a few notes. Such an instruction, however, defies the reality of playing a solo on a trumpet and is only possible in a literary text. Navarro’s phrases get longer in the third part of his solo and, as before, evince quirky rhythmic changes with breaks (“My finger- / tips ache.”: hyphenation is a break) and brief pauses or hesitancies (“ache. Live”: extra space is a pause). At the end of his solo, he invokes motifs from the first part (e.g., “cows” and “pigs”) and concludes his improvisation with a variation on the earlier theme “The deer / shows his / flag to / the bush.” Contrary to expectations, poets often translate the speed of jazz music into thin vertical columns rather than into horizontal lines, but not always. Baraka, for in-

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stance, relied on a combination of short and long, horizontal lines in “Speed” to render the notion of speed and Frank London Brown, whose “Jazz” has a wider horizontal expansion than Baraka’s “Speed,” describes a fast jazz solo without visualizing it. Several poets, however, deliberately created ‘thin’-shaped poems, which ask readers to imagine jazz improvisations ranging from mid-tempo to an extremely fast tempo. Their poems point to characteristic attributes of a particular musician’s style of playing a solo, but an important cue besides the vertical shape of the poem is the musician’s name: given their style for solos, Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro evoke the notion of speedy jazz music; the less well-known Hank Mobley usually plays a quirky mid-tempo hard bop solo and consequently readers will very likely interpret a written rendering of his solo as a mid-tempo jazz solo. Of course, the poem’s visual form, literal meaning, and literary devices shape the figurative reading of it in terms of style and tempo, but the name of a jazz musician prominently triggers notions of speed in jazz poetry.

4.2.2 slow tempo is a horizontal line Following the logic established by the previous metaphor, I anticipated that poets translate the idea of slow jazz into horizontal lines and not into vertical columns and, to be sure, I discovered one poem that fits the metaphor slow tempo is a horizontal line. The majority of the other poems about slow jazz, however, fail to manifest this format and metaphor. For instance, I found a ‘thin’ poem focusing on slow jazz and noted several things: jazz poets tend to refer to such pieces in the title or in the poem itself, write an elegy about a late jazz musician, mention the word “slow” and improvise on the vowel / əʊ / of “slow,” use images of slow motion, and preferably treat jazz musicians whose style is deliberate and unhurried (e.g., Thelonious Monk). A few poems will suffice to demonstrate the variety of ways poets deal with slow tempo. Richard Kostelanetz’s “STRINGFOUR” and “STRINGFIVE” constitutes the only realization of the metaphor slow tempo is a horizontal line. At first glance, readers might not easily identify the two works as jazz poems even though they appear in Feinstein and Komunyakaa’s The Jazz Poetry Anthology, for neither the titles of the two poems nor the dedication to a musician who combines country with Cuban music, nor the literal meaning of the texts refer explicitly to jazz. Perhaps Kostelanetz intended to surprise the readers who expect to find only jazz poems and then encounter the two strange looking pieces. Whatever the case, both titles imply that the works belong to a series of experimental poems (“STRINGONE,” “STRINGTWO,” “STRINGTHREE,” and so on). The “overlapping”

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words point to the poet’s translation of jazz improvisation and the idea of slow tempo into writing: STRINGFOUR for Ned Sublette Stringfourselvestrymandolinberbillowbrowboatmealtimetablemishapelessencephalogrampagentangleefulcrumpushoverballerinadvertenthralligatoreadorablessingletonsilverwarehouselesssayisthmustardenthroneselfingernailmentallowancestoragencyclopedialysisternumbilicalendartifactotumultransomewhatnoticebergothiccupolaryngitissuedelweissuancestryoutlinefficientertainmentorpidginghamstermitemizenmastounderpassassingularderangelatinseltzerotickettledrumpleasantimacassarsaparilladvisedimenterprisenatornadoptometryingrownershippotamusclericalculustrylistickingestablishmenthusiastronautobiographysicalculatorriderivationosphereafterriblendeavortextinguishermitigatewaylaymankindependentombudsmandrillustrioustereophonicotinelegantipathymusseldominantebellumberyardormanticipatenteemingredienterracetracknowledgerrymanderiveterandomestickerchieftaintervalianticlimaximummerchantithesisalvagendangermanesthetickleptomaniacinnamonarchangelderogatekeepersimmonsterlingrainedibleachievermorelayovertebraceletterheadachestnutmegaphonestrangerunderneathletickerosenemancipatorpornographylumbarbershopefulsomelethallucinogenitalkalinertiarabesquestrogenocidenticaliperoxideathwartimekeeperpendicularkspurpleafletup

STRINGFIVE Stringfiveteranciderideafencerebrumblendivestablishmentertaintegerunderwritemperamentorthographysicisternumericalibereavesdropenervoustermagantonymphomaniacinemaciatediousnessencephalitissuedemasculatencyclopedictumoribunderseashellipsesamendemicrophonemesisterhoodluminescepterminextricableederailmentrapprochementrenchantihistaminestroneroustaboutiqueasymptotempowerectilinearachemistryoutboardorsalonesomenopausefulfillogicallowdownerverackingottenementouragendangerminalienableathereafterrapineappleaseldomesticategoricalumetaphorticulturemiasmartentacleavagentlemanpowerewolfhounderdevelopederastylustereophonicknamendmentrainbowlingerbillboardinghouselessonnethermosteopathetickerosenemanatingleefulcrumpetticoatheisthmusculargessayingredientrancestorrentalismanslaughterrifictionospheretickettledrumplethoracleverticaliconoclastrayonderiversidenticalliopeningrainedibleachievergladentifricebounderlinexactornadoptimalaproposterrainfalligatorquellipticalendarticlergymanumitigatewayfareruntowardentalentrusticaterpillargestimaterialistendencyclicalipermanent-

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ranthropocentrichinosisalamanderogatekeepersimmonosyllablessedatlinesmandolinchpinnacleavernacularderangelatinderboxcarpetbaggermanemoneselfinalexandrinexhautibleardrummerchanticlimaximalevolentomboycotterracetylenervate (Kostelanetz, “STRINGFOUR” and “STRINGFIVE” 121–122; my emphasis)

Each poem begins with the word from the title – “Stringfour” and “Stringfive” – and continues with a long line of “overlapping” words. A close analysis of one “verse” from the second poem (italicized) will explain Kostelanetz’s technique of creating a fluid transition between words: – The part of the line: tickerosenemanatingleefulcrumpetticoatheisthmusculargessaying-

–

The “overlapping” words: tick kerosene emanating gleeful fulcrum | petticoat atheist isthmus muscular large essay saying-

The blurring of the spatial boundaries between words could make it difficult to identify the individual words, causing slow and careful reading. At all times, readers have to move back and forth and try to find out how one word leads to another. This process involves trial-and-error experiments: for instance, readers may break down the phrase “petticoatheisthmus” into “petticoat,” “heist,” and “hmus.” But since the last cluster of letters does not constitute a recognizable word, they have to start over and try to break down the phrase in another way: “petticoat,” “atheist,” and “isthmus.” Sometimes the chain of words fails to overlap, which I indicated with the symbol “ | ” above: after “fulcrum” no overlapping transition occurs, because the word “crumpetti” (or “crumpet,” “rumpet,” and “umpet”) does not exist (a ‘correct’ version could be “crumpetty” as in “Crumpetty Tree” – a phrase taken from Edward Lear’s “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat”). Such breakdowns interrupt the otherwise fluid transitions from one word to the next. Additionally, the second poem takes over several words from the first one (underlined: e.g.,

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“alligator,” “veteran,” and “tissue”), varies words from the first poem (boldface: e.g., “ancestor – ancestry – ancestor” and “calculus – calculator”), and surprises readers with clever word-combinations such as “peroxideathwar- / timekeeper,” who first identify the side-by-side of “death” and “war” before the beginning of the next line causes them to rethink their approach and identify the series of words as “death,” “thwart,” and “timekeeper.” These features of “STRINGFOUR” and “STRINGFIVE” foreground the poet’s creative transforming of improvisation and the fluidity of music into two poems, which induce a slow reading tempo but nonetheless lack a metaphoric musicality. Ron Overton, by contrast, translates the slow tempo of a jazz piece in “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” published in Hotel Me: Poems for Gil Evans and Others (1994). It already prepares the readers to expect a poem about the slow tempo of a jazz piece since it refers to “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” (Mingus Ah Um, 1959), composed by Charles Mingus for the jazz saxophonist Lester Young (whose trademark was a pork pie hat) and performed by Gil Evans. Similar to the bebop poems treated above, Overton’s poem exhibits a thin vertical column with short stanzas that, at first, may encourage the conceptualization of it as a swift jazz solo. Yet the poem’s title, topic, explicit reference to the slow tempo of a jazz performance, rhythm, and repetitive use of phonemes such as /əʊ/ and /uː / suggest a slow, elegiac reading: played so slow and soulful as though you knew this was the last gig triple blues for Prez for Mingus gone now too and too soon after: you (Overton, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” 33)

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The elegiac poem pretends that the speaker is listening to a recorded live performance of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” played by the jazz pianist Gil Evans shortly before his death in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Describing Evans’s version of the elegy as “played / so slow,” the speaker emphasizes the slow tempo conveyed by the iteration of the vowel /əʊ/ in the line “so slow” by repeating it in the next two lines “and soulful” and “as though.” Adding to the sluggish pace are the spaces between the short stanzas and single verses. The space after the first stanza “played / so slow,” for instance, separates the enjambement “so slow” from “and soulful” and asks the readers to make a pause and listen to the lingering vowel / əʊ / in “slow.” In short, it instructs the readers to realize the conceptual metaphor a space is a pause. Further elements of the poem stress the slow tempo. The speaker repeatedly uses the drawn-out vowel / uː / in “you knew” and iterates the vowel at the end. Also, the speaker’s use of “triple blues” gives the Evans version a threefold function: it is an elegy composed by Mingus for Lester Young (“Prez”), an elegy for the departed Mingus, and an elegy for Evans himself, who will die shortly after his “last gig.” The narrator picks up the vowel /uː / again in “gone now too” and repeats it in the subsequent lines: “and too soon / after: / you.” Both the colon and the space between the verses “after:” and “you” suggest a respectful pause and, at the same time, emphasize the final “you.” Thus Overton’s poem about a person listening to Evan’s supposedly last performance of the elegy “Good Bye Pork Pie Hat” calls for a slow and thoughtful reading. Form and content reinforce each other. Other poets treat the slow paced compositions and improvisations of Thelonious Monk. As the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in New York during the early 1940s, he performed in conjunction with the era’s leading soloists, such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. As the critic Ran Blake points out, he “helped to formulate the emerging bop style” (“Thelonious Monk”). Despite his involvement in the birth of bebop, his playing style differed from the one favored by the beboppers: “In contrast to the speed-obsessed work of Parker, [Bud] Powell, and Gillespie, Monk preferred slow and medium tempos, and his process of improvising had a deliberate, hesitating quality” (Gioia 2011: 222). Gioia lists other features of Monk’s idiosyncratic music, such as “angular intervals,” the insistent repetition of simple “melodic fragments,” and dissonant chords played in a percussive manner (222), and he also mentions Monk’s calculated use of space in his compositions and solos (226). Unsurprisingly, poets experiment with various ways of communicating the slow tempo of Monk’s performances. Billy Collins, a former Poet Laureate of the United States, employs the image of falling snow to translate the slow tempo of Monk’s ballad “Ruby My Dear” into the medium of writing in “Snow.” An unidentified speaker listens to Monk’s “Ruby

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My Dear” and establishes a set of cross-domain mappings between the music and the falling snow he or she is seeing outside (excerpt): I cannot help noticing how this slow Monk solo seems to go somehow with the snow that is coming down this morning, how the notes and the spaces accompany its easy falling on the geometry of the ground on the flagstone path, the slanted roof, and the angles of the split rail fence as if he had imagined a winter scene as he sat at the piano late one night at the Five Spot playing “Ruby My Dear.” (Collins, “Snow” 105)

The speaker maps the slowly falling snow onto Monk’s slow piece with, the snowflakes onto individual notes, and the spaces between the snowflakes onto the spaces between the notes. The narrator metaphorically understands Monk’s “Ruby My Dear” in terms of falling snow and realizes the metaphor thelonious monk’s “ruby my dear” is falling snow.⁴⁷ Collins also explicitly refers to the slow tempo of “Ruby My Dear” and repeats the diphthong /əʊ/ throughout the stanza to emphasize the slow tempo: I cannot help noticing how this slow Monk solo seems to go somehow with the snow that is coming down this morning, (Collins, “Snow” 106; emphasis mine)

The lines’ rhythmic disjunctions and the irregular length correspond to Monk’s syncopated style and the sonic differences between eye rhymes such as “how,” “slow,” “snow,” and “down” corresponds to his playing angular intervals. Knowledge about Monk’s style thus assists readers to metaphorically interconnect constitutive elements of the poem with his way of playing jazz on a piano.

47 See also the discussion of “cool” aspects in Collins’ poem “Snow” in Chapter 4.4.6.

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Similar knowledge is necessary to recognize Anne Waldman’s metaphorical translation of Monk’s slow tempo and idiosyncratic style into the visual shape of her poem entitled “Bluehawk.” On the one hand, the first word “Blue” of the title adopted from the Monk composition “Bluehawk” found, for example, on the album Thelonious Alone in San Francisco (1959) and the speaker’s lament of Monk’s death in the phrase “Monk’s gone” together with the speaker’s bid to “swipe your tears away” (see below) make the readers aware of the elegiac mood of the poem. On the other hand, the lines’ quirky arrangement shows Waldman’s transformation of Monk’s angular way of playing notes and pauses into the following visual form (excerpt): Monk’s gone blown those keys his alone to unlock your heart sway swipe those tears away Monk’s gone Monk’s gone (pause) a minor chord asymmetry (accent on the “try”) (Waldman, “Bluehawk” 225)

She translates Monk’s repetitive playing of one melodic fragment (as he does in “Bluehawk”) into the repetition of the phrase “Monk’s gone” and his elision of notes from a motif into the omission of the word “away” in the second verse “blown.” Her act of leaving out the word “away,” however, produces an incomplete rhyming pair, which correlates with the dissonant, angular melodic fragments played by Monk. Waldman also realizes the metaphor a musical pause

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is a space on the page to render Monk’s deliberate pauses and hesitations. For instance, she first presents the verse “Monk’s gone” and leaves ample space between the verse and the indented word “blown.” The same amount of space separates “blown” from the next short stanza of verses beginning with “those keys.” Such spaces between lines and stanzas ask readers to translate them into meditative pauses. Yet only the interaction between a literal and a figurative translation of the poem offers a nuanced understanding of it. The literal meaning of the reiterated phrase “Monk’s gone” and the phrase “swipe those tears away” suggest that the poem is an elegy which typically entails a slow tempo and a reflective, sad mood. Simultaneously, “Monk’s gone” allows readers to translate it into a brief melodic statement. The ample space surrounding the word “blown” asks the readers to make a pause, and the incomplete idiomatic phrase “blown [away]” leads them to metaphorically perceive it as an accented melodic fragment followed once more by a pause. The literal meaning of “those keys” plays with the polyvalent meaning of the noun “keys,” which refers to the keys of a keyboard and to the keys that open locks. Having come across the title “Bluehawk” and Monk’s last name, the readers are likely to interpret the plural form “those keys” as the keys of a piano, but the next few lines destabilize their initial reading of the phrase and make them recognize the ambiguity of “those keys”: while it can refer to the keys of the piano, it can refer to a version of the trite metaphorical linguistic expression “keys to your heart” as well. Both the grammatical inversion “those keys / his / alone / to / unlock” as well as the jagged arrangement of the lines also invite the readers to read the stanzas figuratively and imagine them as asymmetrically played melodic phrases. The last part of the excerpt above illustrates Waldman’s deliberate experimentation with literal and figurative translation processes. For instance, the literal expression in brackets – “(pause)” – instructs readers to make a pause, but the figurative translation of the same expression asks them to perceive it as a melodic phrase. Also, the literal meaning of “a minor chord” asks them to imagine that Monk plays at this moment a minor chord, but the words’ linear arrangement presents the verse as a series of notes. Last but not least, the final syllables of both lines “asymmetry / (accent on the “try”)” make up an eye rhyme while the second line instructs readers to give the previous word an odd stress pattern and, at the same time, to translate both phrases into syncopated musical phrases played by Monk. All three examples, especially the clash between the literal and figurative meaning of “(pause),” demonstrate that Waldman is highly aware of jazz poetry’s two dimensions.

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The investigation of how poets treat the issue of slow tempo in jazz poetry has demonstrated that only the two poems by Kostelanetz, “STRINGFOUR” and “STRINGFIVE,” manifest the metaphor slow tempo is a horizontal line, but, as I have shown, the slow tempo results from the time-consuming activity of deciphering the words and their meaning and hence refers not to an unhurried tempo in jazz. The remainder of the poems display other techniques that convey the idea of slow jazz to readers: Overton’s “Good Bye Pork Pie Hat,” for instance, has a thin visual shape, which could lead to the initial assumption that it visualizes a speedy jazz solo, yet it documents the poet’s effort of creating an elegiac tempo with the help of several techniques such as references to Mingus’s “Good Bye Pork Pie Hat” and Lester Young’s death; Collins describes the speaker’s metaphorical interpretation of Monk’s ballad “Ruby My Dear” as falling snow and refers explicitly to the slow tempo of the piece in his poem “Snow”; and Waldman translates Monk’s angular style and his characteristically slow tempo into a series of short, irregularly placed lines in “Bluehawk.” From all the poems I have discussed in this second part, only her poem invites readers to imagine the whole poem as a jazz performance. Although some poems are partially the result of intermedial music-writing translations (e.g., Overton’s “Good Bye Pork Pie Hat”), Waldman’s provides several clues to readers whose precise knowledge of Monk’s characteristic style aids them in their intermedial translation of the poem into a musical piece played by a specific jazz musician.

4.3 tempo is rhythm The superordinate metaphor jazz music is writing additionally embraces the metaphor tempo is rhythm with which I can explore how jazz poets translate the different tempos of music. Proceeding from the metaphor, I would assume that poets establish metaphorical equivalencies between a specific pulse (indicated by a time signature) and the appropriate meter: for instance, the two beats per bar of the time signature 24 correspond to the two beats of the iambic foot, the four beats per measure of the 44 time signature correspond to four beats of two trochaic feet, and the three beats per bar of the time signatures 34 and 38 correlate with the three beats of the dactylic and anapest feet. Surprisingly, however, none of these works follow a strict meter, which would not distinguish them significantly from poems that have a well-defined metrical structure and are not the product of translating music into writing. On the contrary, jazz poets write their jazz poems in free verse and completely avoid any kind of metrical system. Similarly, the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1877–1944), who had moved to New York in 1940, translated the regular bass figure of Boogie Woogie music into ir-

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regular rhythmic patterns rather than an entirely regular pattern in his two Boogie Woogie paintings. Known for his “neo-plastic” style, which consists of grids of vertical and horizontal black lines and colored planes (see below: Trafalgar Square, 1939–1943), he transformed his style due, in part, to the influence of the piano-based music:

(A) Piet Mondrian, Trafalgar Square, 1939–1943; New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A.M. Burden. Acc. n.: 510.1964. © 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

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(B) Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–1943; New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Given anonymously. Acc. n.: 73.1943. © 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

(C) Piet Mondrian, Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–1944); Collection of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

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The astonishing shift from the Trafalgar Square-painting to these Boogie Woogie works demonstrates the deep impact New York and the music had on Mondrian. Rather than visualizing the regular bass ostinato of the Boogie-woogie style usually played in common time ( 44 ), Mondrian created two ambiguous paintings with asymmetrical patterns that invite a number of figurative interpretations. He already hinted at the ambiguity of his paintings in the titles Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie, which he formed by bringing two words or phrases – “Broadway” / “Victory” and “Boogie Woogie” – together. Guided by the title Broadway Boogie Woogie, the readers can establish metaphorical correspondences between the painting and New York City (“Broadway”). For instance, the lines are the grid of streets in New York, the small colored squares are cars, and the numerous small colored squares represent the busy traffic. The correspondences between the painting and Boogie-woogie music are, for instance, the correlation between the small colored squares and musical notes as well as the correlation between the alternation of yellow and non-yellow squares and the pulse of the Boogie Woogie style. This pulsating rhythm, however, is far from being a regular one as this detail illustrates:

The erratic patterns increase in Mondrian’s last and unfinished work Victory Boogie Woogie (oil on canvas with scotch tape), which calls for the metaphorical correlation between the painting and “Victory,” such as the “lozenge” shape of the painting is a double victory of the “revolutionary” music (see footnote below), and the overwhelming mass of colored squares is the victory of the squares over the previously predominant grid-structure in his “neo-plastic” works. There is also a correlation between the painting and music, such as the small and large squares correspond to the musical notes played quietly and loudly respectively, the quick alternation between small colored squares in one line corresponds to a staccato, and the general composition of the painting with its differently sized and colored squares corresponds to a “hot” Boogie Woogie with irregular pulsating rhythms. Neither painting, then, documents Mondrian’s visualization of a regular Boogie Woogie pulse as a strictly regular pattern.⁴⁸

48 The Mondrian specialist Carel Blotkamp mentions the Dutch painter’s fascination with jazz, which Mondrian discovered when he returned to Paris after the First World War (Blotkamp 1994: 165), and gives a brief summary of the article “Jazz and the Neo-Plastic,” published in 1927, in

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Throughout my search for poems that are realizations of the metaphor tempo is rhythm, I could not find one poem that manifests a metaphoric interconnection between a regular pulse (e.g., common time) and an unchanging, rigid meter. But what I found instead was a rich treasure trove, for the “evidence” demonstrates the jazz poets’ creative use of myriad techniques – free verse, typographical markers, literal descriptions, and non-European beat patterns – to translate what they consider the trademarks of jazz into writing: syncopation and free improvisation. The absence of any strict metrical system suggests that jazz poets avoided any traditional metrical pattern because it would misrepresent the music’s very nature, which they associate with freedom, improvisation, and creativity, rather than control, regularity, and commonplace. Hence the investigation of the mismatch between the metaphor tempo is rhythm and the non-metrical rhythms will exhibit the jazz poets’ creativity.

4.3.1 tempo is rhythm i: Free Verse Conspicuously, jazz poets refrain from using regular meters even when they rely on traditional poetic forms. Sascha Feinstein, for instance, wrote four sonnets in memory of the drummer Stan Gage and called them “Sonnets for Stan Gage (1945–1992).” Each consists of fourteen lines and their rhyme scheme corresponds nearly to the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet, but Feinstein’s sonnets do not exhibit the typical iambic pentameter. Feinstein’s riffs on the conventions of the subgenre: Your hands cracked and callused in summer, bled Every winter. That’s the way it’s always been, You said, clutching your fingers in a mottled White towel. All of your unspoken Words—the angular elbows and snapped wrists— Resonate in memory like cymbals left

his book Mondrian: The Art of Destruction: “The contents of the article do not entirely fulfil the promise of the title. […]. But once he has concretized his argument, Mondrian does indeed maintain that jazz and Neo-Plastic painting are at present the only manifestation of ‘the new life’, in the midst of a culture of form in decline. Both are ‘highly revolutionary phenomena: they are destructively constructive. They do not destroy the actual content of form, but rather deepen form only in order to elevate it to a new order. They break the bonds of “form as individuality”, in order to make possible a universal unity’” (166). Indeed, Mondrian does not fully destroy or “deconstruct” the “neo-plasticism” in the Boogie Woogie paintings, retaining the form of lines even in his final work Victory Boogie Woogie.

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Unstruck, forever anticipating the stick’s Crash. Damn it, Stan. You thought death Was some young drummer you could cut, the way You kept outplaying fate with heroin Overdoses, a mugger’s four-inch blade In your chest which now I can only see in My mind heaving. The clean linoleum tile. A nurse washing her hands. The cold bed rail. Floodlight shadow. Your shoes are stroking The platform’s edge. Two hours before the gig— The drums have to be intimidating!— And because you think they’re not you take a swig Of J.D. from a shiny flask. But they were. This was pain: each platinum strike drove nails Into my head. (“stan!”) I’m still caught there, Pressed against the auditorium wall, Twitching as warm-up shots detonated My chest. (“stan! You’ve made the clock jump Forward!”) Yeah, but did they intimidate? Sticks on the drum-kit rug, you walk to the front Of the stage, fingers slicing the air, Flicking blood across a row of wooden chairs. (Feinstein, “Sonnets for Stan Gage” 9)

Like Shakespearean sonnets, Feinstein’s sonnets evince fourteen lines and the rhyme scheme “a–b–a–b / c–d–c–d / e–f–e–f / gg,” which link his sonnets to the traditional form of English sonnets. Nevertheless his sonnets manifest several creative transformations of the conventional features of the subgenre: he changes the perfect rhymes of Shakespearean sonnets into imperfect ones to produce dissonant sounds (e.g., “bled” / mottled” and “been” / “spoken”) and he creates a tension between the rhyme scheme, which divides the sonnets into three quatrains and a rhyming couplet, and the step-like arrangement of the fourteen lines, which divides his sonnets into four tercets and a rhyming couplet (see above). He also favors caesuras and irregular punctuation (e.g., “My mind heaving. The clean linoleum tile. / A nurse washing her hands. A clean bed rail.”) and impressionistic images, and he changes the strict iambic pentameter into an unmetered rhythm. Dissonance, tension between formal structures, and an irregular rhythm represent characteristic features of jazz improvisation and demonstrate that Feinstein, like a jazz musician, knows the conventions of a genre and improvises within the given aesthetic boundaries to produce his variation on the original “theme.” His jazzed-up version of the Shakespearean sonnet is far from being accidental. On

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the contrary, the four similar sonnets show that they are the product of a structured improvisation that creates a hybrid form. Feinstein’s improvisation within the pre-set limits of the Shakespearean sonnet remains one of the few exceptions to the rule, for jazz poems are usually written in free verse. A selection of three contemporary poems can demonstrate the ubiquity of free verse in jazz poetry: (A) Yusef Komunyakaa, “Dolphy’s Aviary”: We watched Baghdad’s skyline ignite, arms & legs entwined as white phosphorus washed over our bedroom, the sounds of war turned down to a sigh. It was one of those nights we couldn’t let go of each other, a midwestern storm pressing panes till they trembled in their sashes. Eric Dolphy scored the firmament splitting to bedrock, as the wind spoke tongues we tried to answer. At first, we were inside muted chords, inside an orgasm of secrets, & then cried out, “Are those birds?” Midnight streetlights yellowed the snow – a fleeting ghost battalion cremated in the bony cages of tanks in sand dunes. Dolphy said “Birds have notes between our notes …” I could see them among oak rafters & beams, beyond the burning cold, melodious in cobweb & soot. Like false angels up there in a war of electrical wires & bat skeletons caked with excrements, we in winding sheets of desire as their unbearable songs startled us down. (424–425)

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(B) Nathaniel Mackey, “John Coltrane Arrived with An Egyptian Lady”: —belated prayer— no sheet of sound enshroud the Fount of this fevered Brook becoming one with God’s Eye, not a one of these notes come near to the brunt of the inaudible note I’ve been reaching towards To whatever dust-eyed giver of tone to whatever talk, to whatever slack jaws drawn against bone To whatever hearts abulge with unsourced light, to whatever sun, to whatever moist inward meats of love Tonight I’ll bask beneath an arch of lost voices, echo some Other place, Nut’s nether suns These notes’ long fingers gathered come to grips of gathered cloud, connected lip to unheard of tongue (66–67)

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(C) David Meltzer, No Eyes: Lester Young (excerpt): Lester had “no eyes” for bad vibes crude moves abrasive invasive uncool imposition on smooth flow create sounds through smoke-filled black and white Lester’s retreat was away from injury at times light was knives, her softness his desire for flight […] No eyes for disdain pain of face of skin of race No eyes to smash brains into cellophane no eyes for paradise if it’s ruled & regular […] (15–16)

None of these poems has a specific metrical structure and rhyme pattern such as the iambic pentameter and the “a–b–a–b / c–d–c–d / e–f–e–f / gg”-rhyme scheme of Shakespearean sonnets. Komunyakaa’s “Dolphy’s Aviary” tells a story about two lovers in bed watching the war in Iraq on television. It mainly consists of short, rhymeless run-on lines with irregular stress patterns due, in part, to the impressionistic style. Mackey’s “John Coltrane Arrived With an Egyptian Lady” consists of even shorter lines than Komunyakaa’s “Dolphy’s Aviary” and brings together John Coltrane, God, and the Egyptian goddess Nut who personifies the sky in Egyptian mythology (“Nut,” Encyclopædia Britannica). The graphical arrangement of Mackey’s “belated prayer” to the deities, the unmetered lines, the unpredictable split of the run-on lines, and the gap in the verse “voices, echo” create an erratic rhythm full of delays, sudden breaks, and short pauses (see below for a discussion about syncopation and typography). Like Komunyakaa’s poem, Mackey’s “John Coltrane Arrived With an Egyptian Lady” has no fixed rhyme scheme, but it displays a prayer-like repetition of the prepositional phrase “to whatever” and the verb “gathered.” David Meltzer’s book-length poem on Lester Young also manifests neither a consistent metrical nor a rhyme pattern. The speaker describes Young as having “no eyes for paradise if it’s ruled & regular,” and, likewise, Meltzer has “no eyes” for a regular metrical structure and rhyme scheme. Instead, he is interested in ever-shifting pulses and different forms of gazing such as the “free gaze.”

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Other poets insert rhythmic passages into poems otherwise written in free verse, such as the first poem of the “Two Jazz Poems” by Carl Wendell Hines, Jr. It pretends to be a translation of the trumpet player’s solo and manifests the metaphor trumpet solo is the first poem. Hence the first poem allows readers to metaphorically identify the succession of tonal changes via the literal descriptions (left column), the alternation between forte and piano via the presence and absence of the exclamation mark (right column), and the two rhythmic passages (middle column): Tone

First Poem: Rhythmic Passages (underlined)

Dynamics

#

proud

cool

dreamy

hot

rise in pitch

yeah here am i am standing at the crest of a tallest hill with a trumpet in my hand & dark glasses on. bearded & bereted I proudly stand! but there are no eyes to see me. i send down cool sounds! but there are no ears to hear me. my lips they quiver in aether-emptiness! there are no hearts to love me. surely though through night’s grey fog mist of delusion & dream & the rivers of tears that flow like gelatin soul-juice some apathetic bearer of paranoidic peyote visions (or some other source of inspiration) shall hear the song i play. Shall see the beard & beret. Shall become inflamed beyond all hope with emotion’s everlasting fire & join me in eternal Peace. & but yet well who knows? (Hines, “Two Jazz Poems” 184–185; emphasis mine)

unspecified

forte piano forte piano forte piano

unspecified

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The first rhythmic passage occurs after the trumpet player’s intro and consists of six alternating lines played in forte and in piano (underlined) respectively: the forcefully played lines differ in length and have no measured rhythm; by contrast, the more softly played lines share the same length (with the exception of the last line which omits the initial “but”) and display a few iambic feet, but not a strict iambic meter. The overall structure of this passage resembles a call-and-response pattern which depicts a trumpet player alternating three times between a phrase played in forte and, as indicated by the monosyllabic structure of the other lines, a series of staccato notes played in piano. Following a “dreamy” sounding passage of the solo, the second rhythmic interlude begins with the emphatic “shall” at the end of the line “other source of inspiration) shall.” It introduces a series of lines (underlined), in which the stressed syllable “shall” at the end of a line corresponds to an accented “upbeat” note to the “downbeat” of the following bar, that is, the first note of the next line. After the rhythmic interlude, the trumpet player moves on to a short, hot passage before he plays a sequence of notes in a step-like manner (see above). The end-stopped “peace” signals the end of the solo and yet the trumpet player surprises his “listeners” with a final “question.” At no time do these rhythmic passages follow a strict meter.

4.3.2 tempo is rhythm ii: Syncopation and Typographical Techniques What jazz poets, however, often undertake is to use typographical markers to translate jazz’s syncopation into writing. The term “syncopation” refers to [t]he regular shifting of each beat in a measured pattern by the same amount ahead of or behind its normal position in that pattern; […]. Phrasing or articulation may be called ‘syncopated’ if regularly shifted ahead of or behind the beat to create tension against the established pulse. (“Syncopation”)

Jazz poets use typographical markers in their translations of rhythmic syncopation into writing to demarcate syncopated jazz rhythms from ‘regular’ free verse. In Velvet Bebop Kente Cloth, Sterling D. Plumpp gives his poems numbers as titles and asks the readers to imagine them as tracks on a vinyl record with two sides (see also the picture of a record with the name “Velvet Bebop Kente Cloth: The Finest in Jazz” on page xv): “Side A” and “Side B” each contain twenty-three “tracks,” and each “track” displays a number of slashes to indicate a syncopated bebop riff to the readers. An excerpt from “Thirteen.” will illustrate his use of the slash to visualize the riff’s rhythmic displacements:

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You may/Run on/Run on for a/Long time. But/Be-Bop riffs gonna/Myth you down Be-Bop is a/Saxophone you/Dial with myth. Archivist of/Axology. Velvet/Host who/Riff the most. Was it you/I hear say/I can tell you/Your destination if I/Know whether you/Take the early Bird or the/Late Trane […] (Plumpp, “Thirteen” 29, excerpt)

The reader expects to read the first line “You may run” in a regular rhythm but the slash and the capitalized “R” of “Run,” which marks a strong accent on the last syllable, creates an unexpected change in rhythm. In addition, Plumpp sometimes inserts a spatial marker after a period to indicate a rest: see, for instance, “myth. Archivist” and “of/Axology. Velvet/Host.” His use of both techniques to create a metaphorical correlation between the syncopated style of bebop riffs and the variable rhythms of his poems provides unanticipated rhythmic shifts of accents. Bob Kaufman’s often-anthologized “Walking Parker Home” also evinces the use of the slash as a means to generate syncopated rhythms. A short passage from the beginning demonstrates the slight difference between Kaufman’s and Plumpp’s ways of employing the slash: Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/ Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization Bronze fingers – brain extensions seeking trapped sounds Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts New York altar city/ black tears/ secret disciples Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates

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Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground. […] (Kaufman, “Walking Parker Home” 102)

Unlike Plumpp, Kaufman always inserts a space between the slash and the following word and often writes the latter in lower-case. The few exceptions to the rule such as the capital “T” in “dreams/ Tomorrow” mark a particular strong accent on the first syllable. The idiosyncratic rhythm stems from the poem’s phrase-like structure. Some verses represent long musical phrases with no rhythmic disruptions and other verses consist of two or three short phrases; the alternation between long and staccato-like phrases generates a syncopated rhythm. Like Plumpp and Kaufman, Ntozake Shange uses the slash to render a syncopated riff. Yet she enhances the visualized irregular rhythm by shifting back and forth between dialect expressions, shorthand words, the ampersand, and regular orthographic words. The excerpts from the first part of her performance piece “i heard eric dolphy in his eyes” illustrates her approach: yesterday evening/ no/ mo like last night/ the moon took on a scarlet hue/ lune rouge/ luna roja/ una luna local/ soy yo una loquita/ thru mists & the clouds that mix […] waitin for tomorrow/ i met the 7th Avenue IRT Express/ specially tailored for Malcolm X Boulevard & the computerized palettes at the Schomburg/ the train came whistling by/ deluxe […] chill factors & smog what cd mix wit neon & cloud/ hoverin/ by the base of hydrants ferocious brazen legs of young girls seein to their own undoin/ (Shange, “i heard eric dolphy in his eyes” 41)

Shange’s techniques underscore the syncopated rhythm of the poem. For instance, the slashes and the dialect word “mo” in the first verse “yesterday evening/ no/ mo like last night/ the” emphasize the stress pattern of spoken discourse and, at the same time, produce an asymmetrical rhythm. The title relates Eric Dolphy’s bebop style to her poem’s bebop rhythm, which consists of short and long phrases and a mixture of the slash (as a typographical marker of rhythmic shifts), the am-

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persand, and dialect expressions such as “wit” (with), “seekin” (seeking), “thru” (through), and “cd” (could) to generate a linguistic riff. However, an excessive use of punctuation marks in a poem does not necessarily mean that a poet deliberately tried to visualize rhythmic syncopations. In “Coltrane, Syeeda’s Song Flute,” for instance, Jean Valentine employs many commas, several colons and periods, and one semi-colon in her translation of Coltrane’s style of playing in “Syeeda’s Song Flute” (Giant Steps: Atlantic, 1959). The punctuation marks help her transform his staccato notes into a succession of short phrases and his legato phrases into longer written phrases: Coltrane, Syeeda’s Song Flute When I came across it on the piano it reminded me of her, because it sounded like a happy, child’s song. —Coltrane For M & P.R To Marilyn, to Peter, playing, making things: the walls, the stairs, the attics, bright nests in nests; the slow, light, grave unstitching of lies, opening, stinking, letting in air you bear yourselves in, become your own mother and father, your own child. You lying closer. You going along. Days. The strobe-lit wheel stops dead once, twice in a life: old-fashioned rays: and then all the rest of the time pulls blur, only you remember it more, playing. Listening here in the late quiet you can think great things of us all, I think we will all, Coltrane, meet speechless and easy in Heaven, our names known and forgotten, all dearest, all come giant-stepping out into some wide, light, merciful mind. John Coltrane, 40, gone right through the floorboards, up to the shins, up to the eyes, closed over,

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Syeeda’s happy, child’s song left up here, playing. (Valentine “Coltrane, Syeeda’s Song Flute” 224; emphasis mine)

Valentine translates “Syeeda’s Song Flute” into a tripartite narration. The upbeat, child-like sound of the first part corresponds to her happy memories of her children Marilyn and Peter playing in the attic. Her fond memories shift to thoughts about death in the middle section of the poem, in which she addresses the departed Coltrane and describes how she and other unknown people will be “speechless” when they meet the famous Coltrane in heaven. This part of the poem with its reference to the album Giant Steps that contains the track “Syeeda’s Song Flute” (“all come giant-stepping”) and the speaker’s reflection on Coltrane’s death at 40 has no correspondence in the song. The fast tempo of “Syeeda’s Song Flute” (192 BPM) and the lively, upbeat style of Coltrane’s performance even when he plays legato do not invite a melancholic mood. Apparently, the speaker’s mind drifts from happy memories triggered by the music to sad thoughts about death in general and Coltrane’s death in particular. She breaks off her melancholic train of thoughts (note the last comma in the penultimate stanza: “closed over,”) when she realizes that “Syeeda’s happy, child’s song” – a quotation from the epitaph – is still playing. A comparison between Part A of Coltrane’s “Syeeda’s Song Flute” and the first stanzas shows that Valentine uses commas, colons, a semi-colon, and periods in her transformation of Coltrane’s staccato and legato articulations into a succession of short phrases in the first stanza and longer phrases in the next stanza. For instance, the short phrases of the line “playing, making things: the walls, the stairs” (underlined) correspond to Coltrane’s playing of staccato notes in bars 1–8 of “Syeeda’s Song Flute” and the two longer phrases of the line “you bear yourselves in, become your own mother and father” (boldface) correspond to Coltrane’s legato technique in bars 9–15. These correspondences, however, do not represent accurate cross-domain mappings between musical notes and words. Rather, the poem documents Valentine’s writing of a few characteristic features of Coltrane’s performance in “Syeeda’s Song Flute” with the aid of punctuation marks. The result is a poem with an irregular rhythm, but Valentine did not deliberately visualize the rhythm with typographical markers such as the slash. Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s typographical deconstruction of several poems introduces another technique of visualizing a syncopated rhythm. Like a musician whose solo involves the fragmentation of a blues melody, Brathwaite takes his five poems published under the title of “Blues” in Other Exiles (1975) and, by breaking up the lines and words with spatial markers and periods, creates variations of the

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“Blues”-poems in Jah Music (1986). A close analysis of the two versions of “Klook” about the bebop-style drummer Kenny Clark (nicknamed “Klook”) will illustrate the deconstructive practice: 1.

“Klook” in Other Exiles (1975): The drummer is thin and has been a failure at every trade but this but here he is the king of the cats: it is he who kills them sick, sad and subtle, from his throne of skin and symbol he controls the jumping rumble using simple shock and cymbal his quick sticks clip and tap, tattoo a trick or two that leaves you prancing: and reveals that perfect quattrocento patterning: giotto, ghirlandaio, chano pozo, klook … (12–13)

2.

“Klook” in Jah Music (1986): The drummer is thin . and has been a failure at every trade but this . but here he is the king of the cats . it is he . who kills them . sick . sad . and subtle from his throne of skin and symbol he controls the jump. ing rumble . u . sing sim . ple skock and . cymbal his quick sticks clip and tap . tatt. oo a trick. or two. that leaves you

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pranc. ing and reveals that perfect quattrocento patt. er. ning . gi. otto . ghir. landai. o . chano. o . po. zo . klook (10)

A comparison between the first and second version of “Klook” demonstrates that Brathwaite inserts an extra space between every word to break open the rhythm and narrow typography of the “Blues”-poem and highlight the individual words, syllables, and letters. He begins the deconstructive practice of disrupting lines and words with periods in the first line, where he places a period between the word “thin” and “and.” The period visually divides the line into two parts and indicates a pause as well. He then puts a period between the first and second stanzas and increases the spatial distance between both stanzas. In the second verse of the second stanza, he replaces the colon after “cats:” with a period, which he removes by an additional space from the noun (“cats . it”), and inserts another period between “he” and “who.” Brathwaite also cuts the line short when he takes the last word of the verse (“them”) and, as he did with the period located between stanzas one and two, positions it between the second and third stanzas. The first verse of the third stanza manifests three periods and, in contrast to previous verses, alternates between a period and three words linked together by alliteration (“. sick . sad . and subtle”) whereby the conjunction “and” after the third period postpones the appearance of the third word “subtle.” The first verse of the fourth stanza evinces, for the first time, a disruption of a word. Brathwaite separates the suffix “-ing” from the verb “jumping” and places a period right after “jump.” He continues to split up words in the following line “. u . sing sim . ple skock [sic] and .” which begins and ends with a period. The end-stopped line, however, does not end but carries on in the next line with the noun “cymbal” which he moved from the previous line to the floating position between stanzas four and five. In the fifth stanza, Brathwaite enhances the onomatopoetic character of the two lines when he replaces the comma after “tap,” with a period, situates it in-between “tap” and “tatt,” breaks up the word “tattoo” into “tatt. oo” to stress the sharp sound of “tatt” and the long vowel / uː /, and places a period after the words “trick” and “two.” Thus his insertion of periods in the fifth stanza gives emphasis to the sharp and short percussive sounds produced by drum sticks and to the soft, long vowel /uː / in “tattoo,” “two,” and “you.” Brathwaite’s experimental fragmentation of words continues in the last stanza of the poem. This time he takes the syllable “prance-” from “prancing” and positions it in the floating position above the final stanza and places a period after the syllable. Omitting the colon after “prancing:,” he adds the first syllable

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“patt-” of “patterning” from the last verse to the penultimate line and concludes it with a period. The final verse of the poem contains eleven periods (!) which mutilate every word of the line, including the names of two famous painters from the “Quattrocento” (“gi. otto . ghir. landai. o .”) and the name of the percussionist Luciano “Chano” Pozo (“chano. o . po. zo .”). The only exception is “klook.” Brathwaite establishes a “perfect quattrocento patt. / er. ning” by alternating between a period placed right after a syllable and a period placed either inbetween two syllables or after the letter “o”: “er. ning . gi. otto . ghir. landai. o . chano. o . po. zo . klook.” However, the pattern is far from being perfect, since he changes his practice after the syllable “landai.” He could have placed the period between “landaio” and “chano” to carry on his pattern, but he disrupts the pattern and shifts to a new one in order to emphasize the vowel “o.” To underscore the vowel “o,” he even inserts one between “chano” and “po. zo”: “chano. o . po. zo .” Brathwaite’s patterns deconstruct three of the four (“quattro”) artists’ names and yet stops short of fragmenting the last name “klook.” Hence the poem begins and ends with Clark’s nickname and leaves out the ellipsis that concluded the earlier “Blues”-version of “Klook.” Braithwaite’s two versions of “Klook” illustrate the difference between free verse and rhythmic syncopation: while the first displays an irregular rhythm without the use of extra typographical markers, the second uses typographical markers to visualize jazz’s syncopated rhythms. Braithwaite’s increasingly deconstructive practices – he uses one period in the first stanza, two in the second stanza, three in the third stanza, four in the second line of the fourth stanza, and eleven in the last verse – also point to his experimentation with the notion of deconstruction as a creative process. The analysis of the second “Klook”-poem shows that Braithwaite does not haphazardly insert periods. On the contrary, he creates patterns and varies them by carefully placing periods between words to fragment the words. His process of deconstructing lines and words in the new version of “Klook” professes a heightened awareness of the structure of his earlier poem and creates a jazz version of the “Blues”-poem. He moves within the aesthetic boundaries of creative deconstruction: Braithwaite may push the deconstructive practice to the limits when he uses eleven periods in the last line, but he creates patterns and varies them without destroying words. Other poets such as Akua Lezli Hope use typographical markers such as colons, commas, and spatial markers in addition to periods in order to visualize rhythmic syncopation. Her “my funny valentine” refers to the same title of a jazz piece recorded by Miles Davis on Cookin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet (Prestige, 1956). The speaker, who presumably is the persona Hope (note the allusion to her name in the phrase “hope’s purple fusion’), links Davis’s cool and meditative style

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and her meditations on him whom the speaker considers to be her mysterious “valentine”: Miles suddenly lucid: read emotion not cool as victimized cool: blackleather […] joy’s examination. quiet fondle in pause moment s only moment s shape this catechism’s arch toward consolation […] face the sun. know you ? never with surety. promise each unveiling never cease. (Hope, “my funny valentine” 21)

Hope uses colons to demarcate phrases, but she relies on commas, periods, and spatial markers as well. Her overall effort at creating irregular long lines full of breaks and gaps that correspond to the meditative style played by Davis in the 1950s and early 1960s has the side effect of producing a syncopated rhythm. All of the poets discussed above have used typographical markers to produce irregular rhythms – and not regular ones – in their poems.

4.3.3 tempo is rhythm iii: Literal Descriptions of Rhythms Many other poets do not use typographical techniques to translate syncopated rhythms into written form but describe rhythms literally. In Lawson Fusao Inada’s “Plucking Out a Rhythm,” an anonymous speaker gives instructions to the readers on how to furnish a room and then asks them to add a Japanese-looking figure and outfit it with a pompadour hairstyle, a suit favored by rockabilly musicians such as Elvis Presley in the 1950s, and a pair of sunglasses and shoes sported by black jazz musicians from Harlem: Start with a simple room – a dullish color – and draw the one shade down. Hot plate. Bed. Little phonograph in a corner. Put in a single figure – medium weight and height – but oversize, as a child might.

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The features must be Japanese. Then stack a black pompadour on, and let the eyes slide behind a night of glass. The figure is in disguise: slim green suit for posturing on a bandstand, the turned-up shoes of Harlem … (Inada, “Plucking Out a Rhythm” 13–14)

After giving these instructions, the speaker asks the readers to start playing a jazz record and observe how the figure comes to life and plays a hot rhythm on the imaginary bass: Then start the music playing – thick jazz, strong jazz – and notice that the figure comes to life: sweating, growling over an imaginary bass – plucking out a rhythm – as the music rises and the room is full, exuding with that rhythm … (14)

The reference to the “Hot plate” in the first stanza, the description of the jazz music as “thick jazz, strong jazz,” and that the figure sweats as a result of the rise in body temperature caused by plucking a rhythm on the imaginary bass point to a hot rhythm. The hot jazz ends abruptly when the speaker calls for the readers to “flap up” the blinds and witness how the daylight will freeze the figure in the last-seen position: Then have the shade flap up and daylight catch him frozen in that pose as it starts to snow – thick snow, strong snow –

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blowing in the window while the music quiets, the room is slowly covered, and the figure is completely out of sight. (14)

After the sudden daylight freezes the disguised figure in his or her position, it begins to snow “thick snow, strong snow –,” which represents a variation of the previous line “thick jazz, strong jazz –,” the music turns silent gradually, and the snow covers the room and perhaps the figure. The wording of the last stanza is unclear as to whether the snow covers the figure completely or whether the figure simply vanishes. Several other ambiguities trigger the following questions: does a speaker address the readers or is it the anonymous “voice” of a manual? Do we furnish an actual room or a room of a dollhouse? Do we dress up a traditional Japanese doll? What is the gender of the figure? Is there a correlation between the cold snow and “cool” jazz? Also, the reader has to fill in the missing “down” at the end of the phrase “the music quiets.” Like the anonymous speaker, the poem gives instructions to the readers and asks them to make guesses and do some imaginative work. Despite the poem’s ambiguous nature, the literal description of the figure plucking a rhythm on an imaginary bass invites the readers to specifically imagine a hot rhythm. Some poets insert a brief reference to the time signature of a jazz piece in their free-verse works. Two examples will illustrate this recurring practice: (A) Percy Johnston, “Fitchett’s Basement Blues, Opus 5”: Diaphanous flames from home “cookin” Stricka-lean stricka-fat Or trumpets cool and bop […] Or Iranian bronze kisses All melt Euro-America, but Arpege from altos and tenors in 6/8 time Hides the fecal essence. (41; boldface mine)

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(B) Michael Weaver, “The Last Jazz Club”: In a sprite room with flight in the ceiling, the zippered white Bible with illustrations. The correct way to walk is to pass time (2/4) with some sort of affection, being cool, infused with the mary jane wrappers. In barber shops wrapped in doo rags, the shawls of mercy. I am in the last measure and can’t reach the chord. (129; boldface mine)

Johnston mentions that alto and tenor saxophones play arpeggios over 68 time and Weaver perceives a barbershop as a jazz club and puzzles the readers with puns. In the line “The correct way to walk is to pass time (2/4),” for instance, the speaker exploits the ambiguity of “to walk” and “to pass time” which have a literal meaning and could mean that 24 time is the correct time for a walking bass line. Such poets state the regular tempo of jazz but do not translate it into a metered rhythm. Ntozake Shange’s placement of treble and bass clefs as well as time signatures above short sections in the second part of “It Hasn’t Always Been This Way” does not match the theory of translating the pulse in jazz into writing either. Similar to the common ternary form theme–improvisation–theme (A–B–A) in jazz, she frames her improvisation in part two “ii. Improvisation” with “i. Mood Indigo” and “iii. Take the A Train,” but does not follow the standard jazz practice of improvising on the pre-established theme in her second part entitled “ii. Improvisation.” In “i. Mood Indigo,” Shange mentions the composer of the original tune “Mood Indigo,” Duke Ellington, when she begins with the theme “it hasn’t always been this way / ellington was not a street” (Shange, “It Hasn’t Always Been This Way” 13) and concludes it with the same line. Instead of picking up the theme in “ii. Improvisation,” she offers a succession of eight variations on the theme “there is something caught in my throat” (14), deviating from this pattern in the fourth variation (see below), and on the clefs and time signatures located above the short improvisational sections:

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11’s there is something caught in my throat it is this place my baby is sleeping i check to see if she is alive she does not know about gagging she does not have this place/ in her throat she does not know where we are how it sears the membranes eats the words right outta your mouth leaves you suckin’ pollutants impotence & failure/ a whole race of people cant do nothin’ at the roller disco.

7⁄8 there is something caught in my throat it is hard & ugly/ i wd vomit it out but the malignancy only grows toward my gut/ & will not come out alive my child is sleeping she doesnt know where we are & some man/ wants to kiss my thighs roll his tongue around my navel put his hands all up my ass & this place is in my throat 5⁄4 how can i tell him there is something up my behind/ that will get this place out of my throat (i went to a dangerous place with a man who was not there/ cuz he cant do nothin’ but dial-a-joke or call for information) i cd tell him a few things there are dead children out here there are desperate women out here the sky is falling & i am choking to death cuz of where i am & who we are.

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9⁄15 this is the twentieth century. (do you think artra skin tone cream will solve the colored complexion problem during a limited nuclear engagement/ or are you stocking up on porcelana?) (Shange, “It Hasn’t Always Been This Way” 14–15)

In Western musical notation the time signature appears after the clef and indicates the meter of the piece. Typically, it consists of an upper and a lower number presented as a fraction at the beginning of the staff. For instance, the fraction 34 indicates that there are three quarter-note beats to a measure. Shange deliberately departs from the notational convention when she places a bass clef and the fictitious time signature “11’s”⁴⁹ above the first variation of the theme “there is something caught in my throat.” The clef with a time signature raises the expectation that the following passage will be in the meter indicated by the time signature. Yet a brief scansion of the first three lines of the improvisation exhibits a disparity between the poem’s time signature and the irregular rhythm: / × / × / × × / there is something caught in my throat ×× × / it is this place × / × × / × my baby is sleeping

Nowhere does the meter comprise eleven beats (“11’s”). The discrepancy between the idiosyncratic time signature and the varying rhythm of the individual sections as well as the unpredictable sequence of clefs and random time signatures point to Shange’s improvisation with the two clefs and diverse time signatures: bass 9 clef and “11’s,” treble clef and 78 , bass clef and 54 , treble clef and 15 , treble clef 6 3 4 13 and 8 , bass clef and 4 , treble clef and 4 , and treble clef and 15 . Aware of generating patterns such as the regular alternation of the two clefs, she disrupts them in her series of improvisations on the theme “there is something caught in my throat” and in her succession of clefs and time signatures. Shange never planned to translate the tempo of a jazz tune into writing. She created the second part as

49 Possibly a play on the African American oral tradition of “the dozens” (or “playing the dozens”), that is, she is one short of a dozen.

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an improvisation on a theme, the sequence of clefs, and factual and fictitious time signatures. Like Shange, Ron Welburn does not translate a specific pulse into a respective meter in his poem “3 AND 4.” Instead, the title invites the readers to imagine a jazz musician who counts the 44 rhythm aloud and highlights the number four to indicate that he or she will begin to play a song after having counted aloud to the number four: sons who missed being their father’s sons and almost the memory of mothers a few short paces uncertain from childbirth are the experiences forgotten in the slow white rain of toothpaste from the alley windows sometime imperceptibly in the morning fish bone along the soup can way laughter songs return to touch across the street, a haverford avenue, they built snowmen in januaries a monument to insurance men and the secret nights whispered by summer rains at les’s store they traded in their pennies for sweets: vision: the puerto rican children or the filipinos the little girl next door on the stoop where a man in a cap drunk threatened to cut a child’s throat a man with one leg watched then hungrily paced the floor in his way curious to the child what kind of impressions are made in these years of shitting in alleys seeing how little girls went to the bathroom or silently no consciousness of some father there to blame them. (Welburn, “3 AND 4” 17; emphasis mine)

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The reference to “les’s story” (underlined) points to jazz guitarist John Leslie “Wes” Montgomery who “pared down the guitar vocabulary of the bebop years, replacing the convoluted, note-filled phrases of the post-Christian [Charlie Christian] period with taut, uncluttered solos” (Gioia 2011: 296). The identification of the jazz musician, in turn, underscores several correspondences between the poem and Montgomery’s style of playing: the poem’s lines correspond to his technique of playing single lines; the images of the lines and phrases as well as the reference to “impressions” correspond to his impressionistic playing style; the use of the phrases “slow white rain,” “snowmen in januaries,” and “summer rains” refer to his slow, blues-inflected solo; the run-on line “at les’s store they traded in their pennies / for sweets: visions:” refers to the “trading fours”- technique used in jazz improvisation, in which two musicians alternate between playing four-bar solos, but, in this case, the phrase “for sweets: visions:” (boldface) with colons after “sweets” and “visions” indicates a 44 rhythm with strong accents on the second and third beat; the change of the theme from sons and fathers in the first stanza to little girls and “some father” in the last one corresponds to a theme introduced by Montgomery at the beginning of his solo and, returning to it at the end of the solo, a variation of the initial theme. The title asks the readers to imagine Wes Montgomery counting aloud the 4 4 4 rhythm before he begins to play a solo in 4 time on his jazz guitar. The poem itself manifests the metaphor wes montgomery’s solo is the poem “3 and 4” and documents Welburn’s creative transformations: for instance, he translates the single-line style of Montgomery into a poem with compact single phrases, and he changes the cool blues sound into images of snow. These and other features allow readers to metaphorically identify Montgomery’s style and perceive the poem in terms of his jazz, but – like the other poems discussed above – without translating the common time into writing. Such poets as Johnston, Weaver, and Welburn mention regular rhythms and do not render them in metrical patterns. Evidently, they use this technique in order to avoid creating poems with strict metrical systems, which would contradict their view of jazz in terms of freedom and improvisation.

4.3.4 tempo is rhythm iv: Additional Rhythmic Features of Jazz Poems Some poets have developed other techniques to indicate percussive effects or even a percussive rhythm such as the repetition of particular words and phrases to visualize a peculiar rhythmic feature and the repetition of words that begin with the same letter. In “Tribute to Art of the Chest,” Gerald Early describes the jazz drum-

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mer and bandleader Art Blakey who practices his drumming on a rainy afternoon in front of a small audience: Tribute to the Art of the Chest (for Jo Jones and Philly Joe Jones) If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light —Matthew 6:22 Some people are standing there, in the act of witnessing, In that gloom even though it is raining and Even though it is only afternoon and is still raining; There are some who are compelled to witness a tiny spectacle, A mere speck of haunting force in the larger storming; As the rain falls and the afternoon, of course, grows darker, It is a good time to bear witness to that conceited strength, hideous In its source of that which is so dreadful but is truly virtue after all, The only virtue we may witness: the drummer practicing his drumming, His back curved and his face a blank kingdom of other faces Awaiting the surging of the conceited strength, the thumping in the chest, To make a single face of the image of the tiny spectacle of what our faces mean. A downward swish of cloth on a dancing dancer! The thudding thud of the dropping Of the great weight! The crackling crack of gates standing aside for kings of glory! He flips his sticks and raises his head to smile suddenly, in virtue, Aglow in the darkness, wet with wonder, to let us know who are standing there Witnessing while it is raining that there is more light, great fist in the chest, More light than ever we have ever dreamt of. (Early, “Tribute to the Art of the Chest” 57; boldface mine)

Although the poem’s rhythm neither corresponds with a key signature nor with an explicitly marked bebop rhythm, it visualizes typical aspects of Blakey’s style: “Blakey was an emphatic drummer, instinctive and always musical” (Giddins 1998: 366). Indeed, the repetition of the phrases such as “it is raining,” “conceited strength,” “face” and “faces,” “more light,” and “ever” (and other words) correlates with Blakey’s emphatic and instinctive style. They visualize the beat in unexpected places of the poem and sometimes become rhythmic units: for

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instance, “the drummer practicing his drumming” and “ever we have ever.” The repetition of the words and phrases such as “it is raining” and the concluding “dreamt of” also creates a lyrical tone that corresponds to Giddins’s description of Blakey’s musical style. The approaching thunderstorm mentioned in line 5 begins in the section demarcated by spatial markers. Early employs italicized onomatopoetic expressions to render three different sounds of Blakey’s drumming, adding an association to each onomatopoetic word: the speaker associates the “swish” with a “cloth on a dancing dancer,” the repetition of “thud” in “thudding thud” with “the dropping / Of the great weight,” and the iteration of “crack” in “crackling crack” with “gates standing aside for kings of glory.” The words also evoke the sound of thunder and lightning: the “swish” refers to the lightening bolt, the “thudding thud” to the distant sound of thunder, and the “crackling crack” to the sharp crack of a nearby stroke of lightning. Also, the anapest feet of “thudding thud” and “crackling crack” and the typographical distinction between two “regular” words and the italicized one indicate to the reader that Blakey plays two soft beats and then a strong beat on his drums: × × /. Finally, the poem’s structure and the image of a thunderstorm could refer to what jazz critics call “Blakey’s Pressroll”: “a rumbling on the snare, usually employed at turnbacks, which had the effect of lifting the soloist, the band, and the listener into the air for a few seconds and then gently depositing everyone in the next chorus” (Giddins 1998: 366). Likewise, the demarcated short section describes a pressroll that lifts readers and listeners and then deposits them back onto the ground – that is, to the final passage. With “Tribute to the Art of the Chest,” Early creates an homage to the Blakey in which a small audience and the reader experience Blakey’s original style and, according to the speaker of the poem, notice the inner light of Blakey whose drumming opened to him the gates of heaven. Early did not translate a specific pulse into a metered poem to demonstrate that drummers such as Blakey could keep time. On the contrary, he translated Blakey’s characteristic style of instinctive and emphatic drumming into writing by repeating the same phrases in different spots and by italicizing a few words. A syncopated rhythm is at the center of the second part of Inada’s “Two Variations on a Theme By Thelonious Monk as Inspired By Mal Waldron.” The poem consists of two parts: “I. ‘Blue Monk’ (linear)” concentrates on the “blue” melody of Monk’s composition “Blue Monk” while “II. ‘Blue Monk’ (percussive).”⁵⁰ In his introduction to the poem, Inada describes his percussive technique: “Then

50 For a discussion of the first part of Inada’s poem “Two Variations On a Theme By Thelonious Monk as Inspired By Mal Waldron,” see Chapter 4.5.1.

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I jump right into the tune and the piano, and blow something from the inside out – percussive – particularly building around and repeating ‘ricochet’” (Inada, “Two Variations on a Theme” 62). The poem’s percussive part begins with the word “Ricochet:” but it does not explicitly repeat the same word: Ricochet: Radius: Radiating: Reciting: Realizing: Referring: Recapturing: Repercussion: Revolving: Reflecting: Returning: Reconstituting: Republic: Reshaping: Restructuring: Reversing: Reclaiming: Religion: Respecting: Removing: Reforming: Receiving: Reality: Refining: Reducing: Refreshing: Regenerating: Resource: Regarding: Relating: Relaxing: Revering: Remembering: Renewing: Revising: Repairing: Replacing: Residing: Reviewing: Respecting: Resolving: Reviving: Responsible: Retaining: Resuming: Revealing: Rehearsing: Resulting: Restoring: Retrieving: Regaining: Recovering: Relying: Redeeming: Replying: Reminding: Rewarding: Resounding: Reverberating: Remarkably: Releasing: Remaining: Repeating: (Inada, “Two Variations on a Theme” 68)

Only when the readers reach the last word do they receive the instruction to go back to the top and read the word “Ricochet:” and the whole poem again. The colon of “Repeating:” thereby fulfills the same function as the repeat sign in music , as both indicate repetition. Throughout the rest of the poem, however, the colon and capitalization call for readers to perform a percussive attack of the first syllable “Re-” of every word and thereby create a regular rhythm by emphasizing the usually unstressed syllable. Inada also places odd accents within the general rhythmic displacement in line two: / × × / × × / × × / × × × × / × × Revolving: Reflecting: Returning: Reconstituting: Republic:

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Deviating from the rest of the words, the fourth word evinces an irregular rhythmic pattern and, in turn, highlights the prosody of “Reconstituting,” which corresponds to the quirky musical passage after the ascending four-note scales in “Blue Monk” (first four bars): 1

2

3

4

3

Steady 4, = 142 (

G

=

)

C

D

D

7

G

7

G

“Re-con-sti-tu-ting” (Monk 2004: 11)

Another equivalence exists between lines such as “Reciting: Realizing: Referring: Recapturing: Repercussion:” and the ascending four-note scales followed by a drop in pitch. The first four words correspond to the four-note scales while the prosody of the last word corresponds to the drop in pitch (see the first two bars): unlike the previous four present participles, which ask for a rise in pitch on the last syllable (“-ing”), the last word is not a present participle but a noun and asks for a change in tone as well as a fall in pitch (end-stopped). The visual disharmony of such lines corresponds to Monk’s use of dissonance and contrast with the visual and aural harmony of other lines such as “Regarding: Relating: Relaxing: Revering: Remembering:” (line 6). In general, the lines of the main body alternate between dissonance and harmony and end with three harmonic lines in a row: dissonance (line 1–5), harmony (line 6–7), dissonance (line 8), and harmony (line 9–11). Finally, the graphical arrangement of the words and lines – especially the five-word lines of the main body and the vertical position of the last five words – correspond to the title and the cover of 5 By Monk By 5 album (which does not have the track “Blue Monk” on it) (Figure 7). The two number 5’s map onto the five-word lines and the vertical “column” of five words, the word “Monk” sandwiched between the two 5’s maps onto the main body of the poem, and the blue of the “5 by […] by 5” maps onto the title “Blue Monk.” Hence the poem’s title and the visual shape echoes 5 By Monk By 5 and afterwards permits readers to observe Inada’s creative transformations: for instance, he moves the “title” from the left margin to the center to indicate the centrality of Monk and translates the first number 5 into three and not five vertically arranged words: he underlines the singularity of “Ricochet” by separating it from

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Figure 7: Album cover of 5 By Monk By 5 (1959)

the next two words “Radius” and “Radiating,” which he places close together to visualize their etymological proximity. He also translates the word “Monk,” which appears to be pressed together by the two big number 5’s, into a prepossessing middle section to give more space and weight to Monk’s genius. Additionally, he omits the two prepositions from his translation of the record title into a poem. Once again Inada demonstrates his acquaintance with the dynamic interaction between sight and sound. He experiments with the relationship between jazz and writing and does not see it as a drawback. On the contrary, he is enticed by the possibilities of written language and, improvising within the given boundaries, produces one masterpiece after another. His poem allows readers to identify his transformation of Monk’s style (e.g., his percussive attack), his tune “Blue Monk,” and the cover of the 5 By Monk By 5 album into a poem displaying a percussive rhythm. However, this rhythm – with its predominantly dactylic feet (see above: “Revolving: Reflecting: Returning: Reconstituting: Republic:”) – does not reproduce the 44 rhythm of “Blue Monk,” but points to Inada’s original effort of translating the quirky melody of “Blue Monk” into a syncopated dactylic rhythm. Whereas Early’s “Tribute to Art of the Chest” clearly documents his technique of repeating selected words and phrases to render Art Blakey’s emphatic and instinctive drumming style, Inada creates a rhythmic and thematic variation of Monk’s piece “Blue Monk” by transforming the melody of “Blue Monk” and not the 44 rhythm into a dactylic meter, which often displays rhythmic anomalies, and by changing the song’s title to the unexpected title of the album. Unlike other jazz poets, Inada does not eschew the use of metrical patterns, but develops an original percussive approach to Monk’s melody without using it to render the common time of the piece. Hence his poem also fails to match the metaphor tempo is rhythm.

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4.3.5 tempo is rhythm v: Swing Other poets focus on the swing rhythm without attempting to transform it into a “swinging” meter. During the heyday of the “Swing Era” in the 1930s and 40s, for instance, a few white writers composed mediocre poems to disparage the swing played by jazz musicians. Perceiving the music and African Americans as threats to their cherished values and worldviews, they portrayed swing as a menace to what they considered an educated and cultured society and, relying on racist stereotypes, even alluded to lynching. The last stanza of Ethel Jacobson’s poem “Air de Barrelhouse” and of Anderson M. Scruggs’s poem “Meditation on Swing” illustrate this type of poem about swing: (A) Ethel Jacobson, “Air de Barrelhouse” (1940): The spirit curdles, the mind succumbs That must read or rest to Crescendo in Drums. I will listen, tranced, for the first six hours, But then I can’t answer for my staying powers. Oh, the addicts can swing till Kingdom Come – If they’d just find a gibbet to do it from. (19)

(B) Anderson M. Scruggs, “Meditation on Swing” (1941): Could Bach and Brahms and Massenet Pause in spirit here today, And Cesar Franck and Meyerbeer See what is going on in here; Could Strauss look in and Humperdinck, They would all fly back to their graves, I think, Pull down the lid and softly sing: O Death, O Death, where is thy swing? But I, being more benign than they, – How can I grudge these boys their sway? Long may they swing, is my earnest hope, Accompanied by a tree and rope. (195)

Jacobson parodies the French titles of classical music (e.g., Claude Debussy’s “L’Enfant Prodigue: Cortège et Air de Danse”) with her title (“Air de Barrelhouse”) and describes the speaker’s shift from initial fascination by the music (“I will listen, tranced, for the first six hours”) to macabre criticism: the speaker claims

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that the loud swing music prevents people from thinking or resting and states that “the addicts can swing till Kingdom Come” if only they swing from a gibbet. Scruggs gives the latter statement an additional racist twist. He makes one reference to skin color when he describes two trombone players as “tall and brown” (195) and employs several racial stereotypes when he refers to musicians as “monkeys” (195), as members of “primitive tribes” (195), and as brainless (“Mop where the brain should be,” 195). These racially prejudiced expressions enable readers to easily understand the final lines: black and not white swing musicians should be hanged. Surrounding the poem with the offending racist statement, however, are nine comic sketches of white and not black jazz musicians. What is their purpose? Apparently Scruggs or an editor used the sketches to disguise the poem’s openly racist message. Readers should think at first that the poem represents a comic treatment on swing music and thus feel tempted to read the supposedly humorous piece. Since Scruggs’s poem was published only a few months after Jacobson’s (published in the New York Times Magazine) and promotes the racist message in a similar fashion, I assume that Scruggs read Jacobson’s poem and, sharing its views, created a racist variation of it for the less popular Hygeia to help spread his racist view of black jazz musicians. A decidedly different approach to the topic of lynching and swing music is presented in Mari Evans’s “princeling” (1970), in which she alternates between the italicized “swing sweet rhythm” and gruesome particulars of a lynched man: swing sweet rhythm charcoal toes swing sweet rhythm blooddripped knees swing sweet rhythm exorcised penis swing sweet rhythm My God – my son. (Evans, “princeling” 81)

Evans’s repetition of “swing sweet rhythm,” which exhibits no traditional meter, establishes a steady but unconventional rhythmic tempo. She contrasts the steady rhythm with three images of a lynched man as well as an exclamatory statement and highlights the contrast visually: she places the four repetitions of “swing sweet rhythm” below each other to create a column and disrupts the harmonious arrangement of the four italicized phrases with a crescendo-like arrangement of the non-italicized phrases. The difference between the italicized and non-italicized phrases also underscores the stark contrast between “sweet” in “swing sweet rhythm” and the horrific details of a mutilated body. The phrase

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“swing sweet rhythm” itself is ambiguous and allows for several readings: it refers to the swing rhythm and, in fact, documents Evans’s translating the rhythmic “feel” of swing in writing through her use of the dactyl-like foot and alliteration in “swing sweet rhythm;” it also represents a macabre allusion to the “swinging” body of a lynched person. She juxtaposes the ambiguous italicized phrase with the ambiguous non-italicized line “My God – my son”: on the one hand, it represents an exclamation made by a horrified parent of the lynched man and, on the other hand, it introduces the idea that the lynched person shared the fate of the crucified Jesus. Evans shocks the readers with her contrast between the “sweet” swing rhythm and gruesome images of a lynched man whom she calls endearingly “princeling” and endows with attributes of the “prince” Jesus.⁵¹ Other poets explore their associations triggered by “swing” without attempting to translate the rhythmic “feel” of swing music into written form. In the title of “The Village Women and the Swinging Guests (of Tarzan and Jane),” Angela Jackson raises the readers’ expectations about guests swinging and jazz but surprises them with the information that Tarzan and Jane are the “Swinging Guests”: “The yodeling man is swinging / through these trees again” (Jackson 1998: 30). And Frank O’Hara creates bizarre images along the lines of Hieronymus Bosch in the poem entitled “Hieronymus Bosch,” in which he mentions the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck and, at the end, states that “they dried him [Bosch] out and hung him up. My, he swung” (O’Hara, “Hieronymus Bosch” 121). O’Hara uses the expression “he swung” as a reference to the strange image of the dried Bosch swinging like one of his pictures and to the rhythm of such music.⁵² Etheridge Knight’s ninth poem of his “Haiku”-series, by contrast, documents the metaphor swing is a haiku poem and links features of the poem and the primarily rhythmic nature of swing, which J. Bradford Robinson describes as the result of “the conflict between a fixed pulse and the wide variety of accent and rubato that a jazz performer plays against it” (Robinson, “Swing”):

51 See also Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” about the lynching of black Americans found on the album Strange Fruit (Jazz World, 1999). It began as the poem “Strange Fruit” written by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym “Lewis Allan” and contrasts a pastoral scenery with the gruesome details of “strange fruit” (excerpt): “Southern trees bear strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” (Allan, “Strange Fruit” 222). For more details about the curious history of the song, see Margolick. 52 See also O’Hara’s poem “Rhapsody,” in which he brings the swinging of lianas together with the swinging of lynched bodies: “your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables / swinging from the myth of ascending / I would join / or declining the challenge of racial attractions / they zing on (into the lynch, dear friends)” (326).

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9 Making jazz swing in Seventeen syllables AIN’T No square poet’s job. (Knight, “9” 19)

The fixed pulse of swing maps onto the fixed form of an English haiku, which typically consists of three lines of seventeen syllables, and an accent played by a jazz musician against the fixed pulse maps onto the capitalized word “AIN’T.” Knight’s haiku, thus, illustrates his creative use of the traditional English haiku to translate swing’s mainly rhythmic nature. Unlike Knight, Frank Marshall Davis copies the lyrics from the live recording of the swing number “Swing, Brother, Swing,” which Billie Holiday sung to the music of Count Basie and his band at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem on June 30, 1937, and presents them as “Swing It Brother Swing” in his writings: “Swing it Brother Swing” (Count Basie with Billie Holiday) Deep rhythm captivates me, hot rhythm stimulates me Can’t help but swing it boy, Swing it brother swing. Don’t stop to diddle-daddle. Stop this foolish prattle. C’mon swing me king, Swing it brother swing. Rarin’ to go and there ain’t nobody gonna hold me down. Say, listen boy, hurry up and send me, let me got to town. Stop this diddle-daddle, and this foolish prattle. C’mon kill it boy. Swing it brother swing. Deep rhythm captivates me, hot rhythm stimulates me Can’t help but swing it boy, Swing it brother swing. Don’t stop to diddle-daddle. Stop this foolish prattle. C’mon swing me Count. Swing it brother swing. Rarin’ to go and there ain’t nobody gonna hold me down. Say, listen boy, hurry up and send me, let me got to town. Stop this diddle-daddle, and this foolish prattle. C’mon swing me Count, swing it brother swing. (Davis, “‘Swing It Brother Swing’” 194)

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Even without Count Basie’s orchestra playing the swing music of “Swing, Brother, Swing,” the lyrics – such as the lines “Can’t help but swing it boy,” “C’mon swing me Count,” and especially the rhythmic “Swing it brother swing” – highlights the song’s excitement and the propulsive rhythm. And if readers have listened to the recorded live performance of this swing number, they can even “hear” her sing the lyrics in her characteristic vocal style. None of the “swing”- poems in this section are realizations of the metaphor tempo is rhythm. Often poets simply refer to swing music, such as Jacobson and Scrubbs in their racist poems, while some poets produce a “swinging” moment. For instance, Evans’s phrase “swing sweet rhythm” not only calls for a swingrhythm, but also “swings” due to the word “swing” at the beginning of the phrase. The repetition of the phrase reinforces the “swing” moment and establishes a rhythmic pattern, which is not a translation of a swing rhythm (e.g., 44 common time) into a “swinging” metrical system. Likewise, Davis’s written record of Holiday’s lyrics generates a swing feeling through the reiteration of the key line “Swing it brother swing.” Yet the line and the whole poem are not based on a well-defined classical metrical structure, which would point to a basic rhythm of swing music.

4.3.6 tempo is rhythm vi: African Drum Poems Not swing but African drum rhythms occur in what I call “African drum poems” written by African-American poets during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Typically, the poems alternate between passages in free verse and, to produce an African drum rhythm, a block of repeated lines. A brief discussion of the “African drum”-poems written by Larry Neal, Etheridge Knight, and Useni Eugene Perkins will illustrate the different structures of such poems: (A) Larry Neal, “Kuntu” (1969): I. I am descended from Drum I am descended from Drum from that which first formed from that which first formed descended from Drum. […] The First that formed to link, to link Word and Act to link Word and Substance to link Word and desire.

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II. Word, Act, and Universe the First form out of the Earth Drum’s Earth and Black Earth Faces Drum’s Song and Black Earth Song Drum’s first Song in the Black of Olorun--the Universe. […] am descended from Drum The Drum’s words informed us, giving us flesh, and flesh shaped the Word; I say and flesh shaped the Word, linked the Song, linked the Earth to Sky. No wonder we float so lightly in Summer we float high, drifting on the rhythms of Drum, do air-dances O so lightly, the Drum informing our lives, our wars. III. Drum was there on the Armistad [sic]. Drum was there is [sic] Jamestown. Drum was there in Watts. Drum was there in Newark. Drum was there in Detroit behind the crackle of ghetto fires, […] Drum running down dome mean shit to all the Brothers and Sisters all the Brothers and Sisters listening to Drum, my Old Man. (Neal, “Kuntu” 18–19; emphasis mine)

In Section I of “Kuntu,” which is the name of a village in Ghana, there are repeated references to the “Drum.” This helps readers interpret the rhythm as drumbeats. It consists predominantly of pairs of identical lines, in which the first line of each pair establishes a beat pattern based on the prosody, the number of syllables, and capitalized words while the second line adds force to the pre-established rhythm: for instance, the prosody of the first line “I am descended from Drum,” which has seven beats, generates the rhythmic pattern “×–×–×××–×–×” while the iteration of the same line reinforces the rhythm and the psychological effect that it is a pulsating one produced by a beating drum. The progression from one pair of lines to another goes hand-in-hand with a slight change of rhythm and, at times, one or more single lines disrupt the progression of the rhythmic couplets (underlined):

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I am descended from Drum I am descended from Drum from that which first formed from that which first formed descended from Drum. The First that formed The First that formed am from the first that formed the pulse that formed the pulse that formed (18)

Following two pairs of lines, the fifth line echoes the first pair and reintroduces the main part of the initial pattern of beats: “descended from Drum.” The next couplet launches a shorter four-beat rhythmic pattern, and the eighth line “am from the first that formed” presents a variation of the previous rhythm: the words “am” and “from” refer back to the lines above and add two beats to the rhythmic unit “the first that formed.” In short, the lines are interlinked and fulfill the theme mentioned further along: “The First that formed to link, to link Word and Act.” Through the snake-like interconnection of the lines, the readers gradually learn that the speaker considers “Drum” to be a god and the origin of everything such as the “Universe.” This also explains why Neal capitalizes “Drum” and “First” in the drum section. The second section (see above) consists of single free-verse lines and improvises on the previous theme without repetitive drum rhythms. The first line “Word, Act, and Universe,” for instance, picks up some of the key words from the first section while the second line introduces the new key word “Earth.” Lines three and four (underlined) develop the new strand of the theme “Earth” and may seem to be a couplet, but the line “Drum’s Earth and Black Earth Faces” (third line of Section II) has one more syllable than the following line “Drum’s Song and Black Earth Song” and a slightly varied diction. Unlike the couplets in the first section, this pair of lines is not identical and therefore fails to produce the hypnotic effect of beating drums. Throughout the improvisational second section linguistic variations of words and phrases taken from the first section abound: for instance, “the First form out of the Earth” (boldface) is a variation of “the First that formed” and the line “am descended of Drum” (boldface) is a variation of “descended of Drum” (first section). Section III returns to a new kind of drum rhythm. The first five lines repeat the dactylic phrase “Drum was there” but end with a name of a ship, a settlement, and cities to stress the idea that “Drum” – placed at the beginning of each – was there from the start: for instance, “Drum” was there when African slaves mutinied

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on the Amistad, “Drum” was there when white settlers founded Jamestown, and “Drum” was there when the race riots in Newark, New Jersey, took place in 1967. Afterwards the text moves to free verse in the next few lines and then to a rhythmic repetition of “our time” before it concludes with the near identical iteration of the verse “all the Brothers and Sisters” and the line “listening to Drum, my Old Man.” Overall, then, the poem shifts from a drum section to one of improvisation and ends with one composed of a drum rhythm partially based on a dactyl foot (“Drum was there”), free verse, and a triple repetition of “our time.”⁵³ Knight divides “Ilu, the Talking Drum” (1973) into two parts. In the first part, an unnamed speaker repeatedly states that “deadness” and “darkness” (underlined) threatened him and fifteen Nigerian slaves while they were sitting or lying on the lawn in front of the white slave owner’s “big white house” at dusk: The deadness was threatening us – 15 Nigerians and 1 Mississippi nigger. It hung heavily, like stones around our necks, pulling us down to the ground, black arms and legs outflung on the wide green lawn of the big white house near the wide brown beach by the wide blue sea. The deadness was threatening us, the day was dying with the sun, the stillness – unlike the sweet silence after love/making or the pulsating quietness of a summer night – the stillness was skinny and brittle and wrinkled by the precise people sitting on the wide white porch of the big white house. … The darkness was threatening us, menacing … we twisted, turned, shifted positions, picked our noses, stared at our bared toes, hissed air thru our teeth. … (Knight, “Ilu, the Talking Drum” 34; emphasis mine)

The repetition of “The deadness was threatening us” (underlined) and the varied version “The darkness was threatening us” (boldface) give weight to the statement and underscores the speaker’s assertion that “It [the “deadness”] hung heavily, like stones around our necks.” But also the almost “dead” silence of the white people sitting on the porch of the house menaces them: “the stillness was skinny and brittle and wrinkled / by the precise people sitting on the wide white porch / of

53 For a discussion of the religious and philosophical aspects in Larry Neal’s poem “Kuntu,” see Stephen E. Henderson’s article “Take Two-Larry Neal and the Blues God: Aspects of the Poetry,” 227–230.

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the big white house.” Only when Tunji stands up and starts beating Ilu, the talking drum, (“iya ilu” in Yoruba means “mother drum”) does the life-giving force return: Then Tunji, green robes flowing as he rose, strapped on Ilu, the talking drum, and began: kah doom/kah doom-doom/kah doom/kah doom-doom-doom kah doom/kah doom-doom/kah doom/kah doom-doom-doom kah doom/kah doom-doom/kah doom/kah doom-doom-doom kah doom/kah doom-doom/kah doom/kah doom-doom-doom the heart, the heart beats, the heart, the heart beats slow the heart beats slowly, the heart beats the blood flows slowly, the blood flows the blood, the blood flows, the blood, the blood flows slow kah doom/kah doom-doom/kah doom/kah doom-doom-doom and the day opened to the sound kah doom/kah doom-doom/kah doom/kah doom-doom-doom and our feet moved to the sound of life kah doom/kah doom-doom/kah doom/kah doom-doom-doom and we rode the rhythms as one from Nigeria to Mississippi and back kah doom/kah doom-doom/kah doom/kah doom-doom-doom (Knight, “Ilu, the Talking Drum” 34–35)

The speaker provides four identical onomatopoetic renderings of the sound of the “ilu” drum (A) and then translates the drum’s sound and rhythm into language (B) to emphasize that life – the heartbeat – gradually returns: × / × / / × / × / / / (A) kah doom/kah doom-doom/kah doom/kah doom-doom-doom (B) the heart, the heart beats, the heart, the heart beats slow

He then changes the rhythm around in “the heart beats slowly, the heart beats” (that is, “kah doom-doom-doom/kah doom-doom”), repeats the phrase but exchanges “heart” for “blood” in the next line. He then presents the initial rhythm with the phrase: (C) the blood, the blood flows, the blood, the blood flows slow

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What follows is an alternation between the onomatopoetic translation of the drum rhythm and lines that describe how it brought the slaves back to life, freeing them from the menacing “deadness”: night turns to day and quietness becomes sound (“and the day opened to sound”), the idle feet begin to move (“and our feet moved to the sound of life”), and their imagination is rekindled (“and we rode the rhythms as one / from Nigeria to Mississippi / and back”). The rhythmic section ends with the rhythm produced by Tanji on “Ilu, the Talking Drum.” Useni Eugene Perkins’s “The Genesis of Jazz” offers another variation on the relationship between free verse and rhythmic units. Each of his five stanzas consists of four unmetered and rhymeless verses and the same rhythmic couplet. Usually, the first four verses form a question (stanzas one, two, four, and five) to which the beating drums respond and so the stanzaic structure follows a calland-response pattern: Abatutsi were your royal drums soaked in African soil And sent to fester on the sidewalks of Charleston, To hark the stentor of your tribunal ancestry Where jazz nutured in your amorous bosom? To the beat of congo drums To the beat of congo drums Abatutsi did they castrate your copper hue flesh From your verdant pastures of nobility, And bring your crescendo to a hostile land Of pliant cotton and blood smeared rivers? To the beat of congo drums To the beat of congo drums I heard an ebony folk singer echo your chants Along the umbrageous streets of New Orleans, And saw you rebel against serfdom’s tyranny And search for concord in Mississippi waters. To the beat of congo drums To the beat of congo drums Abatusi [sic] did you sow the pastoral seeds Which King Oliver nourished in Kansas City, And replanted in the clamorous belly of Harlem Where Yardbird sounded his eccentric horn. To the beat of congo drums To the beat of congo drums

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Abatutsi are you the Olympian of jazz heaven Did your rhythms inspire the sensous Lady Day To sing the blues like a melancholy child And make jazz dance in Louie Satchmo’s trumpet? To the beat of congo drums To the beat of congo drums (Perkins, “The Genesis of Jazz” 5)

In four of the five stanzas, the speaker addresses the Abatutsi people from Africa and asks them a question, in which he or she implicitly refers to the African roots of jazz. The subsequent rhythmic unit serves as a “response” to the question and drives home the message that “The Genesis of Jazz” lies in Africa. All three “African drum”-poems reflect the poets’ fascination for Africa during the Black Arts Movement and their endeavor of translating African drum rhythms into the medium of writing. In Neal’s “Kuntu,” the speaker perceives himself as a descendant of the African god “Drum”; Knight describes how the beating of “Ilu, the Talking Drum” puts an end to the threat of “deadness” by bringing the slaves back to life; and Perkins writes a poem about the African roots of jazz in “The Genesis of Jazz.” Each writer varied the relationship between free verse sections and rhythmic ones: Neal places the main rhythmic section at the beginning of “Kuntu,” Knight at the end of his poem, and Perkins at the end of every stanza. All three poets introduce captivating drum rhythms that do not follow traditional meter. The metaphor tempo is rhythm raised the expectation of discovering jazz poems that connect musical time and poetic meter. Jazz poets could have easily translated the 24 and 44 time into iambic and trochaic meter respectively. However, the exploration of the genre of jazz poetry showed that none of the poems matched the findings predicted on the basis of the conceptual metaphor. Evidently jazz poets associate jazz with a lack of restrictions and free improvisation and consequently write their poems in free verse and not in strictly metered lines. Jazz poetry allows them to break with the “authority” of traditional literary forms and create idiosyncratic rhythms without having to adhere to pre-established rules. They generally avoid established forms such as the sonnet and, following in Walt Whitman’s footsteps, privilege free verse. But even if a poet chooses to write a jazz poem in a traditional form, he or she would undermine the normative form, such as Feinstein’s poem about Stan Getz. At first glance, the fourteen-line poem resembles an English sonnet, but Feinstein systematically destabilizes the rigid rules of the English sonnet such as the iambic pentameter of the lines, the rhyme scheme of “pure” rhymes, and the graphical arrangement of the fourteen lines as a “block” aligned to the left side.

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Having noted the jazz poets’ preference for free over metered verse, I then demonstrated several methods of conveying an erratic, improvisational rhythm to readers. Often poets such as Plumpp, Kaufman, and Shange use typographical markers such as slashes, colons, periods, spatial gaps, and non-existent time signatures to visualize a syncopated rhythm in their jazz texts. Other poets such as Percy Johnston and Michael Weaver write in free verse and mention the time signature if they want to note that a jazz musician improvises over a specific regular tempo. Their practice points to one limitation of this poetry: jazz poets cannot simultaneously translate the “imaginary” pulse into a regular meter and the practice of improvisation into written language. Yet, poets can indicate a basic jazz rhythm such as common time ( 44 ) to their audience without actually translating the regular rhythmic patterns into fixed metered lines. The second part of Inada’s “Two Variations on a Theme By Thelonious Monk as Inspired By Mal Waldron” may seem to be an exception to the rule, as it manifests a more or less regular dactylic structure, yet it represents a percussive approach to the melody of Monk’s “Blue Monk” and not a metaphorical rendering of the 44 rhythm into a metrical system. Several others poems above are rhythmic, but in each case the poems do not follow a strict metrical system. The African drum poems, for instance, exhibit entrancing African drum rhythms, which, however, do not match the basic rhythmic structures found in Western cultures. All of the poems above have failed to fulfill my expectations of encountering poems with a regular rhythmic tempo as the result of translating the source domain tempo in jazz music into the target domain rhythm. Many poets invented creative ways to produce a great variety of non-traditional and free rhythms.

4.4 hot and cool Jazz

Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Hot Rhythm (1961); Chicago History Museum, Chicago

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Archibald Motley’s Hot Rhythm depicts a crowd scene in a nightclub during the Harlem Renaissance and manifests his visualization of hot jazz as an agitated performance by the jazz band and scantily dressed chorus girls dancing. But how do jazz poets translate hot and, for that matter, cool jazz into the medium of writing? Cognitive linguists such as Lakoff and Johnson regard “heat” and “cold” as common source domains used in everyday metaphorical thought to conceptualize abstract target domains. Both source domains, as Kövecses points out in Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, have an experiential basis, for the human body senses warm and cold temperatures (Kövecses 2002: 18), and, for instance, help people to express their emotions and desires. Kövecses provides a list of several metaphorical linguistic expressions that document the conceptualization of people’s attitudes towards other people in terms of “heat” and “cold”: in the heat of passion a cold reception an icy stare a warm welcome (19)

Accordingly, I expect that poets will rely on the well-entrenched domains heat and cold when they try to render what is commonly called “hot” and “cool” jazz. The authoritative Grove Music Online Dictionary provides the following definitions for hot and cool jazz (excerpts): – Definition of “hot”: In jazz parlance, the term is used to suggest the qualities of excitement, passion, and intensity; it has been applied to tune titles, bands, individual musicians, and aspects of performance. It was used in the USA in the 1920s in order to distinguish jazz from other genres, and later to differentiate “real” jazz from the “sweet” music played by the more commercial dance bands. (Thacker, “Hot”)

–

Definition of “cool”: A term applied to diverse styles of modern jazz variously perceived as subdued, understated, or emotionally cool. (Gridley, “Cool jazz”)

Presumably the bodily experience of exciting and energetic music (e.g., New Orleans jazz) led people to understand such styles in terms of “heat” since the latter invite people to move their body, either to dance or simply to tap their feet to a driving rhythm, causing thereby an increase in the heart rate and body temperature. People literally felt “hot.” The calm bodily experience of the introspective, re-

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strained styles of modern jazz, however, motivated people to perceive such styles as “cool” (e.g., Miles Davis’s innovative “cool” jazz style on the aptly entitled Birth of the Cool). Poets conceptualize hot jazz in terms of domains related to “heat,” such as fire, cooking, and sex, and cool jazz in terms of domains related to “cold,” such as snow and winter scenes (cold weather). Importantly, though, many jazz poets creatively riff on such well-entrenched or clichéd metaphors. They often use the expressions “hot” and “cool” to describe jazz performances in their poems and sometimes even create “hot” and “cool” poems.

4.4.1 hot jazz: The Adjective “Hot” Many poets simply employ “hot” to convey the passionate and energetic nature of hot jazz. A few excerpts will illustrate the straightforward use of “hot” in jazz poetry: (A) Frank Marshall Davis, “Dancing Gal”: Jazz – hot jazz Gazelle graceful Lovely as a lover’s dream (64)

(B) Michael S. Harper, “‘Engagements’”: Rage at the hottest tempos, or play slow. (72)

(C) Hayden Carruth, “Freedom and Discipline”: Freedom and discipline concur only in ecstasy, all else is shoveling out the muck. Give me my old hot horn. (62)

All three poets simply use “hot” to refer to hot jazz without conceptualizing it in more specific terms derived from domains related to heat such as fire, cooking, and sex. Davis describes a specific performance and perceives a female dancer as a

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beautiful (“lovely”) and graceful gazelle; the speaker of Harper’s “Engagements” encourages a jazz band to “Rage at the hottest tempos” or “play slow” while the speaker of Carruth’s poem talks about the interdependence of freedom and discipline in jazz and in life and asks for his “old hot horn” at the end of “Freedom and Discipline,” leaving it up to the reader to imagine how the speaker will play a hot jazz improvisation.

4.4.2 hot jazz is fire and hot jazz is sex Apart from merely using the adjective “hot” to describe hot jazz, poets often conceptualize hot jazz in terms of fire and sex. The everyday experience of heat due to fire and sexual activities constitutes one of the basic physical experiences in human societies: people use fire for cooking, comfort, light, protection, and warfare, and experience a rise in body temperature during sexual intercourse. Unsurprisingly, poets establish systematic correlations between the source domain hot jazz and the target domains fire and sex in their translations of hot jazz. In the following discussion, I will show several creative realizations of the metaphors hot jazz is fire and hot jazz is sex as well as other ways of bringing hot jazz together with fire and sex. A few examples illustrate the ubiquity of translating hot jazz into images of fire (excerpts): (A) Fred Chappell, “The Highest Wind That Ever Blew: Homage to Louis”: Had a tune would melt the polar cap to whiskey. […] It’s the man in the cyclone of flame Who keeps on saying Yes with a note that would light Up the Ice Ages. (34–35)

(B) Sterling Plumpp, Ornate With Smoke (“XV. Fifteen”): But Prez blow sweet Fire into embers (53)

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(C) Langston Hughes, “Trumpet Player”: The music From the trumpet at his lips Is honey Mixed with liquid fire (338)

All three examples display metaphorical linguistic expressions which manifest the metaphor hot jazz is fire. Chappell’s homage to Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five recordings in “The Highest Wind That Ever Blew: Homage to Louis” (“Hot Five, hot damn,” 33) includes a metaphorical correlation between Armstrong’s style and a “cyclone of flame” and a note that “would light / Up the Ice Ages.” A combination of the metaphors jazz is taste and hot jazz is fire (and, in the last example, jazz is a liquid) characterize the two other excerpts: Plumpp’s speaker asks Lester Young (“Prez”) to play sweet hot jazz (“blow sweet / Fire into the embers”) while Hughes portrays a trumpet player’s music as a mixture of sweetness and fluid heat. Peter Kostakis’s prose text “Fire Parcel” manifests the metaphor hot jazz is fire as well. Reminiscent of concrete poetry, the narrative’s typographical arrangement about Eric Dolphy’s “fire parcel” visualizes the prototypical idea of a parcel and documents not only a systematic correlation between eric dolphy’s hot jazz and fire, but also between Dolphy’s avant-garde solos with their unpredictable melodic turns and wide-spaced intervals and the unpredictable turns in the story (eric dolphy’s unpredictable turns in his music are unpredictable turns in the story):⁵⁴ Postal authorities in New York City were worried about the shipping of Eric Dolphy’s old alto to his mother, Mrs. Sadie Dolphy. For some time the inside of the horn had been burned out, but not far back enough to preclude the mischief of embers that sent packing crates up in smoke, stuffings and all, three times in a row! If they had stamped Eric Dolphy’s forehead “CANCELLED,” that would have been hitting the nail on the head, in 1964 anyway. But no one thought of that. Eric’s music must have been the soundtrack for all of those fires, turning New York for a while into Nero’s Rome. And that’s how this story ends: with the drunken cluster of notes on “Epistrophe” and a fire ball. If you expected scenes of a firebird arrested and booked by the cops for arson, you were dreaming. (Kostakis, “Fire Parcel” 345)

54 The critic Barry Kernfeld describes Dolphy’s style as follows: “An intense, passionate improviser, Dolphy constantly surprised his listeners with his rapid flow of ideas and his unexpected phrasing and intervals” (Kernfeld, “Eric Dolphy”).

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The first sentence introduces an odd story about worried postal authorities who want to send Dolphy’s alto saxophone to his mother. Picking up the theme of the previous sentence, the next one presents a metaphorical linguistic expression that shows the metaphor eric dolphy’s hot jazz is fire. Kostakis visualizes Dolphy’s hot sound via the image of a burned-out horn: Dolphy has blown so much fire through his horn that it partially burned out; what remains are embers, which, since embers may consist of wood, could be a reference to the reeds used in the mouthpiece of Dolphy’s woodwind instrument. Long after Dolphy’s fire has ended, these embers continue to glow and incinerate three crates. A bizarre sentence interrupts the metaphor of the previous sentence and surprises the readers with the notion that the word “CANCELLED” stamped on Dolphy’s forehead would “have been hitting the nail on the head, in 1964 anyway,” the year of his death and thus the end of his performance (“CANCELLED”). Kostakis rekindles the conceptual metaphor when he writes that Dolphy’s music turned New York “for a while into Nero’s Rome” and startles his readers once more when he abruptly mentions the end of “this” story, which concludes with the last notes of Dolphy’s “Epistrophe” and a “fire ball.” Both are references to Dolphy’s surprising death on June 29, 1964, at age 36. His version of Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophe” was recorded shortly before he died in a hospital in Berlin, and the track appeared on the album Last Date (recorded on June 2, 1964); the unconventionally written expression “fire ball” alludes to the title of “Fire Parcel” and implies that Dolphy played an unusually hot jazz and died in an exceptionally bright fire or, to use another metaphorical expression, went down in flames. Dolphy’s story (“this story”) may have ended, but Kostakis, like Dolphy, plays with readers’ expectations in the narrative’s final statement: “If you expected scenes of a firebird arrested and booked by the cops for arson, you were dreaming.” The speaker raises new expectations and, returning to the conceptual metaphor eric dolphy’s hot jazz is fire, claims that Dolphy’s death in a “fire ball” prevented him from being arrested for arson. It also thwarts the reader’s expectation of a justified text, since the typographical placement of the sole signifier “dreaming” in a new line breaks with the typical pattern. Lynda Hull combines the metaphors hot jazz is fire and hot jazz is sex in “Hollywood Jazz.” It begins with a denial that the kind of jazz accompanying film noir movies, which typically feature “cool jazz” by musicians such as Duke Ellington and Miles Davis (e.g., Davis played the background music to Ascenseur pour l’échafaud/Elevator to the Gallows directed by Louis Malle in 1958), is hot: Who says it’s cool says wrong. For it rises from the city’s sweltering geometry of rooms,

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fire escapes, and flares from the heels of corner boys on Occidental posing with small-time criminal intent – all pneumatic grace. This is the music that plays at the moment in every late-night noir flick (Hull, “Hollywood Jazz” 47; emphasis mine)

The metaphorical expressions used above (boldface) are linked to heat and fire: jazz “rises” from the “sweltering […] rooms” and “fire escapes” and “flares from the heels.” The speaker reinforces the notion of hot jazz in the subsequent “scene,” in which the indirectly implied adjective “hot” (“nothing remotely / cool”) functions as an attribute to jazz and sex: a platinum-blonde femme fatale is alone in a hotel room with a man who is invisible, one more bedroom arsonist seeing nothing remotely cool: a woman in a cage of half-light, Venetian blinds. This is where jazz blooms, in the hook and snag of her zipper opening to an enfilade of trumpets. Her dress falls in a dizzy indigo riff. I know her vices are minor: sex, (47)

Referred to as “one more bedroom arsonist,” the man sees a sexually desirable woman whom the reader imagines to be in a cage (“a woman in a cage / of halflight, Venetian blinds”) of half-light. According to the speaker, hot jazz blossoms in the femme fatale’s act of unzipping her dress: the latter is accompanied by “an enfilade of trumpets” and the dress falls in “a dizzy indigo riff” (the falling dress is a dizzy indigo riff). À la hard-boiled detectives Sam Spade and Philip Marlow, the speaker states that “I know her vices are minor: sex […]” and, omitting the sex scene, jumps ahead to the “candescent” woman standing “by the window in a slip” (48). Such erotically charged film noir scenes depicted in Hull’s “Hollywood Jazz” document the conceptual combination of the metaphors hot jazz is fire and hot jazz is sex.

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4.4.3 hot jazz is cooking Several poets also translate the source domain hot jazz into the target domain cooking. Lawson Fusao Inada’s “Louis Armstrong” documents his conceptualization of the hot jazz played by Louis Armstrong, who recorded some of his early hits such as “Heebie Jeebies,” “Hotter Than That,” and “Potato Head Blues” with the bands known as “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven” during the period from 1925 to 1929, in terms of cooking. Inada creates and then develops the metaphor louis armstrong’s hot jazz is cooking in a kitchen, but he does not translate hot jazz into writing. I will therefore use the Mapping Metaphor, rather than a combination of the Mapping and Translation Metaphors, to describe the poem’s conceptual processes. In the first stanza, the speaker establishes the metaphor louis armstrong’s place is one great kitchen and then elaborates it: Pop’s place is one great kitchen: the presence of food is dominant the cooking constant, and the source of sauces goes back who knows how many years – handed down by the mouthful to continue the household: the pride and pleasure resourcefulness, regeneration … (Inada, “Louis Armstrong” 73)

The speaker conceptualizes “Pop’s place,” an indistinct reference to a place where Louis “Pops” Armstrong performs his jazz pieces (probably a stage), in terms of “one great kitchen” and creates a set of unspecific cross-domain mappings between louis armstrong’s hot jazz and cooking in the kitchen: the presence of instruments and/or songs, the necessary “ingredients” for his jazz performances (“the cooking constant”), probably maps onto the presence of food in the kitchen (“the presence of food is dominant”), but an exact identification of the source entity is not possible. The phrase “source of the sauce” could point to the African American tradition which also “goes back / who knows how many years – ”while the phrase “handed down by the mouthful” – the word “mouthful” denotes a small quantity of food taken into the mouth (e.g., a mouthful of food) – possibly refers to the black oral tradition, in which African Americans used oral storytelling and singing as vehicles for handing down their culture and values from one generation to the next (“to continue the household”), ensuring the continuation of the black oral tradition, the “pride and pleasure” of African Americans, their “resourcefulness,” and the “regeneration” of the black race. Additionally,

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“handed down by the mouthful” alludes to “Dippermouth,” another nickname of Armstrong, who hands the audience a “mouthful” of his “sauce” (music) and to Armstrong’s use of his mouth to blow his trumpet. Finally, the ellipsis […] signals the omission of other elements of the black culture and simultaneously the continuation of “the household.” The speaker’s use of “thus” at the beginning of the following stanza indicates a valid deductive reasoning based on premises and allows for the view of the line “Pop’s place is one great kitchen” as a premise: Thus, Pops is always talking about licks, and chops, about putting the pot on, about his “flavorite” songs, tastiest tunes, about strutting with some barbecue – always looking to play that breakfast dance and then, on Monday, here comes red beans and rice! (“Appetite is a right, so don’t be wrong!”) (Inada, “Louis Armstrong” 73)

However, the speaker’s logic is fallacious because Armstrong’s expressions related to eating, food, and cooking – “licks,” “chops,” “putting on the pot,” and so on – are not linguistic realizations of the metaphor louis armstrong’s hot jazz is cooking in the kitchen established in the first line. Instead, they manifest Armstrong’s own metaphorical process of understanding his music in terms of cooking. The potpourri of words and expressions begins with “licks,” which has the following meaning in jazz parlance: In jazz argot a short motif or formula inserted into an improvisation when the context permits or when invention lapses. Many jazz musicians have at their disposal a repertory of licks, some of their own invention, some borrowed from other players, and an improvisation may be little more than the stringing together of a number of such fragments. In some styles (e.g., slow blues) and for some ubiquitous chord progressions (e.g., I–II–V–I in major or minor keys) a common stock of licks is in circulation. (Witmer, “Lick”)

Yet, the context of cooking also prompts the meaning of “licking” as in “he licks his lips,” though the grammatical case of “licks” is a noun and not a verb (“talking about licks”). Moreover, the proximity of “licks” and “chops” (“about licks, and chops”) triggers the association of the idiomatic phrase “to lick one’s chops” which expresses the act of looking forward eagerly to eating something.

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The ambiguous “chops” rhymes with “Pops” of the previous verse and, within the context of food and cooking, could refer to “pork chops.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “chops” can also designate “[t]he power of a trumpeter’s embouchure” (“Chop,” OED). As Giddins mentions in Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong (2001), Armstrong probably coined “chops,” or at least made it popular: Among the words that Louis is believed to have coined or popularized in his early years are several that became part of the English language: chops, jive, scat, gutbucket, mellow, and solid […]. (Giddins 2001: 47; his italics)

Indeed, Armstrong used “chops” to refer to his embouchure in an interview conducted in 1966: “I’d go wild in those solos – up there in the high register all the time, and if I had some more chops left, just use ’em some more” (Armstrong 1971: 40). Armstrong also employed the word “chop” in the metaphorical song title “Cornet Chop Suey” (recorded 1926 with the Hot Five band), in which the literal meaning of “Chop Suey” (“mixed pieces”) refers to the American-Chinese dish of “mixed pieces” (typically meats and vegetables) while the exact metaphorical correspondences between cornet and chop suey remain unclear: perhaps the hot meal of mixed meats and vegetables corresponds to the red hot jazz played by Armstrong on his cornet. The next line “about putting the pot on” allows for various interpretations as well: it denotes either the activity of putting a pot on a stove or heating up a pot; the word “pot,” in addition, is slang for marihuana which Armstrong used to smoke on a regular basis. The expression “flavorite” in the following line blends “favorite” and “flavor” and “tastiest tunes” displays the alliteration of the consonant /t / and the synesthetic conceptualization of songs as tasty food. The utterance “about strutting with some barbecue –” refers to the song “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” (recorded in 1927 by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five band) and can be interpreted as Armstrong talking about strutting on a stage where he plays some “hot” jazz. The verse’s last word (“barbecue”) and the next verse’s last expression (“breakfast dance”) possibly allude to a recording of Count Basie called Breakfast Dance and Barbecue (Roulette, 1959) while “breakfast dance” alone refers to a dance that starts in the evening and lasts until breakfast the next day. The phrase “on Monday” points to the Armstrong song “A Monday Date” (recorded in 1928 with his band Hot Five), and the saying in parenthesis – “(“Appetite is a right, / so don’t be wrong.”)” – is along the lines of other famous sayings by Armstrong such as “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” and “I got a simple rule about everybody. If you don’t treat me right / shame on you!” Yet although Inada put the saying in direct speech, I could

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not find any evidence that Armstrong ever said those words. Thus, I suspect that Inada invented the saying and placed it in Armstrong’s mouth in order to extend the metaphor to Armstrong’s sayings. Inada elaborates the metaphor louis Armstrong’s new orleans jazz is cooking in a kitchen in the third and fourth stanza of “Louis Armstrong.” Referring back to the opening line “Pop’s place is one great kitchen,” the first line of the third stanza begins with “In Pop’s place” and a vague metaphorical expression: In Pop’s place, the savor is always strong. This is how the chicory coffee steeps and brews, the seasonings season, to belong. (“If you ain’t sweaty, the sauce ain’t ready!”) (Inada, “Louis Armstrong” 73)

The repetition of “Pop’s place” activates the metaphor louis armstrong’s place is a kitchen and makes readers aware of the figurative meaning of “the savor is always strong.” The term “savor” triggers a search for an equivalent in jazz, a search probably aided by the repetitive use of “s” (boldface signals an alliteration) in “the savor is always strong” (phoneme pattern: /s z z s/). The emphasis of the consonant sound “s” as well as the sonic correspondence between the phoneme /s/ of “savor” and the phoneme / s / of “sound” points to the possibility that “savor” refers metaphorically to Armstrong’s hot sound. The repetition of “s” stresses that Armstrong’s sound (“savor”) is “strong” or, in other words, powerful: the reiteration of the consonant “s” in “This is” (/ s / and / z /), “steeps and brews,” and “seasonings season” (which constitutes the repetition of the word “season” as well). Inada creates other “strong” sounds by repeating the phoneme / k / (boldface) in “chicory coffee,” the phonology of “-ong” in the end rhyme “strong” and “belong,” and the phoneme recurrences in “sweaty” and “ready” (boldface and underlined). He also employs “chicory coffee,” a popular drink in New Orleans, to subtly allude to Armstrong’s origin and his hot New Orleans jazz style. But, overall, the linguistic expressions “savor,” “steeps and brews,” “seasoning,” and the causal relation between a jazz musician’s sweat from playing hot jazz and the preparation of a sauce in the (probably sham) saying “If you ain’t sweaty, / the sauce ain’t ready!” attributed to Armstrong documents the conceptualization of Louis Armstrong and his style of playing New Orleans jazz as a cook brewing a potpourri in a kitchen. In the fourth stanza, Inada continues to dwell on the metaphor louis armstrong’s hot jazz is cooking in the kitchen: Armstrong is “stewing in the

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blues” and “the exuberance is boiling over, / exulting in the ingredients of life.” He then presents an anomalous “family”-metaphor, which defies any easy naming procedure, and the metaphor orchestra is a converted kitchen in the next stanza: Everybody calls him Pops, except his mother. She calls him Louis; he calls her Mother. And between the two of them, the rest of us are a celebrated musical family. For what is an orchestra if not a converted kitchen? (Inada, “Louis Armstrong” 74)

Inada links Armstrong’s nickname “Pops” and the father of a family and a correspondence between Armstrong’s “Mother” and the mother of a family and, indicated by the capitalization of the two words “Pops” and “Mother,” perceives them as two opposite poles. Between the two poles, he paradoxically situates a “musical family”: “the rest of us / are a celebrated musical family.” The meaning of the metaphor remains hazy: first, the phrase “the rest of us” has no clear referent (does the pronoun “us” refer to all the people in the world who are neither Armstrong nor his mother or does it refer to the orchestra mentioned below?); second, the metaphor the rest of us is a celebrated musical family does not cohere with the previously established metaphorical correlation between “Pops” and “Mother” and the parents of a family, because a “musical family” also entails a father and a mother. The capitalized “Pops” and “Mother,” however, suggest that “the rest of us” are children. Inada, in short, creates two conflicting metaphors before he abruptly shifts to another metaphor the orchestra is a converted kitchen that does not follow from the preceding context. He then reverses the directionality of the metaphor the orchestra is a converted kitchen and connects kitchen utensils and rhythm section (kitchen utensils are the rhythm section) and kitchen utensils and reed section (kitchen utensils are the reed section): With pots and pans and lids we have our timpani, percussion. With brooms we whisk, we baste the rhythm; with spoons, we tippy-tap tinkle; ladles dip deep into the bass of kettles, secure with syncopation. Bottlecaps and cans – tambourines! Every tub, every tine, keeping time!

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And, oh, all manner of things to blow! Jugs, bottles, bones, reeds right out of the salad! Held just so to the mouth, all utensils are instruments – for calling, for answering … (Inada, “Louis Armstrong” 74)

The first mapping of timpani onto pots, pans, and lids displays an inconsistent pattern: while the prototypical images of flat circular pans and flat circular lids correspond with the image structure of flat circular timpani, the prototypical image of a deeper circular pot does not fit properly the image structure of timpani. The actions described by “we whisk, we baste the rhythm” performed with prototypical brooms, which usually consist of stiff fibres or bristles attached to long broomsticks, point to the correlation between brooms and drum brushes. Similarly, the onomatopoetic “tippy-tap tinkle” generated with spoons connects them and drum sticks with which a drummer can also produce the sound described as “tippy-tap tinkle.” Inada then relies on the container image schema when he correlates the image of ladles dipping into multiple kettles with the deep sound of a bass in the metaphorical linguistic expression: “ladles dip deep into the bass / of kettles.” The next phrase reinforces the correlation between the image of ladles dipping into multiple kettles and a bass player of a jazz rhythm section: like a bass player who not only keeps a steady pulse but who is also “secure with syncopation,” the members of the musical family who use ladles to “dip deep into the bass / of kettles” are also “secure with syncopation.” In the following two verses, Inada links tambourines with “bottlecaps” and “cans” and percussive instruments with “tub” and “tine,” whereby the alliteration of “t” coincides with stressed syllables and underlines the percussion’s role in keeping time. Other kitchen utensils are part of the reed section: musicians can blow on jugs and bottles, but how they can blow on bones is left entirely to the imagination of the readers. This metaphorical correspondence between bones and reed instruments puzzles the readers and remains unclear, for people are more likely to use them as drum sticks than as reed instruments. Probably Inada chose “bones” from the context of food in the kitchen (e.g., chicken bones) to create the euphonic alliteration “bottles, bones” and to surprise the readers with a “kitchen utensil” that does not allow a neat conceptual process. The same is true for the cryptic phrase “reeds right out of the salad!” Do the readers have to imagine that reeds grow right out of the salad or that musicians make reeds out of the salad and put them between their two thumbs and blow? To be sure, the context tips the scale in favor of the latter possibility, but Inada’s deliberate omission of a verb to produce

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the melodic alliteration “reeds right” permits both readings and the connotation of “reeds” with “weeds.” At the end of the stanza, the speaker claims metaphorically that “all utensils are instruments –” (Inada, “Louis” 74) if held “just so to the mouth” and that jazz musicians can use them to play call-and-response patterns (“for calling, for answering”). Inada reverses the conceptual directionality of the previous conceptual metaphors when he maps the images of a spatula and a funnel perceives onto image of a trumpet: Pops’ own trumpet is part spatula, part funnel. He keeps it by the oven, always warm. Mother flips and stirs with it. (Inada, “Louis Armstrong” 74)

Again he puzzles the readers with a bizarre image metaphor: the metaphorical correspondence between the image of a trumpet and an image of a spatula is difficult to grasp because the shape of a spatula does not resemble the shape of a trumpet in our everyday experience of such objects. The shape of a funnel, by contrast, resembles a trumpet bell and hence allows an unproblematic metaphorical conceptualization process. Inada embellishes the image metaphor with additional details which interconnect the trumpet with heat and cooking: “it” in the second verse refers to the trumpet which is always warm since “Pops” keeps the spatula shaped trumpet close to the oven; “it” also refers to the trumpet in the next verse, especially to the spatula part of the trumpet, for Armstrong’s mother uses the trumpet-as-a-spatula to flip and stir food. The following stanza begins with a conflict between a figurative and a literal perception of Armstrong’s trumpet and ends with an emphasis on his hot jazz: Anyone can dip it for a sip. Anyone can blow on it, through it. It’s usually too hot to handle. (Inada, “Louis Armstrong” 74)

The pronoun “it” refers to Armstrong’s trumpet and imagines it as a ladle with which anyone can take a sip. Also, the euphonic phrase “dip it for a sip,” which echoes “ladles dip deep into the bass / of kettles,” alludes to Armstrong’s early nickname “Dippermouth.” Running counter to the figurative view of the trumpet as a ladle is the literal statement: “Anyone can blow on it, through it.” It stresses that anyone can also blow on the trumpet. The modification “through it” at the end of the statement draws attention to the incorrect preposition in “to blow on it

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[trumpet],” because people do not actually blow on a trumpet but blow air through it. Additionally, Inada takes a figurative idiomatic expression “too hot to handle,” which usually means “too dangerous to deal with,” literally: the trumpet is usually too hot to handle and so Louis Armstrong – not everyone – is most of the times the only person who can handle his own instrument. This literal expression, in turn, invites a figurative reference to the red-hot New Orleans jazz style played by Armstrong. The next stanza interweaves the theme from the last stanza with a metaphorical description of an Armstrong performance: Pops grabs it with a handkerchief, for insulation. He licks it to a festive flavor, for spirit and the gusto, and when he starts to blow, you know just how hungry you’ve always been for his food, this music, for your very survival – for what Pops is actually doing with his singing, his playing, is offering sustenance to anyone beyond the porch, the yard, the widening bayou – all of it glowing with the aroma of his sound: Pops is calling and calling for you! Pops is proclaiming the table set! Pops is saying don’t be late! yes, all roads parade to Pops’ place for you to follow on home! (Inada, “Louis Armstrong” 74)

The performance begins when Armstrong takes hold of his trumpet. The verse “Pops grabs it with a handkerchief, for insulation” refers, on the one hand, to the hot temperature of the trumpet and, on the other hand, refers to Armstrong’s habit of holding his trumpet with a white handkerchief. Keeping in line with the previous statement that Armstrong’s trumpet is “too hot to handle,” the speaker states that Armstrong to protect his hands. After grabbing his instrument, Armstrong

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prepares to play his trumpet by licking it “to a festive flavor, / for spirit and the gusto.” The odd metaphorical linguistic expression echoes the act of smacking one’s lips before enjoying a wonderful great meal. It documents the bizarre conceptualization of Armstrong’s preparatory act of wetting his lips and raising the trumpet as an act of licking an instrument “to a festive flavor” (boldface mine) – once again a euphonic phrase – and for inspiration (or a spirited performance) as well as for its taste. Inada then introduces the metaphor armstrong’s music is food. The speaker claims that as soon as Armstrong begins to blow his trumpet the audience becomes aware of their hunger for his “food,” recognizing that it is necessary for their survival, as the “aroma of his sound” offers “sustenance / to anyone.” Armstrong’s performance calls them to sit down at the table and eat. The poem ends with an italicized section, giving it special emphasis, in which Inada changes the idiomatic expression “all roads lead to” (e.g., “All roads lead to Rome.”) to “all roads / parade to Pop’s place.” He thereby personifies the roads and produces a melodic quality via the alliteration of “p.” Inada’s unusual use of “parade” in the couplet probably alludes to jazz parades and the Mardi Gras parade style of “King of the Zulus” by Armstrong and his Hot Five band in 1926.⁵⁵ The poem’s final verse concludes with the suggestive “home,” which frames the reader’s “home” as “Pop’s place.” The close analysis of “Louis Armstrong” has demonstrated Inada’s tendency to construct bizarre conceptual metaphors to puzzle the readers’ practice of creating exact metaphorical mappings between two different domains. Although the poem documents his conceptualization of louis armstrong’s hot jazz in terms of cooking, it does not allow a precise identification of the whole set of correspondences between the two domains. Sometimes the readers can easily establish a metaphorical correspondence between the source and the target domain, and sometimes they cannot, due to the metaphors’ ambiguity. Typically, Inada creates a textual hodgepodge of different cognitive processes: literal and figurative correspondences, connotations, detailed knowledge of Armstrong’s habits and recordings with the Hot Five and Hot Seven bands, translations into sound, speculations, and so on. To be sure, conceptual metaphors play an important role in Inada’s poem, but they do not suffice to explain the reader’s process of construing his or her aesthetic experience.

55 Giddins mentions the “Mardi Gras parade mode” at the beginning of Armstrong’s “King of the Zulus” in his review of Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings (Columbia, 2003): “‘King of the Zulus’ begins in Mardi Gras parade mode (the title refers to the Zulu Aid and Pleasure Club, which crowned Louis as king during the 1949 celebration), governed by an intriguing rhythm made up of sustained notes and three-beat rests” (Giddins 2004: 532).

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Like Inada, Ann Waldman employs a name of a jazz musician as the title to activate readers’ knowledge about the jazz performer. Her “Eric Dolphy” may not be as long and experimental as “Louis Armstrong,” yet it displays her way of translating the source domain eric dolphy’s avant-garde jazz into the target domain cooking (excerpt): “Out To Lunch” : funny how he takes a break cooking the real stuff goes on in the back (kitchen?) (Waldman, “Eric Dolphy” 226)

The poem begins with a reference to Dolphy’s ‘Out To Lunch!’, continues with a colon in the next line, and the subsequent musings of a speaker who thinks it strange for Dolphy to take a break. Since the expression “takes a break” appears within the context of the line “Out to Lunch,” it means that Dolphy takes a break from playing jazz and is having lunch. The cover of the album supports this reading of the phrase “takes a break” even though the multiple hands on the panel that displays a clock undermine any attempt at predicting the exact time of his return (Figure 8). In jazz parlance, however, the same phrase denotes “a short improvised solo without accompaniment that ‘breaks’ an ensemble passage or introduces an extended solo” (“break”). Waldman, therefore, deliberately plays with the ambiguity of “to take a break” and with the subsequent uncertain grammatical construction. The following verb “cooking” highlights the omission of “from” from the sentence “funny how he / takes a break [from] / cooking” and, filling in the gap, they continue to read the next verse “the real stuff” until “goes on” indicates that they need to retrace their steps and begin a new sentence. It involves the act of filling in the gaps with other words indicated by the brackets: “[the] cooking [of the] / real stuff / goes on / in the back / (kitchen?).” After reading the expression “(kitchen?),” they also have to modify their previous assumptions about the grammatical structure of the sentence and the word “back,” for the statement turns into a tentative question and “back” becomes “back kitchen.” Documenting the

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Figure 8: Album cover of ‘Out to Lunch!’ (1964)

metaphor eric dolphy’s jazz is cooking, “cooking” belongs to the first and the second grammatical constructions. Waldman indicates this special role of “cooking” by placing it between the verses “takes a break” and “the real stuff” and by separating it from both verses with additional space. In spatial limbo, it asks readers to construe different grammatical scenarios. Waldman’s poem also manifests the metaphor eric dolphy’s avant-garde jazz style is the fragmented poem “eric dolphy” and, in turn, invites readers to metaphorically translate the visually fragmented form into Dolphy’s style of playing a jagged, unpredictable jazz solo found on the title track “Out to Lunch.” The colon after “Out To Lunch,” the literal meaning of the phrase “takes a break,” and the step-like arrangement of the short linguistic phrases indicate to the readers that Dolphy plays short, jagged phrases. The excerpt also allows readers to create a correspondence between the noun “kitchen” and a question mark in brackets and a cautious rise in pitch. Both readings of “Eric Dolphy” conflict with each other. The literal interpretation tells the reader that the speaker marvels at the break taken by Dolphy from “cooking” and speculates whether the real “cooking” is taking place in the back kitchen. The figurative interpretation, by contrast, asks the readers to imagine that Dolphy – far from taking a break and going out for lunch – is playing his solo from “Out to Lunch.” Yet, the literal meaning of some words and the question mark guide the figurative translation: for instance, the literal meaning of “takes a break” asks the readers to imagine a pause after the musical phrase. Such cognitive activities go beyond the mere realization of the metaphor eric dolphy’s avant-garde jazz is cooking. Deviating from the common use of “cooking” as a source for metaphorically relating to hot jazz, Inada employs “cooking” purely in a literal sense in his “Billie

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Holiday.” The poem, like “Louis Armstrong,” belongs to a series of poems about jazz legends published in Legends from Camp and describes another prominent member of the jazz scene cooking in a kitchen: She’s doing what she pretty well please – cooking, singing, in any group, so beautiful … And, oh, does she have some mouths to feed! Papa’s home, hungry, and here come Pres and Ben! (Inada, “Billie Holiday” 79)

Inada portrays Billie Holiday as a woman who, in contrast to her turbulent life full of drugs and abusive men, has a home where she cooks and sings beautifully for her friends and fellow collaborators Armstrong (“Papa”), Lester Young (“Pres”), and Ben Webster (“Ben”). The speaker pretends that he or she is also at Holiday’s home and witnesses the arrival of Young and Webster. The speaker later addresses the readers (“you”) with an ambiguous statement, declaring that both stay at Holiday’s home and listening to her songs will have a transformative effect. The following and final assertion highlights the utopian character of her “home”: Whoever you are, you will never be the same. This is The Lady’s home, the home she never had. (80)

The extra space between the line “This is The Lady’s home, the home” and “she never had” stresses the twist at the end and that Holiday never experienced such a warm and welcoming home in her difficult life. Contrary to “Louis Armstrong,” then, Inada uses ‘cooking’ in “Billie Holiday” literally, deviating thereby from the usual practice of using ‘cooking’ as a source for metaphorically relating to hot jazz.

4.4.4 “Hot” Poems A final group of three poems documents the poets’ effort of translating the passionate quality of hot jazz into a poetic text. Carl Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia” (1922), Langston Hughes’s “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret” (1925), and Frank Marshall Davis’s “Jazz Band” (1935) all appeared during the heyday of the red-hot New Orleans Jazz and display the use of exhortations to render the excitement

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and intensity of such music. A brief comparison of the three poems will illustrate the literary functions of exhortatory statements: Carl Sandburg, “Jazz Fantasia”

Langston Hughes, “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret”

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.

Play that thing, Jazz band! Play it for the lords and ladies, For the dukes and counts, For the whores and gigolos, For the American millionaires And the school teachers Out for a spree. Play it, Jazz band. You know that tune That laughs and cries at the same time. You know it.

[…] Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops, moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang! you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns, tin cans – make two people fight on the top of a stairway and scratch each other’s eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs. Can the rough stuff … now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo … and the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars … a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills … go to it, O jazzmen. (179; boldface mine)

May I? Mais oui. Mein Gott! Parece una rumba. Play it, jazz band! You’ve got seven languages to speak in And then some, Even if you do come from Georgia. Can I go home wid you, sweetie? Sure. (60; boldface mine)

In Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia,” the speaker envisions a performance by a band larger than a regular ensemble and encourages the musicians to play both agitated and sorrowful jazz.⁵⁶ In this flight of the imagination, the speaker calls on one group to “[d]rum on your drums, batter on your banjos” and the other to “sob on the long cool winding saxophones.” As indicated by the nouns’ plural forms, the speaker envisions a big jazz band with many drummers, banjo players, and saxophonists, while the contrast between the compact, parallel constructed phrases of the first verse (e.g., alliteration and word order) and the long, uninterrupted sec-

56 Sandburg’s use of the adjective “cool” in the second verse of his poem “Jazz Fantasia” (1922) clearly refers not to the cool jazz of the 1950s and early 1960s, but it demonstrates that he was presumably the first poet who searched for techniques, images, and expressions such as “cool” to describe the experience of jazz in literature.

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ond verse underscores the clash between the two types of jazz. Against the background of the previous two lines, the speaker’s exhortative “Go to it, O jazzmen” represents a passionate appeal to the unreal jazz musicians to play stormy and sad jazz. Until the final stanza, the speaker strongly urges the musicians to play a mixture of styles. In the third stanza, for instance, he or she encourages the saxophone and trombone players to “[m]oan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome tree- / tops” and “cry like a racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop,” embellishing the image with the sound of two shots fired by the cop, before he or she – caught up in the excitement of the imagined performance – cheers the jazz musicians on to bang on or bang together instruments, traps, and tin cans. Then, the speaker calls on them to play music that sounds as if “two people fight / on the top of a stairway and scratch each other’s eyes / in a clinch tumbling down the stairs.” Having had enough of the “rough stuff,” he or she orders the orchestra to stop playing the rowdy music in the fourth and last stanza and, instead, play smooth jazz, expressed with the image of a Mississippi steamboat floating on the river. Immediately, the speaker immerses him- or herself in the mellow jazz played by the band and, after having mentally embellished the image, encourages the band once more to “go to it, O jazzmen.” Since the exhortation follows a passage on smooth jazz, the speaker pronounces it softly this time and not forcefully as at the outset.⁵⁷ Hughes’s “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” by contrast, begins with the commanding exhortation “Play that thing, / jazz band!” and twice repeats a shorter version of it to translate the energy and passion of hot jazz into a literary form (see above). After the first exhortative statement there follows a Whitmanesque catalog of parallel constructions that underline the exuberance of the speaker who urges the band to play for the French aristocracy, the lower class whores and gigolos, the nouveau riche American millionaires, and, from the educational sector, the teachers. The speaker’s second exhortation reinforces his or her apparent desire for hot jazz, but then he or she requests a tune “[t]hat laughs and cries at the same time,” a feature typically ascribed to the blues. The first two slightly indented lines of the second stanza construct an ambiguous situation at the Parisian cabaret, in which, perhaps, an English-speaking patron asks a French patron whether he may have a seat at the same table or whether he or she may have a dance with the French person (“May I? / Mais oui.”). The next two slightly indented lines, however, unmask the suggested situations as the

57 See also the discussion of Sascha Feinstein’s literal interpretation of Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia” in Chapter 2.2.1.

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result of an improvisation on the part of the speaker whose strong exclamation “Mein Gott!” continues the pattern of beginning an utterance with the capitalized “M” and yet disrupts the previously established context. His request in Spanish, finally, illustrates the speaker’s spontaneous improvisation and his or her passionate enthusiasm. The speaker’s use of four different languages (English, French, German, and Spanish) in four verses also exhibits the multilingual and multicultural nightclub scene in Paris of the 1920s. After another strongly urgent “Play it, / jazz band!,” he or she addresses a hip black “cat,” (jazz musician) by alluding to the idiomatic expression that a cat has seven or nine lives in the line “[y]ou’ve got seven languages to speak in.” The line refers to the multiple languages used by the speaker and to the “languages” (that is, different instruments) played by the jazz band. The speaker then segues into a fictitious dialogue between himself, affecting a Southern black dialect (see the reference to Georgia and the dialect word “wid”), and a female patron of the club (“sweetie”) who consents to have sex with him without a moment’s hesitation. The iterated exhortations, the speaker’s boundless excitement, and his imagined dialogue with a sexually available woman documents Hughes’s effort at translating the hot quality of jazz into a hot poem, in which the speaker requests a blues song. Published ten years after Hughes’s poem, Frank Marshall Davis’s “Jazz Band” pulls all known registers to create a truly hot jazz poem. Like Hughes, he begins with a passionate exhortation that echoes Hughes’s “Play that thing, / Jazz band!” (Hughes, “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret” 60): “Play that thing, you jazz mad fools!” (Davis, “Jazz Band” 20). The same exhortation concludes the poem. Both exhortations frame two other similar statements (all boldface): Play that thing, you jazz-mad fools! Boil a skyscraper with a jungle Dish it to ’em sweet and hot – Ahhhhhhhhh Rip it open then sew it up, jazz band! Thick bass notes from a moon-faced drum Saxophones moan, banjo strings hum High thin notes from the cornet’s throat Trombone snorting, bass horn snorting Short tan notes from the piano And the short tan notes from the piano Plink plank plunk a plunk Plink plank plunk a plunk Chopin gone screwy, Wagner with the blues Plink plank plunk a plunk […]

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Do that thing, jazz band! Whip it to a jelly […] Let it rub hard thighs, let it be molten fire in the veins of dancers Make ’em shout a crazy jargon of hot hosannas to a fiddle-faced jazz god Send Dios, Jehovah, Gott, Allah, Buddha past in a high stepping cake walk Do that thing, jazz band! Your music’s been drinking hard liquor Got shanghaied and it’s fightin’ mad Stripped to the waist feein’ ocean liner bellies Big burly bibulous brute Poet hands and bone crusher shoulders – Black sheep or white? Hey, Hey! Pick it, papa! Twee twa twee twa twa Step on it, black boy Do re mi fa sol la ti do Boomp boomp Play that thing, you jazz mad fools! (Davis, “Jazz Band” 20–21; boldface mine)

Together, the four exhortative statements manifest an ABBA structure and make up the backbone of the “hot” poem. Moreover, Davis relies on the domain cooking to render the hot quality of hot jazz. The first metaphorical linguistic expression “Boil a skyscraper with a jungle” of the first stanza keeps to the grammatical structure “boil something with something” (for instance, “boil the shrimp with vegetables”), yet substitutes the placeholders for food items (indicated by the word “something”) with “a skyscraper” and “a jungle.” By bringing these two unrelated objects together, the speaker connects different realms of connotation: while the image of a skyscraper triggers connotations of civilization, power, verticality, and sterility, the image of a jungle activates connotations of uncivilized wilderness, a horizontal plane, frenzied cries, and a hot and humid climate. With this expressive utterance, the speaker urges the musicians to play hot, turbulent jazz. The verse “Dish it to ’em sweet and hot –” documents the metaphor hot jazz is cooking and fervently encourages the musicians to present the audience not

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with a “sweet and hot” dish but with “sweet and hot” jazz, while the subsequent interjection “Ahhhhhhhhh” represents the speaker’s anticipatory sigh of satisfaction after having tasted good food and experienced or relished the “sweet and hot” jazz music. Leaving the metaphor hot jazz is cooking behind, the speaker calls for rough and then calm music in the last verse of the first stanza: “Rip it open then sew it up, jazz band!” Davis, furthermore, employs the domain fire and the adjective “hot” to generate his metaphorical linguistic expressions. Following an imaginary, ragtimelike piano performance in which the predominant left hand plays the pattern “Plink plank plunk a plunk” (and slight variations) and the right hand a melodic improvisation (note the longer silly lines that rhyme with each other), the speaker resumes with passionate calls for hot jazz: Do that thing, jazz band! Whip it to a jelly Sock it, rock it; heat it, beat it; then fling it at ’em Let the jazz stuff fall like hail on king and truck driver, queen and laundress, lord and laborer, banker and bum Let it fall in London, Moscow, Paris, Hongkong, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Sydney Let it rub hard thighs, let it be molten fire in the veins of dancers Make ’em shout a crazy jargon of hot hosannas to a fiddle-faced jazz god Send Dios, Jehovah, Gott, Allah, Buddha past in a high stepping cake walk Do that thing, jazz band! (Davis, “Jazz Band” 21; boldface mine)

For instance, the speaker urges the musicians to play hot jazz (“heat it”) that will cause hard rubbing thighs (which generates more heat) and that will be “molten fire in the veins of dancers.” Their music should make people shout “a crazy jargon of hot hosannas to a fiddle-faced jazz god.” Together with the Whitmanesque catalogs (“Let …”) in which opposites are brought together (e.g., king and truck driver, lord and laborer, and banker and bum) and the “wild” image of various gods participating in a cakewalk (an African-American dancing contest performed to syncopated music), the expressions of heat and fire not only reveal the speaker’s excitement, intense energy, and passion, but also contribute to the hot quality of this jazz poem.

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Davis’s “Jazz Band” combines all the characteristic ways of translating hot jazz into written form. Unlike Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia” and Hughes’s “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” it documents the use of “hot” to refer to New Orleans Jazz, which, by the time Davis wrote his poem, had become a clichéd term applied to the style of jazz played in the 1920s and early 1930s. It also exhibits several exhortative statements urging the musicians to play hot jazz, linguistic realizations of the metaphor hot jazz is cooking and hot jazz is fire, the speaker’s passion and energy, and the “crazy” mishmash of images. Leaving aside the ragtime passage, which serves as a break between “hot” passages, “Jazz Band” is the hottest poem I have found so far and, fittingly, appeared at the height of the hot jazz style performed in the 1930s.

4.4.5 cool jazz: The Adjective “Cool” When poets treat “cool jazz,” they typically use the adjective “cool” and, as expected, rely on domains related to “cold” such as winter and water A short excerpt taken from Quincy Troupe’s “Ode to John Coltrane” illustrates his use of “cool” and his conceptualization of such jazz in terms of a winter scene: With soaring fingers of flame you descended from Black Olympus to blow about truth and pain: yeah, just to tell a story about Black existence. Then the flames left your fingers and soul, came winter you lay down in cold snow and was cool. (Troupe, “Ode to John Coltrane” 3)

The first metaphorical linguistic expression “soaring fingers of flame” manifests Troupe’s use of the domain fire to describe an imagined Coltrane performance, in which Coltrane plays his characteristic style of fast “sheets of sound,” which move “upwards,” on his tenor saxophone. Troupe then relates Coltrane’s shift from a hot to a cool style by relying on the images of winter and cold snow as well as “cool.”

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Unlike Troupe, Gerald Early repeats “cool” several times in “Innocency, or Not Song X” in order to guide the readers’ figurative translation of poem into a cool jazz improvisation performed by the pianist Bud Powell:⁵⁸ Innocency, or Not Song X (for jazz pianist Bud Powell) Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? —Job 4:7 It was not warm not what he thought, not warm But cool, dirty, dirty, and cool, this very small space Under the car, there, under, where he thought it would be warm. A space, before he went under, down under, thought to be a yonder That was yearning for him, for which he yearned himself, a calling; To be under the car, the grit, the oil, the dark, cool metal mazed, A sort of breathing thing, not breathing, as if one were buried, Buried in the belly of a calm machine, under and away, sheltered. (Early, “Innocency, or Not Song X” 68; my emphasis)

The negative “not warm” in the first line and repetitive use of “cool” in the section above asks readers to imagine the poem as a cool jazz piece. Simultaneously, the appearance of “cool” in different places corresponds metaphorically with the improvisation of musical phrases and notes.

4.4.6 Thelonious Monk: Translating Monk’s Cool Compositions In Michael S. Harper’s “Bandstand,” the literary treatment of Thelonious Monk’s dissonant and cool improvisational music deviates from the common way of depicting cool jazz as a winter scene. Harper improvises on other images related to “cold” and on the word “cool” (see second stanza):

58 See also the discussion of a subsequent part of Early’s poem “Innocency, or Not Song X” in Chapter 4.4.1.

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Monk’s dissonant hat willing every change of direction; all those influences in your head touching the wrong target – none of this recorded, the ears of the kitchen painted black, all the musicians in common clothes, dressing for the ancestors. You learned to appreciate the pews, the cooling iron, the cooling board where the bodies, guns in the recording studios, became the tuning forks, meals eaten while running in place for Mother and Dad who could dance. (Harper, “Bandstand” 67)

While Harper uses the image of pews to trigger the connotation of a cold church, he improvises on “cool” in the next two lines: he first turns a heating iron into a “cooling iron” and then associatively follows it up with “cooling board” which is linked to the previous line through the term “cooling” and “ironing board.” These lines document cognitive processes, which go beyond a translation of cool jazz into terms of winter. Poets often – but not always – use the image of snow as a means of describing Monk’s cool sound metaphorically. A close analysis of diverse poems about Monk will demonstrate the heterogeneous functions of “snow” in jazz poetry: Example 1: Yusef Komunyakaa, “Elegy for Thelonious” (excerpt) Damn the snow. Its senseless beauty pours a hard light through the hemlock. Thelonious is dead. Winter Drifts in the hourglass; notes pour from the brain cup. […] The ghost of bebop from 52nd Street, footprints in the snow. Damn February. […] (110)

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Example 2: Billy Collins, “Snow” (excerpt) I cannot help noticing how this slow Monk solo seems to go somehow with the snow that is coming down this morning, how the notes and the spaces accompany its easy falling on the geometry of the ground, on the flagstone path, the slanted roof, and the angles of the split-rail fence as if he had imagined a winter scene as he sat at the piano late one night at the Five Spot playing “Ruby, My Dear.” […] (105)

Example 3: Art Lange, Monk Poems “Trinkle Tinkle”

“North of the Sunset”

How very caustic and as a sign in a cinema illuminating fluorescent or at least circular as a thought and still no sign of snowing

All those days new snow below white to warm to write

(n.p.)

“the lean foot” but sat and nobody seems very pleased things even less: anxious grey like nerves caught in a graph like broken glass like broken lines like cold air rushed in to fill the lungs to kill “the wish to pursue what lies behind the mind” door to door moving blue frozen white frozen thought frozen sight (n.p.)

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In “Elegy for Thelonious,” Komunyakaa uses the image of snow as a sign of winter to indicate Monk’s death on February 17, 1982, rather than as a metaphorical reference to his performances. Collins, in turn, describes in “Snow” a speaker who listens to Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear” while looking at the snow falling and establishes metaphorical correspondences between it and Monk’s slow style. He or she then speculates that Monk imagined such a winter scene when he played the piece one late night at the Five-Spot jazz club in New York.⁵⁹ The two poems by Art Lange, finally, illustrate his association of Monk’s cool jazz with snow. He uses the titles of Monk’s compositions for his poems and engages in a play of associations without establishing a system of metaphorical correspondences between the compositions and winter scenes. Lange claims outright that he did not try to translate Monk’s music in his so-called Monk poems: As you can see, The Monk Poems consists entirely of poems using titles of compositions by Thelonious Monk as their titles. There is not meant to be any other specific reference to the music in the poetry, neither in terms of content, subject, or form – outside of some musical references which pop up here and there, and the influence that Monk’s rhythmic sense has had on me, but these are both rather arbitrary and vague. The poems are in no sense an attempt to explain, elucidate, illustrate, or translate Monk’s music into words. (qtd. in Feinstein and Komunyakaa 1991: 263)

Both poems quoted above manifest his experimentation with free associations and thoughts. Apparently, the titles “Trinkle Tinkle” and “North of the Sunset” activated the connotations of snow and coldness, which, at no time, represent the outcome of Lange’s figurative translation of Monk’s music into written words.

4.4.7 “Cool” Poems In contrast to Lange, Richard Elman deliberately conveys the cool sound of jazz with images of snow in “Low Celsius Notations” but also uses other techniques such as alliteration (underlined), the repetition of the vowel / oʊ / often indicated by the grapheme cluster “ow” (italics), as well as the recurrence of the lower case letter “b” (boldface) to create a “cool” poem:

59 See also the discussion of Collins’ way of rendering the aspect of slow tempo in Chapter 4.2.2.

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The sky seems so much closer after a snowfall when cotton wools stick to the tree tops and fall everywhere around us in great tufts or skeins. The wind on the wide Sound is brilliance threaded beyond this grove of oaks, or pressed out flat like blue oxford on the ironing board. The large grey gulls shuttling above us, as in a loom, between the separate branches, appear and disappear and reappear again, as larger shadows on the snow. There’s a soft place at the base of the nearest tree. Depressed to be this utterly deep powder blue, it yawns and glows a little in the night when everything else outside our window is black on dark. (Elman, “Low Celsius Notations” 82; emphasis mine)

The unconventional capitalized “S” of “Sound” emphasizes the importance of sound and highlights various sound patterns such as the “ow” in the chain “Low”–“snow”–“shadow”–“snow”–“powder” (variation)–“glows”–“window” (italics), the alliteration of the consonant “t” in “stick to the tree tops / and fall everywhere around us in great tufts” and the alliteration of the consonant “w” in “The wind on the wide” (underlined), and the multiple use of “b” (boldface). Three other features help readers interpret the poem figuratively: first, the reference to cold weather in the title, the iteration of “snow,” and the expression “deep powder blue” calls for a cool sound. Second, the portrayal of snowflakes as “cotton wools” and the adjective “soft” metaphorically refer to the soft dynamics of the sound. Third, the expressions “flat like blue oxford,” “Depressed,” and “deep powder blue” as well as the recurrent use of the lower case “b” to signal a flat note ( ) or a flat key such as B-flat major (B major) point to the music’s blue mood. All of these techniques show Elman’s creative effort at translating a cool blue jazz sound into an extraordinarily cool blue poem. C.D. Wright’s “The Complete Birth of the Cool” displays an altogether different way of creating a cool poem. She takes her title not from the original Miles Davis record The Birth of the Cool (Capitol, 1957) but from the 1998 CD The Complete Birth of the Cool as a means for alluding to her initials “C.D.” The poem’s title alerts readers to the correlation between cool jazz and images of water as well as expressions related to water sprinkled: Under this sun voices on the radio run down, ponds warp like a record. In the millyard men soak; roses hang from the neck.

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Everyone is thankful for dusk and the theater’s blue tubes of light. But evenings are a non-church matter. On the cement step – damp from my swimming suit I sort out my life or not, an illustrated dictionary on my lap. If I want hamburger I make it myself Behind the wrapped pipes Sister expels a new litter in the crawlspace. Even she can see the moon poling across the water to guard the giant melon in my patch. Awe provides for us. (Wright, “The Complete Birth of the Cool” 21; emphasis mine)

The highlighted words and phrases echo Davis’s cool jazz played. What is more, Wright’s use of the title from the CD version of The Birth of the Cool provides readers with a hint as to the meaning behind the puzzling style of the poem. The CD contains previously unreleased live recordings of the original tracks such as two live recordings entitled “Budo (Hallucination).” Not included in the original track name “Budo,” the parenthesized word “Hallucination” suggests that Wright read the track name and had the idea of writing a hallucinatory poem. Other correspondences between the poem and the album show her creative transformation process: “run” in the first line alludes to the opening track “Move”; “damp from my swimming suit” describes a woman who has come out of the water and refers to the track “Venus de Milo,” the ancient Greek statue of the same name, and to the painting “The Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli, in which Venus emerges from the water as a fully grown woman. Moreover, “the moon poling across water” points to the title of the track “Moon dreams,” and “melon” represents perhaps another veiled reference to “Milo.” Hence the poem allows readers to recognize that Wright created a hallucinatory cool poem without translating Davis’s cool jazz into words. Poets have found varied ways of treating hot and cool jazz. While their use of the adjectives “hot” and “cool” and their conceptualization of hot and cool jazz in terms of the domains fire, cooking, and winter are unsurprising, other techniques are unexpected. For instance, Frank Marshall Davis’s creation of “Jazz Band” by combining exhortative statements (“Play that thing, you jazzmad fools!”) with the recurrent use of “hot” (e.g., “hot hosannas”), interjections, linguistic realizations of the conceptual metaphors hot jazz is fire and hot jazz is cooking, and a potpourri of images. A further example is C.D. Wright’s

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ingenious transformations of titles of tracks taken from the CD rerelease of Davis’s The Birth of the Cool into the hallucinatory “The Complete Birth of the Cool.” Such gems provide a richer, more diverse perspective on how poets render hot and cool jazz in jazz poetry.

4.5 “tone-colors” are colors Music cannot express color and yet people use the term “color” metaphorically to describe the tonal quality of music: “It is customary to speak of ‘colouring’ or ‘tone-colour’ where variations of timbre or tone are produced by different intensities of the overtones of sounds” (“Colour”; emphasis not mine). Proceeding from this feature of music, I would think that jazz poets establish systematic correlations between tone-colors and colors and translate tone-colors into colors, but, contrary to expectations, very few manifest the synesthetic metaphor “tonecolors” are colors. Most of the poems, I found out, do not fit the metaphor at all. Jazz poets often use “blue” as a marker of tonality and typically overlap “cool” sound and blue and “hot” sound and red. Sometimes, however, poets use “blue” to produce the tonality phonologically (4.5.1 “Blue and Red”). Also, many poets from the 1960s and 1970s talk about “black sound” and “brown sound” in their poems and employ the colors black and brown as ethnic markers (4.5.2 “Black and Brown”). Other poets, in turn, simply improvise on colors, correlate the colors of a painting with images of jazz, and, in rare instances, map colors onto “tone-colors” (4.5.3 “A Palette of Colors”), one of jazz poets’ manifold attempts at interconnecting jazz music with colors.

4.5.1 Blue and Red A common practice in jazz poetry consists of using color to denote a sound. For instance, Everett Hoagland portrays the music of the horn-player Bobby Green as “blue / milk” in his poem “Jamming” (excerpt): It was that rainy summer night when Bobby Green was playing at The Pub. He took out his horn did his thang and poured blue milk into her ear. (Hoagland, “blue / milk” 84; boldface mine)

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The blue color mentioned in the metaphorical linguistic expression “poured blue / milk into her ear” refers to the blue tonality of Green’s horn music. Other poets employ color in literal expressions to designate the notes’ sound. A case in point is Richard Elman’s “Chet’s Jazz,” in which he describes Chet Baker’s jazz music as “blue notes” (excerpt): Behind Chet’s clerical specs a death’s head blows frivolous trills on a brass horn, blue notes so oblique his group can only vamp and vamp and vamp again a rhythm like applause. (Elman, “Chet’s Jazz” 116; boldface mine)

Elman’s reference to “blue notes” denotes the so-called “blue notes,” that is, flattened thirds and sevenths which provide “jazz’s characteristic tone of unresolved plangency and which, in its harmonic ‘impurity’, scandalised early classicallytrained critics” (“blue note”). Yet it could also indicate that Baker plays a blue melody, not only specific “blue notes.” An excerpt from Melvin B. Tolson’s section “Mu” from Harlem Gallery, however, unequivocally brings up the “blue note”: Zulu, King of the Africans, arrives on Mardi Gras morning; the veld drum of Baby Dodds’ great-grandfather in Congo Square pancakes the first blue note in a callithump of the USA. (Tolson, “Mu” 75; emphasis mine)

Apart from describing the Mardi Gras celebrations, the section introduces the topic that, under French and Spanish colonial rule, slaves were permitted to gather in Congo Square on Sundays where they could dance and perform their African music and where, as the text implies, slaves played the “first blue note.” Several jazz poets, by contrast, focus on producing the “blue” sound of jazz via the phonology of “blue.” In the first part of “Two Variations on a Theme By Thelonious Monk As Inspired By Mal Waldron,” Lawson Fusao Inada translates the blue tonality of “Blue Monk” into a /bluː / sound by repeating “blue” throughout. Entitled “I. ‘Blue Monk’ (Linear),” the poem constitutes “a linear horn-like statement” that “fits, like an overlay” to the second part, the percussive render-

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ing of Monk’s “Blue Monk.”⁶⁰ Two excerpts will illustrate Inada’s multiple use of “blue” to render the blue tonality of Monk’s “Blue Monk”: Excerpt 1:

Excerpt 2:

you feel like you’ve been hearing “Blue Monk” forever, since the planet started dancing, like it’s been around since sound,

Mr. Blue Monk, bringing everything we do, we see, we know, into melodious focus

since the blue wind got up one blue summer morning, looked across the cool, blue canyon at that sweet, blue mountain, and melodiously started to sing “Blue Monk”; you know that lovely feeling, “Blue Monk”; you know what “Blue Monk” can do for you, the melodious message it sends, the melodious message that always comes echoing back across the canyons as a result; “Blue Monk,”

through the blue keys of his blue piano;

(Inada, “Two Variations” 63–64; boldface mine)

(67; boldface mine)

therefore, in this blue region, with this blue vision, in this blue body of being we all know as home, everything throbs and pulses and glows with the true, blue beauty of his song: “Blue Monk”!

Inada’s recurrent use of “blue” in both excerpts invites readers to articulate it frequently to produce a / bluː / tonality that resonates throughout the respective sections. For instance, he introduces the topic of listening to “Blue Monk” in the initial four lines of the first excerpt and then mentions the color “blue” four times in impressionistic images before he generates a downbeat with the four anaphoric repetitions of the song title, which emphasize its blue tonality. In the second excerpt, Inada returns to the technique of repeating “blue” several times to again generate the resonating /bluː / phonology. He underlines, in addition, the bluesy sound with the phonologically similar adjective “true” and asks the readers to imagine that they are listening to the “blue beauty of the song: / ‘Blue Monk’!” played by the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Likewise, “blue” pervades Rod Jellema’s “Holy Week” and produces a pensive, melancholic quality. Yet Jellema improvises on the way of perceiving the blue tone metaphorically. Instead of presenting the blue sound only as soft and mel60 For a discussion of the second part of Inada’s poem “Two Variations on a Theme By Thelonious Monk as Inspired By Mal Waldron,” see Chapter 4.3.4.

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low, he maps various other qualities onto the sound such as “wet” and “deep,” but also “electric,” “sharp,” “hard,” “wild,” and “light”: Flash of bluejay in wet leaves is blue, deep blue. Too deep. Cut an electric wire and it bleeds a sharper blue. There must be blue like motor sparks and ozone wedged hard in crystals. Leon Rappolo, jazzman, sprang that blue mad in a thunderstorm in Illinois -they found him wet and cutting sharp wild notes with his clarinet clean through the whistling veins of high tension wires. Pierced with sounds Mary at Golgotha knew it -how light and sharp this blue is everywhere electric, I heard it this sunny morning in the rip of spring ice on our lake. (for Dirk Jellema) (Jellema, “Holy Week” 50; boldface mine)

The poem documents that Jellema metaphorically understands the blue tonality of a jazz performance in terms of the crucifixion of Jesus on Good Friday (e.g., “flash” of lightening, the bleeding Jesus, the veins, the piercing cries, and Mary at Golgotha). In turn, the conceptual metaphor blue tonality is the crucifixion of jesus leads to startling modifications of the blue sound. Jellema begins his conceptual improvisation with the statement that the “Flash of bluejay in wet leaves” is “Too deep” and, afterwards, changes it to an electric “sharper blue,” a blue like “motor sparks and ozone / wedged hard in crystals.” In the subsequent two stanzas, he describes the sound as “mad” and “wild”: the jazzman “sprang that blue / mad in a thunderstorm” and “sharp wild notes.” The blue tone quality becomes “piercing” in “Pierced with sounds / Mary at Golgotha knew it” and then light, sharp, and electric in “how light and sharp / this blue is everywhere / electric.” Finally, the blue tone sounds like the “rip of / spring ice on our lake.” So Jellema’s bizarre poem “Holy Week” surprises the readers by asking them to forgo

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their usual association of a blue sound with a soft and mellow tone and perceive it in terms of the crucifixion of Jesus on Good Friday. Aside from Jellema’s highly unconventional treatment of the blue tone quality, jazz poets often refer to the color in conjunction with red to invoke jazz’s opposing qualities: “blue” / “cool” vs. “hot.” A brief discussion of three excerpts will illustrate this pattern. In “Dancing Gal,” Frank Marshall Davis describes a black girl dancing to a mixture of hot and blue notes (excerpt): A brown-sugar brown Slim gal sways […] Beneath a yellow thumb Of steel-stiff light Amid a striped rain Of red note, blue note (Davis, “Dancing Girl” 64; boldface mine)

Richard Elman’s Part V “Cathedral-Tree-Train 1” of the long poem entitled “Cathedral-Tree-Train” mentions the same two colors, but, at first, the immediate context of this part does not necessarily lead readers to interpret them in terms of cool and hot jazz. A glance at Part IV “Memory” of Elman’s poem on the opposite left page of the volume, however, clarifies the role of the two colors: “Memory” (left page)

“Cathedral-Tree-Train 1” (right page)

Snow falling thick and fast, no sound at all when he walked except a crunching as though his boots broke dry toast. Somewhere along the route of that dream he was scheduled to wake up again in his warm bed with the radio putting out hot jazz from Boston. He had edged himself along this little piece of night, slipped and recovered, walking on his heels along that snowy path.

1

(Elman, “Memory” 20)

(Elman, “Cathedral-Tree-Train 1” 21; boldface mine)

The world is burning. Burning. Old mills, bleak houses, bare trees as vulnerable to the glow as cardboard cutouts. From the trainwindows near Utica at dusk the glow, heath and fen used up, consumed, scorched, occasional ice flats seeming to melt. The world burns on. It’s evening, the meadows now in cold blue light sere, brown, jagged patches of red where the bushes catch fire beside the tracks.

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On the left-hand side of the page, Elman draws on the convention of using the image of snow to indicate cool jazz implicitly. He merely employs the image of snow to generate the contrast between the cool temperature and the “hot jazz” on the radio. But since Elman’s poem “Memory” depicts a dream and contains the verse “along the route of that dream,” which probably refers to Sigmund Freud’s often quoted statement that the interpretation of dreams is “the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life” (Freud 1996: 419), the poem invites readers to interpret it as the speaker’s unconscious dream-thoughts about cool and hot jazz. The context, in turn, allows readers to spot the blue and red colors as markers of cool and hot jazz in Part V “Cathedral-Tree-Train 1” located on the righthand side of the page. Other references to jazz – such as the name-dropping of the famous jazz musicians Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, Art Farmer, Fats Navarro, and Lester Young (23) – underscore that the colors blue and red refer to cool and hot jazz in Part V of the long poem “Cathedral-Tree-Train.” Similarly, readers have to determine the jazz context of David Henderson’s mosaic-like “Egyptian Book of the Dead,” which consists of nine interrelated trains-of-thought, before they can identify with certainty the function of the blue and red colors cited in the first part of the poem. For readers with knowledge about jazz, Henderson’s reference to Egypt in the title and the bizarre image of the first verse “pharisees come bloom” (112) are an oblique reference to the tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders (excerpt): pharisees come bloom water eddys the twilight air blue for music red for fire look out along the rooftops ancient cities pop up old testaments tribes muster at grey street corners sparks of cigarettes gleam the glass arcades wine bottles libate the sidewalk no more the wine from palms no more the beers from bananas but easy now easy this night will turn you on / (Henderson, “Egyptian Book of the Dead” 112; boldface mine)

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Along with the section’s impressionistic structure and the alternation between “no more” and the parallel constructions “the wine from palms” and “the beers from bananas,” the veiled reference to Pharoah Sanders calls for readers to recognize that this section of the poem pretends to be a written translation of Sanders’s style of improvisation and interpret blue and red as Sanders’s cool and hot jazz. Other parts of the poem offer additional references to jazz, such as the name of the jazz pianist Horace Silver, to stress that Henderson’s poem deals with jazz. The red color does not always appear in connection with blue to specify the oppositional pair cool (or blue) vs. hot jazz. Doug Lang, for instance, mentions the color in the verse “[s]he who longs for the red hot songs of Robert Johnson” (Lang, “The Depression” 258) to underscore the hot quality of the blues guitarist’s songs. The same phrase “red hot” can also express sexual appeal as in Vassar Miller’s “Dirge in Jazz Time.” Dedicated to the jazz singer Sophie Tucker, the elegiac poem (“dirge”) consists of four stanzas that end with variations of the line “Red-hot Mama who is cold tonight” (Miller 1991: 166): Her voice forever match to dry wood Since, a girl, she sang for a crust, Her innocence even then understood As a subtler word for lust As in age her wisdom would mean delight – Red-hot Mama who is cold tonight. […] Turn the spotlight off of the night-club floor. Let the jazzmen muffle their drums And their saxophones she will hear no more Where winter forever numbs, Where no one can warm her whose heart burned bright, Where Red-hot Mama is cold tonight. (Lang, “Dirge in Jazz Time” 166)

At the outset, the poem establishes the theme of Tucker’s everlasting hot voice with the linguistic metaphor “[h]er voice forever match to dry wood” and then presents the topic of sexual lust in the next few lines. Miller’s use of “Red-hot Mama” in the last verse of the stanza thus refers to Tucker’s extremely “hot” voice and sexy appearance and, at the same time, introduces the stark contrast between the sexually attractive and alive person (“Red-hot Mama”) and her dead body (“cold tonight”). She reinforces the hot quality of Tucker’s voice in the following two stanzas and, by describing the effects of the latter’s voice and body on men, attests to her sex appeal. Tucker’s death becomes the main theme in the

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final stanza, in which Miller deepens the contrast between hot and cold temperatures before she concludes with the refrain-like statement “[w]here Red-hot Mama is cold tonight.” Overall, Miller’s use of “red” in here stresses her hot voice and sexual attractiveness. But Tucker was also known as the “Red Hot Mama” in such songs as “You’ve Got to See Mama Ev’ry Night,” “Red Hot Mama,” and “I’m the Last of the Red Hot Mamas” found on the best-of album The Last of the Red Hot Mamas (Living Era, 2006) illustrate.

4.5.2 Black and Brown Like blue and red, black and brown play a central role for contemporary poets such as Stanley Crouch and Colleen J. McElroy and the adherents of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ted Wilson and Henry Dumas (who use them as markers of black identity). Crouch, for instance, metaphorically links Coltrane’s tonal variation and the improvisatory alternation between the black and blue skin color of an African witch doctor in “The Revelation” (excerpt): SCREECH

CRY:

Bird of blood with razor-sharp wings of boiling stone fallen from God into my throat claws my tonsils and sticks its feet way down into my stomach and I double over trying to vomit forth this bird to the rhythms of anklets ashake in the dance of a black – blue-black blue-black a black blue-black African Witch Doctor (Crouch, “The Revelation” 33; boldface mine)

Since the poem pretends to be a revelatory translation of a solo played by Coltrane, it allows readers to metaphorically identify several elements of the fictitious solo. The onomatopoetic “SCREECH” and upper-case “CRY:” manifest the metaphor loud is capitalization, and both words ask the readers to imagine that Coltrane plays a loud, screeching sound. Following the colon, the linguistic metaphor of the verse “Bird of blood with razor-sharp wings of boiling / stone” enables readers to imagine a correlation between the image and sharp, hot notes while the subsequent alternation between black and blue (boldface) permits the metaphorical detection of a two-tone tonal variation played by Coltrane. Literally, the expression “blue-black” refers to the color of the African Witch Doctor’s skin, but figuratively the succession of colors in “black – blue-black / blue-black a black blue-black”

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calls for a translation into music: Coltrane plays first one tone (“black”) and then hesitates – the hyphen manifests the metaphor pause is a hyphen – before he plays twice the same two tones (“blue-black / blue-black”). He concludes his short two-tone variation with the sequence “a black blue-black,” in which the accent on the first tone (“a black”) creates a rhythmic shift. Similarly, Colleen J. McElroy ties black to Africa in “Music from Home.” It describes a woman listening to a jazz performance, which, in her mind, transports her back to Africa. She associates the sound of a bass player with a “Pure black sound” and a “moving sound” that – interrupted by African ritual shouts – stirs snakes and “ladies / of warrior tribes” into motion: A four string bass plays into the heart of the rain forest. Pure black sound, moving sound – Ngoma – Ngoma – stirring snakes and ladies of warrior tribes. (McElroy, “Music from Home” 45)

Her imaginative descriptions enable readers to make vague observations about the fictitious jazz. For instance, the train image in the second stanza shows that she listens to “train-like” music, creates metaphorical equivalences between the music and an image of a train, and, prompted by the image of a jungle, fantasizes about a train, “engine plowing through a dark / green night” (45), and sees herself as a passenger: The deep wet sound calms an echoing drum as it rocks through the jungle. It’s a train – wheels smoking, engine plowing through a dark green night. I swallow the sound, become passenger, driving myself through the depths of the train. Ngoma – I am oil. (45)

She concludes her fantasy with another African ritual shout “Ngoma” and believes that she is black oil. In the third stanza, the sound of the jazz performance makes her body want to move and triggers another flight of fancy:

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My toes are dry and itch to move, my hips to bend. I plunge into a second skin, glisten like the burnt case of the walnut fiddle. The cowbells are my feathers. The drummer’s hand paints my face. Ngoma – I am bush woman. (45)

She fantasizes about plunging into a jet-black skin that glistens “like the burnt case / of the walnut fiddle,” maps the image of feathers onto the sound of the cowbells, and imagines that the drummer’s hand paints her face. Et voilà (“Ngoma”), the speaker has transformed herself into a “bush woman.” Her fictitious journey has taken her halfway there when a “blue moan” plucked by the bass player activates another set of associations: Halfway home, my palm sings as the bass player plucks a blue moan driving forty camels into Timbuktu, salt slabs and sweet berry wine. Ngoma – I sip from the only glass in town. (45)

The “blue moan” prompts the idea that it drives forty camels into the city of Timbuktu, which, in turn, activates the images of “salt slabs” and “sweet berry wine.” Finally, she arrives in Africa and probably sips wine from the only glass in Timbuktu. Hence the “Pure black sound” of jazz has transported her back to Africa, her supposed home. Linking the color to Africa, McElroy writes about a woman who metaphorically perceives jazz as the continent’s black sound. Ted Wilson’s “S, C, M,” gives preference to black over any other color and calls for a black movement. It consists of three interconnected stanzas entitled “Sound,” “Color,” and “Movement” and promotes the theory that adding sound (S) and color (C) together results in movement (M). In the first stanza, the speaker celebrates the “rhythmatic” sounds of African “Mighty Drums” and proclaims that they are “the rhythms of Life” and the “sounds of blackness” (200):

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Sound Mighty Drums echoing the voices of Spirits determining the movement of human forms These sounds are rhythmatic, The rhythm of vitality The rhythm of exuberance and the rhythms of Life These are sounds of blackness Blackness – the presence of all color (Wilson, “S, C, M,” 200)

While the parallelism of the lines “The rhythm of vitality / The rhythm of exuberance / and the rhythm of Life” establishes a “rhythmatic” sound, the anadiplosis in the last two lines of the first stanza underscores the already capitalized and thus marked “Blackness” which constitutes “the presence of all color.” Moving on to the second variable of the equation S + C = M, the speaker introduces the theme “The color representative of the sound” of the next few lines and afterwards expresses the theory that high sounds are equivalent to bright colors and low sounds are equivalent to somber colors (200): Color The color representative of the sound Hi sounds = bright colors Low sounds = sombre colors Rhythmatic sounds thrown together are harmonious Colors thrown together in prints with scales & wheels all their own (200; boldface mine)

The repetition of “thrown together” below about sound and color link the two “variables” even before the speaker proclaims the equation S + C = M in the next stanza:

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Movement Sound & Color = Movement Rhythmatic sound, print harmonious colors = Movement indicative only to Blackness These times of Easterness are where we must go for this is from whence we came (200)

The second line of the last stanza represents a variation of the equation “Sound & Color = Movement” and refers back to the last two statements about sound and color in the previous stanza, in which the speaker claimed that “Rhythmatic sounds thrown together / are harmonious / Colors thrown together in prints” displaying symbols for justice and motion. The next verse “indicative only to Blackness” permits readers to bring “Movement” together with “Blackness” and, due to the end rhyme of “Blackness” and “Easterness,” connect “Blackness” with Africa. Like many African American artists in the 1960s and 1970s, Wilson wrote a politically motivated poem connecting the color to black identity and Africa and encourages African Americans to move back to Africa, where the “sounds of blackness” originated. Another variation on the use of black in jazz poetry occurs in Henry Dumas’s “Play Ebony Play Ivory,” in which the verse “play ebony play ivory” manifests first of all the conceptual metonymy material for object and then the conceptual metonymy color of material for black identity: that is, the materials ebony and ivory stand metonymically for the black and white piano keys, which were traditionally made from ebony and strips of ivory, and, in a second thought, for the black and white ethnic groups (see below). The speaker of the line “play ebony play ivory” asks a piano player to play the black and white keys. The verse appears four times in the first two stanzas which taken together document Dumas’ transformation of the basic AAB-form of blues lyrics:

A

A

B

play ebony play ivory play chords that speak primeval play ebony play ivory play notes that speak my people … play ebony play ivory play til air explodes play til it subsides play ebony play ivory. (Dumas, “Play Ebony Play Ivory” 3)

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Typically, the lyrics of a twelve-bar blues song consist of three four-bar verses featuring the AAB-format: the first four-bar verse (A) is repeated once (A) and then followed by a concluding third-line (B). The first three strophes from Bessie Smith’s song “Backwater Blues” will illustrate the AAB-blues structure: AAB-Form:

Bessie Smith, “Backwater Blues”:

A A B

When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night Then trouble’s takin’ place in the lowlands at night

A A B

I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door That’s enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she wanna go

A A B

Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond I packed all my clothes, throwed ’em in and they rowed me along (Smith, “Backwater Blues” 72)

A comparison between the standard AAB-format of blues lyrics and the two stanzas of “Play Ebony Play Ivory” shows that Dumas divided the AAB-pattern of a single strophe in a blues song into the AA-form of his first stanza and the B-form of his second one (see above). His separation of the AA-pattern from the B-pattern also involves the breaking up of the first two four-bar verses of the standard blues format into a stanza with two tercets and the third four-bar verse into a quatrain. The matching graphical arrangement of the two triplets in the first stanza, which both begin with “play ebony play ivory,” visualizes the AA-structure of the stanza while the deviating shape of the second stanza highlights the B-verse. It displays a frame structure that consists of four lines: the two indented lines “play ebony play ivory” frame the two non-indented lines “play til air explodes” and “play til it subsides.” The second stanza, then, manifests Dumas’ visualization of the fourbar blues structure as four lines and not as the two triplets of the first stanza. Dumas underscores the AA-form of the first stanza by repeating the same euphonious prosody of the first tercet once more in the second tercet of the first stanza. A brief analysis of the rhyme scheme and the succession of stressed and unstressed syllables demonstrates the similar prosodic structure of the AAtriplets:

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A: a b c

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A: / × × × / ×× × play ebony play ivory / / × play chords that / / × × speak primeval

a b c

/ × × × / ×× × play ebony play ivory / / × play notes that / / × × speak my people

Both triplets share the same structure (abc) and the same melodious quality due to the euphonious prosody of the three lines. The repetition of “play ebony play ivory” at the outset of the two triplets as well as the anaphora in the first two lines of the triplet and the iteration of the word “speak” at the beginning of the last line contribute to the melodious quality of the AA-pattern. Unlike the identical AA-verses of a standard blues song (e.g., Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues”), however, the two AA-triplets of the first stanza evince dissimilarities in lines two and three (b and c): Dumas replaces “chords” with “notes” in the second line of the second triplet and changes the metaphorical expression “speak primeval” to the metaphor “speak my people.” Hence the same graphical arrangement of the three lines and the same prosody allow readers to identify the AA-pattern of the triplets whereas the different words and meaning in the last two lines of both triplets make them aware of the dissimilarities between the two otherwise matching tercets. Dumas’ indentation of the two verses “play ebony play ivory” in the second stanza visualizes a frame structure and links the stanza to the similarly indented verses of the previous one. Since all four lines begin with “play,” the stanza depicts his use of anaphora to emphasize the speaker’s request for the jazz pianist to “play” and exhibits his subdivision of the anaphora into the framing pair of lines and a framed couplet. Almost like the two framing lines “play ebony play ivory,” the two consecutive lines “play til air explodes” and “play til it subsides” exhibit a similar prosodic melody and, together with the two metaphorical linguistic expressions, further distinguish the second stanza. These two linguistic metaphors manifest the conceptual correlation of “til air explodes” with loud and “til it subsides” with soft dynamics. Consequently, the speaker encourages the fictitious jazz pianist to play extremely loud music and then play until the loud “explosions” quiet down. At the same time, however, the phrase “til air explodes” hints at the speaker’s call for violent action further below. In the next two stanzas, the speaker asks the pianist to play muted chords for the dead:

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for the songless, the dead who rot the earth all these dead, whose muted sour tongues speak broken chords, all these aging people poison the heart of earth. they cannot sing they cannot play they cannot breathe the early rhythm they never heard the pulse of womb (Dumas, “Play Ebony Play Ivory” 3; boldface mine)

The ambiguous “muted” refers to the silent tongues of the dead and, in the general context of music and in the particular context of “chords,” refers to the softened or muffled sound of jazz. And although the enjambment in the fourth and fifth line paradoxically ties the verse “speak broken chords” to the “muted sour tongues,” the analogous construction of the former phrase with the verses “speak primeval” and “speak my people” of the first stanza enables the readers to interpret it as a request from the speaker: he or she asks the pianist to play a muffled blues for the dead. For the living black people (“my people”), the speaker asks the pianist to play loud and uplifting music and expresses his or her requests with two metaphorical linguistic expressions: the image of “bursting lungs” relates to loud dynamics (and to the image of air exploding) and the image of “spirits of morning breath” to uplifting spirits. The speaker’s heartening exclamations “so up!” and “up!” within the context of the first four lines also point to the orientational metaphors life is up, loud is up, and happy is up as well as to a general upward spatial orientation: so up! you bursting lungs you spirits of morning breath up! and make fingers and play long and play soft play ebony play ivory. play my people all my people who breathe the breath of earth all my people who are keys and chords … (Dumas, “Play Ebony Play Ivory” 3)

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The speaker concludes the stanza with “play long and play soft” and “play ebony play ivory,” which, due to the similar construction of the lines, create a melodious effect. In fact, the last line “play ebony play ivory” corresponds to a musical cadence that affirms the melodic formula introduced in the first two stanzas. Alluding to the line “speak my people,” the speaker replaces “speak” with “play,” thereby linking it to the previous line “play ebony play ivory.” He also plays with words from other stanzas such as “breathe” and “earth” in his or her little improvisation on “my people” that ends with a metaphorical mapping of “keys” and “chords” onto “all my people.” The next stanza exhibits some of the words and phrases already used above to describe jazz: the phrase “your lungs scream” as well as the consecutive lines “til they explode” and “til blood subsides” refer to the phrases “you bursting lungs,” “til air explodes,” and “til it subsides,” respectively. Despite the similarities among the phrases, the context has unequivocally shifted from jazz to militant protest: now touch and hear and see let your lungs scream til they explode til blood subsides and flesh vibrates (Dumas, “Play Ebony Play Ivory” 3)

Instead of asking the pianist to play loud and soft music, the speaker calls on “my people” to protest vehemently against white oppression and, indicated by “til blood subsides,” advocates the use of violence à la the Black Power Movement. Similar to the theme subsiding explosions expressed in lines such as “til they explode / til blood subsides,” the speaker’s sudden outburst subsides in the final stanza as he or she invites the pianist once more to make chords that speak play long play soft play ebony play ivory play ebony play ivory (Dumas, “Play Ebony Play Ivory” 3–4)

This final strophe is the second part of the poem’s overall frame structure which encloses a call for violent actions against white oppressors in two melodious sections about jazz music. Like other black artists during the 1960s, Dumas promotes

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the theme of black militant protest. However, instead of proclaiming straightforwardly, he embeds it in a poem, in which “ebony” and “ivory” of the verse “play ebony play ivory” metonymically refer to black and white piano keys and to the respective racial group while the repetition and variation of the verse creates a harmonious rhythmic and melodic context for the dissonant voice of black power. Dumas also interconnects brown with black identity and sound in his poem “Brown sound” without mapping the color onto “tone-color.” Each stanza pretends that the “brown sound” triggers “brown” memories and that, in a next step, the speaker of the poem relates a speculative memory about a first time experience of a presumably black reader. In the first stanza, for instance, the speaker associates the “brown sound” with “chocolate memories” and then presents a “brown” chocolate memory about the reader’s first-time experience of seeing and tasting grapes: brown sound chocolate memories like the first time you saw grapes and tasted them and learned the color blue (Dumas, “Brown sound” 144)

A similar pattern governs the next three stanzas: the “brown sound” triggers “cream milk / echoes” in the second stanza, “africa / pulses” in the third stanza, and “america / pulses plus pushing / down trees” in the fourth stanza (145). The parallelism of the last two associations indicates a similarity between the “africa / pulses” and the “america / pulses,” bringing “brown” Africa and “brown” America together, but the supplement to the latter phrase “plus pushing / down trees” as well as the plosive consonant sound of the alliteration in “pulses plus pushing” adds the aspect of aggression to the “america / pulses” (145). All three stanzas also include an imagined recollection of a first-time experience such as seeing bees and tasting honey for the first time (second stanza), having sexual intercourse, hearing drums, and experiencing the rhythm of love for the first time (third stanza), and seeing a wild horse in a desert for the first time (fourth stanza): brown sound cream milk echoes like the first time you saw bees and tasted gold and learned the honey tongue

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brown sound africa pulses like the first time you exploded between legs and heard drums and learned the message of rhythm love brown sound america pulses plus pushing down trees like the first time you saw that wild crazy horse riding through painted deserts and you learned the grand canyon red mother (Dumas, “Brown sound” 144–145)

The repetition of “brown sound,” the references to blue, Africa, and America, and especially the depiction of the first sexual experience as “the first time you exploded between legs” specify the addressed audience as African-American men. Dumas highlights the audience’s black identity in the initial two lines of the last stanza and, in a final twist, implies that the first-time experience of blackness is also the last time of experiencing it “like that”: brown sound black outline like the first time like the first time the first time is the last time like that (Dumas, “Brown sound” 144–145)

Although the last stanza begins, like the other ones, with “brown sound,” it deviates from the others. Its first line does not continue with an enjambement such as “brown sound chocolate / memories” and “brown sound africa / pulses.” Instead, the first verse “brown sound” and the second one “black outline” constitute two separate and compact phrases. Moreover, the next five lines no longer address the; the lines themselves have become the theme of an improvisation and advance a coherent statement: “the first time / is the last time / like that.” These differences between the first four stanzas and the last one demonstrate that the last stanza calls for an interconnection with improvisation. It asks readers to es-

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tablish a metaphorical correspondence between the lines and a jazz solo, which starts out with two short compact phrases and a repetition of a brief theme before a playful fragmentation of the theme takes place, and so links the indistinct expression “brown sound” to jazz. The similar phrase “tan notes” from Frank Marshall Davis’s “Jazz Band” documents the synesthetic mapping of brown onto musical notes. It appears twice at the end of a stanza, in which Davis anthropomorphizes the band’s instruments: Thick bass notes from a moon-faced drum Saxophones moan, banjo strings hum High thin notes from the cornet’s throat Trombone snorting, bass horn snorting Short tan notes from the piano And the short tan notes from the piano (Davis, “Jazz Band” 20)

The drum is “moon-faced,” the saxophones “moan,” and the banjo strings “hum.” In contrast to these straightforward personifications, the verse “High thin notes from the cornet’s throat” manifests a combination of the orientational metaphor pitch is up (“High”), the image-based metaphor “thin notes,” the metonymic relation between the shape of a cornet and a person’s throat, and the metaphorical personification a cornet is a person’s throat. Lastly, the trombone and bass horn are “snorting,” which could also refer to the sound made by horses and pigs. In addition, the pianist’s notes are tan-colored, that is, the phrase “short tan notes” represents a linguistic realization of conceptualizing musical notes in terms of a brownish skin color. Finally, the short syllables of the last two verses produce a cadenced ending and allow for a figurative interpretation of the predominantly monosyllabic words as short notes played on a piano.

4.5.3 A Palette of Colors Other jazz poets such as Thulani Davis express the notion of creativity with a palette of colors. She writes about a woman who experiences a dull phase in her life and, by improvising on colors, words, images, and sounds in her imagination, affirms to herself that she is still “alive inside” (42). The poem “the attack could not be seen by night” begins with a statement about the monotony of “this little phase” (42) and then plunges into an energetic jazz improvisation:

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this little phase keeps on the same way without variety jazz and compromise making blue snow grow at the windows mohair fumes clog my throat like cats flames pounce without burning shadows gather in parkas at my back turn so i can see your face stand where i can see you man should someone phone i will tell whoever it is i cannot escape this night even saxophones do not dry light the brown sweat terror in white doorways under multicolored covers there is no way to sleep with the phone falling off the hook the blaring beep of warnings do not leave your house do not stay home this is the contradiction of when i live even fanfares and flourishes do not announce a truce with our personal assailants without variety blue dust blood traces in floor wax black fog and nappy lint colorless wax spreads broad tears across all the windows some permanent weather happened to this building some misplaced coal mine had its disaster here and I am alive inside (Davis, “the attack could not be seen by night” 42; emphasis mine)

The words in boldface highlight Davis’s play with colors and the noun “color.” Her improvisation begins with a reference to a pensive, melancholic mood conveyed in “blue snow” and continues with “brown sweat,” “white,” and “multicolored” before she embarks on a variation of the color-series: “blue,” “black,” and “col-

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orless.” She embeds the improvisation on colors in many creative variations of sounds and images as a brief analysis of a few lines will illustrate: making blue snow grow at the windows mohair fumes clog my throat like cats flames pounce without burning shadows gather in parkas at my back (42; emphasis mine)

After mentioning blue, she presents the words “snow,” “grow,” and “windows” that all end with the vowel / əʊ / (underlined) and contrasts the proximity of the internal rhyme “snow” and “grow” with the rhyming pair “windows” and “shadows” across four lines. The next line not only combines “mohair” with “clog my throat like cats,” which possibly alludes to the regurgitation of hairballs of fur by some cats, but also activates the improvisation on the notions of fire and cats: “fumes” leads to “flames” and “burning” and “cats” triggers “pounce” in the following line (italics). These and other techniques such as the frequent use of the personal pronoun “i” in the upper section (see the italicized letter “ i ”) and the ubiquitous alliterations (e.g., “clog my throat like cats”) establish a contrast between the initial assertion referring to the monotonous phase and the subsequent creative improvisation. The final position of the speaker’s statement “and I am alive inside” and the “I” emphasize the statement in which the speaker affirms her aliveness “inside.” Even though she experiences a dull phase in her life, she proves to herself that she is still alive and not “without variety” and “jazz” by improvising on colors, words, images, and sounds in her mind. Rather than improvising on a palette of colors, Kenneth Rexroth translates Ornette Coleman’s practice of modifying tone-colors into a pattern of changing colors “Written to Music: Eight for Ornette’s Music.” His poem allows readers to identify several metaphorical mappings between it and Coleman’s style of playing free-jazz improvisations: for instance, the inserted blues sections at the end of the poem maps onto Coleman’s characteristic practice of drawing on the blues, the poem’s linguistic patterns map onto musical patterns of Coleman’s solos, and the change of colors maps onto Coleman’s change of tone-colors. An excerpt will illustrate the sets of correspondences between the poem and Coleman’s style of improvisation:

4.5 “tone-colors” are colors |

time turns like tables the indifferent and blissful Spring saves all souls and seeds and slaves asleep dark Spring in the dark whispering human will words spoken by two kissing tongues hissing union Eve’s snake stars come on two naked bodies tumble through bodiless Christmas trees blazing like bees and rosebuds fire turns to falling powder lips relax and smile and sleep fire sweeps the hearth of the blood on far off red double stars they probate their won tied wills Blues the sea will be deep the eye will be deep the last bell has been deep the iceberg has been cold the nail has been cold the hungry whore was cold the jungle was fierce the tooth was fierce the poor bum’s woman is fierce the plate of tripe is shallow the omelette in the pan is shallow shallow as the wisdom of the ages the hawk in the zenith knows the mole under the spade knows the curly brain knows too

Blues grey as the arctic grey as the sea grey as the heart grey as the bird in the tree red as the sun red as the robin red as the heart red as the axe in the tree blue as the star blue as the gull blue as the heart blue as the air in the tree black as the tongue black as the vulture black as the heart black as the hanged girl in the tree

don’t you forget it (Rexroth, “Written to Music: Eight for Ornette’s Music” 622–624; underlining and boldface mine)

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The last three parts of “Written to Music: Eight for Ornette’s Music” manifest Ornette Coleman’s way of playing his free-jazz solos: the asymmetrical lines, the numerous alliterations such as the alliteration of / t / in “time turns like tables,” and the associative series of “kissing,” “hissing,” and “Eve’s snake” (underlined above) correspond to the asymmetrical lines, the repetition of the same note, and the construction of Coleman’s improvisations. The subsequent part entitled “Blues” (left column) consists of five tercets, which do not exactly match the AAB-form of standard blues lyrics, and a single line at the end. Contrary to the AAB-form of blues lyrics, Rexroth always alters the second line slightly. In the first stanza, for instance, he changes “sea” of the first line “the sea will be deep” to “eye” in the second line: “the eye will be deep.” Such inconsistencies between the AAB-form of traditional blues lyrics and the tercets of the blues section metaphorically correspond to Coleman’s flexible free-jazz interpretations of traditional forms while the title and the recognizable AAB-format of the blues section refer to the blues background of Coleman’s free-jazz solos. The poem concludes with another part entitled “Blues,” which I placed to the right above. Unlike the first blues part, the stanzas of the second one neither follow the common AAB-format of blues lyrics nor do they exhibit a mainly epiphoric structure. Instead, the second “Blues” consists of four anaphoric quatrains and manifests several different patterns: for instance, all lines have the same grammatical construction, the last two lines of each quatrain end with “heart” and “in the tree,” respectively, and all lines of a quatrain begin with the same color and the color changes with each. This change of colors echoes Coleman’s style of modifying tone-colors and the unexpected horrible image of the last line “black as the hanged girl in the tree” is equivalent to a surprise ending of a jazz solo. The poem, thus, documents Rexroth’s effort at translating some features of Coleman’s style of playing improvised free-jazz into writing and, more specifically, manifests the metaphor “tone-color” is a color. Clarence Major also brings together a palette of colors and jazz music. His “In Walked Bud With a Palette,” however, does not metaphorically equate “tonecolors” and colors. The blend of the last names at the end of the subtitle “T. Monk and P. Cézanne: Cézmonk” not only exemplifies the idea of blending the music played by Thelonious Monk with the colors used by Paul Cézanne; it also spells out the combination of the two art forms and artists: the first part “In Walked Bud” refers to a piece composed by Monk and the second part “With a Palette” refers to a color palette. Taking up the topic of mixture as indicated by the blend “Cézmonk,” the first-person speaker practices it in the first part (excerpt):

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IN WALKED BUD WITH A PALETTE T. Monk and P. Cézanne: Cézmonk (Alternate take) Take one Pompeii-eyed old man with a brush, poised in midair near Mont Sainte-Victoire, take one strange young man filled with light, bopping at the piano in Minton’s. Who are you, dull-eyed mathematical seer? Who are you – monsoon-sound maker? I force the two of you together – mix you in a blue bowl and you rise like a Blake fantasy – a vorticism unto yourself, left-handed with keys and brushes. I call you Cézmonk. I hang upside down from your gut-wrenching rafters. Birdcalls go out from you before sunrise, combo-smooth. They smooch the sky. Your boats are filled with labeled gunnysacks of precise beats, licks, and uncoiling cubes of careful color. (Major, “In Walked Bud With a Palette” 229–230)

As if following a recipe, the speaker takes the two artists, which he or she circumscribes in the first two allusive stanzas, mixes them together in “a blue bowl,” and calls the outcome “Cézmonk.” The following stanza begins with a bizarre image of the speaker who, like a bat, hangs “upside down from / your [presumably Monk’s and Cézanne’s] gut-wrenching rafters,” and concludes with another odd image that brings together jazz music, colors, a reference to cubism (“cubes”), and a 44 beat generated by the consonant “c” (underlined): “Your boats are filled / with labeled gunnysacks / of precise beats, licks, and / uncoiling cubes of careful

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color.” Both pictures and especially the catalog of peculiar images of the last stanza highlight the impressionistic form: You are Gilgamesh’s buttons. You are toes of a Spanish martyr. You are teeth of a vestal virgin. You are purple rocks in a stream. You are ghost figures in a zoom lens. You are seeds in sunflowers – in that vase on Vincent’s table. You are the interior of a dolphin’s mouth. You are the unoiled screws in a new motor. Your sounds and colors are my self-portrait – unlike me, it’s a portrait of uninterrupted elegance, an elegance twice that keeps lifting lifting – lifting belly to the dicethrower behind the curtain. (232; emphasis mine)

The catalog of impressionistic images includes another reference to the amalgam of sounds and colors (underlined) and ends with an unexpected, non-elegant image of a “lifting belly.” Both the impressionistic images as well as the surprise ending, the title, and, most of all, the cue “(Alternate take)” at the outset document the metaphor an impressionistic interpretation of a monk composition is the impressionistic poem “in walked bud with a palette.” In addition, the cue “(Alternate take)” invites readers to move from a literal to a figurative translation of the poem as an “alternate take” of a Monk composition such as “Ruby, My Dear,” which the speaker mentions four times in the text, and perceive it as an impressionistic interpretation of a jazz pianist who, metaphorically speaking, paints a composition by Monk with a palette of colors. Linda France, in a playful allusion to her name, brings, like Major, a French painter and an American jazz musician together in “Sonia Delaunay Listens to Miles Davis.” Her poem pretends that Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), who joined her husband Robert Delaunay and others in founding and developing the so-called Orphism movement in the 1910s, listens to Davis’s cool jazz and views her Orphist painting style through the lens of his music. Put differently, she understands the domain cool jazz played by miles davis in terms of the domain sonia delau-

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nay’s orphist paintings and maps her Orphist painting style, which involves the correlation of musical qualities and colors (“Orphism”) and “the harmonious juxtaposition of areas of pure color” (“Sonia Delaunay”), onto Miles’ cool jazz style. A comparison of the poem with a painting by her husband Robert Delaunay (Rhythme/3, 1938), who both shared a similar Orphist style, will help to illustrate the conceptual metaphor: Jazz happens where there was none like paint, circles and half-circles, path of a dark snake, side-winding a halo, shining the kind of blue that swims through sadness, small squares – tall buildings waiting to fall under the weight of sky Someone’s laughing in black and white, shrugging in flashing lights. Cars cruise in the rain, chequered taxis taking corners like oaths. The city’s dancing in syncopated shoes, red leather, yellow leather. Steam breathes off tarmac, curves stretching into nothing, the ghost of a voice.

Robert Delaunay, Rythme/3 (1938); Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zeland. Bequest of Judge Julius Isaacs, New York, 1983/Bridgeman Images

The sun will rise. It will be midnight. (France, “Sonia Delaunay” 40)

The persona Sonia Delaunay’s thought that “Jazz happens / where there was none” demonstrates that she perceives her Orphist style of painting (“where there was none”) in terms of jazz (“Jazz happens”). She first claims that jazz happens in her paintings (“paint”) and lists some of the abstract forms she often uses, such as “circles” and “half-circles” (e.g., her husband’s Rythme/3 and her painting entitled Rythme Couleur as well as several other Orphist paintings) and then

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correlates a sequence of black half-circles in one of her paintings (see Rythme/3) with a “path / of a dark snake” which, in a snake-like coils, winds around a “halo” (“side-winding a halo”). The term “halo,” in turn, manifests her conceptualization of a half-circle in terms of a “halo” while the apposition “shining the kind / of blue that swims / through sadness” specifies the color of this “shining” halo: Delaunay is thinking of a blue half-circle. Apparently she has a painting in mind, which depicts a sequence of black half-circles “side-winding” a blue halfcircle (probably one of her own paintings in which a series of black half-circles “side-wind” a light blue half-circle and a dark blue half-circle), and, at this point, connects the blue half-circles and Davis’s cool jazz. The same three verses quoted above – “shining the kind / of blue that swims / through sadness” – display her association of the blue color with Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959) to which she is probably listening at the moment and her mapping of the blue color onto the sad mood of the music (whereby the whole expression could refer to a dark blue half-circle that swims in a “sea” of gray and grayish-blue as can be found in her painting Rythme Couleur). The last three lines of the stanza reveal that Delaunay’s mind wanders from “circles” and “half-circles” to “small squares” (see, for example, the squares in the painting “Untitled” above) which, in addition to the blue mood of Davis’s music, activate the image of “tall / buildings waiting to fall / under the weight of sky.” At least the line “under the weight of sky” allows for the possibility of establishing a correspondence between the mood of Davis’s performances on Kind of Blue (e.g., “Blue in Green”) and the oppressive feeling conveyed by the image “under the weight of sky.” The second stanza explains how the music leads Delaunay to imagine a scene at a jazz club by associatively mapping concrete images onto abstract elements of her Orphist paintings: for instance, the first three lines “Someone’s laughing / in black and white, / shrugging in flashing lights” manifests her conceptual mapping of the image of a laughing mouth, which exposes white teeth (perhaps the laughing mouth of an African-American person), onto black and white half-circles and the image of shoulders “shrugging in flashing lights” onto the two half-circles placed next to each and surrounded by other colors; the next three lines “Cars cruise in the rain / chequered taxis taking / corners like oaths” exhibit Delaunay’s translation of Davis’s lyrical music into the lyrical phrases (e.g., “Cars cruise in the rain”) and her mapping of the image of rain onto the blue mood as well as her mapping of the image of “chequered taxis” onto the checkered pattern of squares in her paintings. The following three verses “The city’s dancing / in syncopated shoes, red / leather, yellow leather” document her translation of a syncopated jazz rhythm into the syncopated rhythm of the lines “in syncopated shoes, red / leather, yellow leather” (emphasis mine) and her cognitive act of associatively

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mapping the image of syncopated shoes onto the checkered patterns found in her paintings. Very likely the term “syncopated” and the previously mentioned image of a “dark snake” refer to Robert Delaunay’s painting Rythme Syncope dit le Serpent Noir (1934) while the phrase “red / leather, yellow leather” points to her conceptual mapping of the image of red and yellow shoes onto the red and yellow half-circles (see, for instance, Delaunay’s painting Rythme Couleur). Finally, the term “tarmac” and the statement “curves / stretching into nothing” indicate that Delaunay associatively maps the image of a curvy street made of tar “stretching into nothing” onto the left-hand part of Delaunay’s painting Rythme Syncope dit le Serpent Noir (1934). Simultaneously she conceptualizes Davis’s forlorn sound in terms of the painting and perceives it as “the ghost of a voice.” Also, the paradoxical juxtaposition of the two brief statements “The sun will rise.” and “It will be midnight.” displays her ekphrastic translation of her characteristic style of juxtaposing pure colors into the two concluding images. The detailed discussion of France’s “Sonia Delaunay Listens to Miles Davis” has demonstrated her creative effort of imagining the fictitious cognitive processes of Delaunay while she listens to Davis’s Kind of Blue. France pretends that Delaunay views elements of her Orphist paintings in the light of Davis’s music, yet her poem goes beyond a linguistic realization of the metaphor sonia delaunay’s orphist paintings is the cool jazz played by miles davis. For instance, the music triggers a scene at a jazz club in Delaunay’s mind and she embellishes it by translating elements from her own and from her husband’s paintings into impressionistic images that fit into the context of a jazz club in an urban setting (e.g., laughing people, checkered taxis, dancing, and “syncopated shoes”). A final example illustrates the metaphor the sound of instruments is a palette of colors. In Aleda Shirley’s “Ellington Indigos,” the narrator drives through a landscape in fall and the fall colors produce “[a] kind of uneasy indolent longing” in her, which, the speaker asserts, is similar “to the one evoked in me by Ellington’s pastels, or fall” (198). The speaker’s use of “Ellington’s pastels” anticipates the synesthetic cross-domain correspondences between the music played by Ellington’s musicians and a palette of colors documented in the next few stanzas (excerpt): Though the autumn colors haven’t yet peaked, here and there I see a sweetgum edged in violet, a maple dying back to pale-yellow. The soft azure of an alto sax, the jagged red of a growling trumpet, the raw gold of a clarinet – discussing Ellington’s tone palette, a jazz critic perfectly described

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this landscape. Though the wind’s picking up, I stop to put down the top of the car. It’s the story, Ellington explained, of a little girl who loves a little boy. Everyday she sits at a window and waits for him to come by. One day he doesn’t. “Mood Indigo” just tells how she feels. With its trio of clarinet and muted trumpet and trombone, “Mood Indigo” starts, each chord shaped by small movements in the line of a single instrument. (Shirley, “Ellington Indigos” 198–199; emphasis not mine)

After having identified the violet color of a sweetgum tree and the pale-yellow color of a maple tree, the speaker maps the fall colors of a landscape onto the instruments: the sound of an alto saxophone is the “soft azure” color of the sky, the “growling” trumpet is the “jagged red” of red leaves, and the sound of a clarinet is the “raw gold” of yellow leaves, and the musical tones are a palette of colors (“Ellington’s tone palette”). Since the featured line-up of the jazz standard “Mood Indigo” mentioned in the text (last stanza) – clarinet, trumpet, and trombone – differs from the line-up of the three instruments – alto saxophone, trumpet, and clarinet – referred to in the second stanza above, the speaker is not listening to “Mood Indigo” when he or she perceives one of Ellington’s compositions in terms of a palette of colors in Shirley’s poem with the telling title “Ellington’s Indigos.” Of the jazz poems I have discussed, only Kenneth Rexroth’s poem “Written to Music: Eight for Ornette’s Music” manifests the metaphor “tone-colors” are colors. He translates Ornette Coleman’s style of modifying tone-colors into a sequence of colors, whereas all other poets found different creative ways of employing colors: Lawson Fusao Inada, for instance, translates the blue tonality of Monk’s “Blue Monk” into a “blue” phonology while Richard Elman, like many other poets, uses the oppositional pair blue vs. red to indicate the contrast between cool and hot jazz. Henry Dumas and other members of the Black Arts Movement experiment with black and brown within the context of jazz and employ them as markers of black identity. Thulani Davis improvises on various colors in her poem “the attack could not be seen by night,” whereas Aleda Shirley maps a palette of fall colors onto the different sound of instruments played by Ellington’s band. To discover such a diversity of creative ways poets interconnected jazz with colors, I had to use a “transgressive” approach and look beyond manifestations of the metaphor “tone-colors” are colors in jazz poetry.

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4.6 musical key is a mood Typically, musical pieces are based on a harmonic “key” or “tonic.” They “tend to be centered around a single musical pitch called a tonic” (Wyatt and Schroeder 1998: 12). The tonic forms the basis on which major and minor scales, that is, “groups of notes arranged in steps around the tonic” (12), are built. A common way of referring to the tonic and the scale is to say that a composition is “in” a certain major or minor key: for instance, a song is “in the key of E minor” or “in the key of B-flat major (B major).” Given the discussion in Western music theory on the interrelation between the two scales and emotional qualities, in which critics largely agree that the major scale expresses a “bright” or “happy” and the minor scale a “dark” or “sad” mood,⁶¹ I would expect that jazz poets for the most part map a happy mood onto a major key and a sad mood onto a minor key and yet I only discovered two poems – Jeremy Robson’s “Blues for the Lonely” and Ron Welburn’s “Miles, Trane, Wilbur Hardin” – which document the translation of moods conveyed by jazz pieces into a “sad” and a “happy” work, respectively. In the first section, I will search for the metaphor minor key is a sad mood and demonstrate that jazz poets sometimes render the sad emotional quality of blues. Blues poems are kaleidoscopic in nature and cover a broad range of emotions and topics.⁶² Only one poem matches the conceptual metaphor minor key is a sad mood. In the second section, my exploration will focus on the metaphor major key is a happy mood and I will show that, firstly, merely one jazz poem exhibits this particular metaphor and that, secondly, only one poem conveys a decidedly happy mood. Despite the fact that no more than two of the poems of the jazz poetry corpus actually exhibit metaphorical correspondences between a musical scale and a respective emotional quality, I came across a variety of creative ways poets used to express emotional qualities such as sadness and happiness.

61 Bryan Hyer, for instance, states that “[t]hough highly specific with respect to different repertories and listeners, expressive qualities fall into two basic categories, which conform to the basic difference – often asserted as an opposition – between major and minor: major is heard to be brighter and more cheerful than minor, which in comparison is darker and sadder.” (Hyer, “Key (i)”). And Leonard B. Meyer elaborates on the moods typically related by listeners to the minor key: “The minor mode is not only associated with intense feeling in general but with the delineation of sadness, suffering, and anguish in particular” (Meyer 1956: 227). 62 Kevin Young makes a similar observation in the “Foreword” of his anthology Blues Poems: “Far from a series of sad poems, this collection—the first devoted exclusively to poems about the blues—celebrates life. As Langston Hughes often said, the blues are ‘laughing to keep from crying’; the fact that this line also appears in the song “Trouble in Mind” tells us that even when there’s trouble, we still can laugh about it” (Young, “Foreword” 12).

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4.6.1 minor key is a sad mood An unusually large number of jazz poems represent no translations of blues or any other type of gloomy sounding music yet still express a sad mood. They are elegies in which the speakers mourn well-known musicians such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Chet Baker.⁶³ These poems often evince sad, melancholic sentiments, which, however, are not the product of the metaphor minor key is a sad mood. A case in point is Ted Joans’s elegy “Lester Young.” The speaker of the poem – probably the Beat poet Ted Joans – strikes a nostalgic chord in his reflections on Lester Young’s performances and also allows for “happy” tunes without making any reference to a minor or major scale: Sometimes he was cool like an eternal blue flame burning in the old Kansas City nunnery Sometimes he was happy ’til he’d think about his birth place and its blood stained clay hills and crow-filled trees Most times he was blowin’ on the wonderful tenor sax of his, preachin’ in very cool tones, shouting only to remind you of a certain point in his blue messages He was our president […] Our prez done died, he know’d this would come but death has only booked him, alongside Bird, Art Tatum, and other heavenly wailers. Angels of Jazz – they don’t die – they live they live – in hipsters like you and I (Joans, “Lester Young” 106)

Each stanza begins with a statement about Young that reinforces the poem’s sad nature: for instance, “Sometimes he was cool,” “Sometimes he was happy,” “He was our president,” and “Our prez done died” (106). And each statement is fol-

63 In Chapter 7 “Goodbye Porkpie Hat: Farewells and Remembrances” of Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present, Sascha Feinstein, as he summarizes it in the introduction, focuses on “the remarkable number of jazz innovators who died and the predominant elegiac theme in the jazz poetry from the 1970s” (11). Among the jazz elegies he discusses are Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” Quincy Troupe’s “Elegy for Wes,” Bill Zavatsky’s poem “To the Pianist Bill Evans,” Larry Neal’s “Don’t Say Goodbye to the Pork-Pie Hat,” and several poems commemorating the death of Chet Baker such as Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Speed Ball,” Ai’s poem “Archangel,” and Lynda Hull’s “Lost Fugue for Chet.” Most of the poems can be found in the two anthologies of jazz poems edited by Feinstein and Komunyakaa.

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lowed by a shorter or longer train of thought visualized via the length of indented passages: the first statement “Sometimes he was cool” is followed by a short indented passage while the fourth statement “He was our president” is followed by a longer indented passage. This structure corresponds to a musician who repeatedly begins his improvisation with a specific theme and then develops it in a different direction.⁶⁴ The first two stanzas also demonstrate how the speaker metaphorically projects Young’s style and contrasting emotions evoked by the music. In the first stanza, he projects the cool blue sound onto Young himself when he states that “Sometimes he [Young] was cool” and compares the jazz musician to “an eternal / blue flame burning in the old Kansas / City nunnery” (Joans, “Lester Young” 106) mentioning at the same time the city to which Young moved in 1933. In the second stanza, he projects happy and sad feelings onto Young again when he states that “Sometimes he [Young] was happy ’til he’d think / about his birthplace and its blood / stained clay hills and crow-filled trees” (106). As above, Joans interweaves a metaphorical description of Young’s music with biographical details of his life, such as his being born in Woodville, Mississippi, where several lynchings took place. After three more plaintive stanzas, the poem takes a sudden turn when it ends with an upbeat couplet: “Angels of Jazz – they don’t die – they live / they live – in hipsters like you and I” (Joans, “Lester Young” 106). Expressions such as “Angels of Jazz” and “hipsters,” the emphasis on life, and the spontaneous energy expressed by the short phrases indicate that the poem was written by a Beat poet who reflects on Young’s death and, in a surprising energetic burst, proclaims that the “Angel of Jazz” will live on in other aficionados of jazz. Another prominent subgenre of jazz poetry, the blues poem, is often tied to the melancholy and sadness expressed in blues music and lyrics. Blues musicians typically achieve this sound by playing traditional songs in a major key with flatted third and seventh notes (“blue notes”) and only occasionally in a minor key. The accompanying blues lyrics usually follow the traditional AAB-form and tell about personal hardships such as an unhappy love relationship and white oppression. A brief comparison between the first strophe from W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (1914) – customarily played in G major – and Mari Evans’s “Blues in Bb ”

64 See also my article “Kreativität, Improvisation und Spontaneität: Differenz und Intermedialität von Bebop Jazz und Beat-Literatur aus kulturökologischer Sicht,” in which I show that Jack Kerouac draws a parallel between the length of an utterance and the length of a musical phrase blown on a horn and that Allen Ginsberg cites Lester Young as a significant influence on his poem “Howl” (Redling 2008: 98–99).

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(1970s) will illustrate the similarity in form and theme of the early song and Evan’s poem: 1.

W.C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues”: I hate to see de ev’nin’ sun go down, Hate to see de ev’nin’ sun go down, ’Cause ma baby, he done lef dis town. (63)

2.

Mari Evans, “Blues in Bb ”: baby baby tell me what did I do wrong? baby baby tell me what did I do wrong? ain seen yo face since Thursday How come you stay away so long? […] Have you got another woman wash yo clothes and cook yo meals? Have you got another woman wash yo clothes and cook yo meals? Irregardless babe, she sho Lawd Cain feel about you like I feel baby baby tell me what did I do wrong? baby baby tell me what did I do wrong? ain seen yo face since Thursday How come you stay away so long? (12)

Both the lyrics of “St. Louis Blues” and “Blues in Bb ” exhibit the common AABformat: each of the first two stanzas of “St. Louis Blues” consists of a line (A), an almost verbatim repeated line (A), and a new line (B); the third stanza deviates from this standard format but the rhyme scheme “aabb” of the four verses refers back to the AAB-format. Evans varies the traditional AAB-form of blues lyrics by dividing both A-lines and the B-line into two verses each, thereby creating the alternating rhyme scheme “ababa’b’” whereby the last two lines evince an impure rhyme pattern (indicated by the apostrophe). Although she explicitly mentions

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the major scale B-flat major (Bb ) in the title, she, like Handy, the so-called “Father of the Blues,” establishes the sad feeling with the theme of lost love, rather than establishing a correlation between a minor key and a sad mood. Evans, in fact, cites the major scale Bb in the title to create an alliteration of the consonant “b” and underscores the alliteration through her repeated use of the word “baby” in verses such as “baby baby tell me / what did I do wrong?” Simultaneously, her frequent use of “b” also manifests her conceptualization of flatted blue notes, which, in music notation, has a stylized lowercase “b” ( ) as a sign. Ira Sadoff goes one step further in “Mood Indigo.” The title alludes to the jazz standard “Mood Indigo” composed by Duke Ellington and Barney Bigard with lyrics by Irving Mills in 1931. Set in A-flat major with its four flats A, B, D, and E, the piece strongly accentuates blue notes and tonality. The critic Neil Powell describes the composition’s mood as follows: “The most intensely pensive melancholia of all, of course, needs a shade beyond blue – and finds it in Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’” (Powell, “blue” 24). Like the color indigo (a shade darker than blue), Sadoff metaphorically translates the deep melancholic mood evoked by Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” into a disproportionate amount of the lowercase letter “b” (boldface): I’ve tried to trace the reverie without a source. Why I love that shade of blue the veins become when you press a thumb against my wrist. Why I take the bunting weighing down the branch of pine as a sign it’s lost, searching for its mate. Why I think of nineteen forty-four, the argument before my birth: it should have warned my mother how the future held her like the violent blue of storm. Like a tablet dropped into a glass of water, this mood dissolves and bubbles up a murky brew of hurt and anger misconstrued. The color of a bruise, a child before he draws his first traumatic breath. Why put a stop to it? Because the hook of waking in the dark drags me towards the morning light, because I must consume the cold sublime, the bowl of plums that calls us to the table. (Sadoff, “Mood Indigo” 12; emphasis mine)

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Sadoff’s heavy use of the letter “b” in thirteen of the twenty-three verses of the poem manifests the metaphor blue notes ( ) are the lowercase letter “b,” and, deviating from the pattern, he capitalizes the “B” in the verse “Why put a stop to it? Because the hook …” (boldface mine) to highlight the metaphor. Sadoff’s second technique of translating the intense melancholia of Ellington’s song consists of using several images which imply indigo (see underlined phrases above): for instance, “that shade of blue the veins become / when you press a thumb against my wrist,” “The color of a bruise,” “a child / before he draws his first traumatic breath,” and “the bowl of plums.” Each phrase refrains from explicitly mentioning the color but generates an image that points to it, such as the image of veins, a bruise, a newborn child, and plums. Such images, in turn, convey the “indigo”-mood of Ellington’s piece. The phrase “the violent blue of storm,” however, deviates from the pattern outlined above, as, in this case, the adjacency of the words “violent” and “blue” activates the connotation of the color indigo placed in-between the colors violet and blue on the electromagnet spectrum. Put together, both techniques produce a “Mood Indigo.” Jeremy Robson presents another way of rendering the blue feeling in “Blues for the Lonely.” Like other jazz poets, Robson writes about a person meditating on life and loneliness to express the pensive melancholic feeling evoked by blues songs. Yet his poem exhibits multiple conspicuous gaps and a footnote in which he states that he wrote the lines to “the track ‘Blue in Green’ on the Miles Davis album ‘Kind of Blue’” (56): Now the birds begin to crow It is the time for them to crow Below them hurrying cars have almost reached their destinations The crowded trains shrug slowly from the stations Soon they will be gone Only gaping stars lonely and unwatched guard the sleeping city The branches chatter in the breeze the grass softens under the falling dew. For some there is sleep, for others only pitiless joltings from uncertain memories. For some sleep comes in an overwhelming cloud, hurrying them past smiling suns to a Never-Never-land of warmth and kindness. But for most night brings a cover with cruel transparencies So for me. It is as if a blind man felt suddenly for his stick, and there were no stick or called softly for his dog, and there were no dog. There is no shelter, no cloak to hide behind, only question marks enquiring from the sky.

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Seeing her spread contentedly on the sheets, you know for the first time that you are strangers and you know everyone is a stranger. Desire changes to demand You want to run but there’s no-where to run to You want to shout but there’s no-one to listen. So you pretend and smile shake-hands and drink and smoke and yell love in everybody’s face. And they tell you you’re a hell of a guy and you believe them. You believe them until you’re alone until you lie staring at the silence and the hundred questions illuminated in the sky. *Written to the track “Blue in Green” of the Miles Davis record Kind of Blue. (Robson, “Blues for the Lonely” 55–56)

A leading exponent of a style called “modal jazz” in which “modal scales (or their general characteristics) dictate the melodic and harmonic content” (“Modal jazz”), Davis shuns frequent chord changes in the ballad “Blue in Green,” which he wrote in the key of E minor, in favor of producing musical “space” and a meditative mood.⁶⁵ Robson translates the brooding feeling, the tempo of the melody, the musical spaces, and tone of the ballad – and the sadness expressed by the minor scale – into his poetic text “Blues for the Lonely.” What follows is the musical notation of Davis’s first chorus after Gil Evans’s intro on the piano with the lines of the first stanza below the respective parts of the notation to demonstrate how Robson resourcefully realized the metaphor miles davis’s “blues in green” is the poem “blues for the lonely” and the metaphor minor key is a sad mood (but: the excerpt I use below to illustrate the translation process is in the key of G major):

65 The lack of frequent chord changes represents a defining characteristic of modal jazz: “The style has attracted musicians partly because it is relatively undemanding by comparison with those based on chord progressions. Because it is free of frequent harmonic interruption it can more easily create an unhurried and meditative feeling. Many performances are based on a twochord sequence or a drone. The absence of frequent chord changes alone is sometimes regarded as defining modal jazz” (“Modal jazz”).

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Am

Davis

7

B

mf

7 5

Em

7 3

(1) Now the birds begin to crow

Dm

7

7

G

C

maj7

7 5

[pause]

It is the time for them

3

G

Em

7

(2) to crow

D

/

Below them hurrying cars have almost reached their destinations

7 9

Bm

7

Em

/

7

The crowded

Am

7

3

(3) trains shrug slowly from the stations

B

7 5

/

Soon

3

Em

be gone [pause]

they will

7

Dm

7

7

G

(4) Only gaping stars

C

maj7 3

lonely

B

/

7 5

and unwatched guard the sleeping city Em

7

(5) / F

The branches

7 9

Bm

chatter 7

/ Em

in

7

(6) the breeze [pause] the grass softens under the falling dew.

(Davis, “Blue in Green” 35; emphasis mine)

Robson’s poem allows readers to detect multiple correspondences between it and the melody. The gap between “Now the birds begin to crow” and “It is the time for them to crow” corresponds to the pause between the two musical phrases (see the pause in the first line) and the end of each verse correlates with a pause in the melody. A further metaphorical correspondence exists between the image of “hurrying cars” as well as the polysyllabic verb “hurrying” and the fast tempo of the nine sixteenth notes combined into two connecting bars (2, middle). Also, the repetitive use of / əʊ / in words such as “crow,” “below,” and “slowly” (excluding

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the eye-rhyme words “Now” and “crowded”) as well as the image of trains that “shrug slowly from the stations” (55) correspond to the melody’s plaintive tone and the piece’s slow tempo, respectively. Such correlations between Davis’s style in “Blue in Green” and the poem manifest no exact mappings of the poem onto the music, but rather ‘loose’ transformations of the music and the mood expressed via the minor scale. For instance, the comparison of line 5 with the fifth verse of the stanza (example 5) shows an apparent mismatch between the triplet of sixteenth notes and the word “in.” Such discrepancies illustrate Robson’s practice of creating a ‘loose’ translation while listening to “Blue in Green” on Kind of Blue. Another approach to treating sad emotions evoked by blues songs and modal jazz is James A. Emanual’s “Get Up, Blues,” in which he relies on what Lakoff and Johnson call “orientational metaphors,” namely happy is up and sad is down.⁶⁶ He conceptualizes melancholic and sad emotional states induced by blues compositions in terms of down and gives it a special twist by personifying the blues and introducing the orientational metaphor sad is up. In the first three stanzas, the speaker pities the Blues for preferring to stay down on the ground without professing any ambition to move spatially upwards: Blues Never climb a hill Or sit on a roof In starlight. Blues Just bend low And moan in the street And shake a borrowed cup. Blues Just sit around Sipping, Hatching yesterdays. (Emanual, “Get Up, Blues” 51)

Addressing the Blues, the speaker commiserates with the Blues who never wants to move upwards – sad is up, but rather stays low and close to the ground. The images of the personified Blues who begs for money in a drooping posture and who sits on the ground and wails about yesterdays befits the experiential basis

66 For a classic discussion of “orientational metaphors” and their way of giving various concepts an up-down spatialization, see Chapter 4 “Orientational Metaphors” in Lakoff and Johnson’s groundbreaking study Metaphors We Live By (2003), 14–21.

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and the emotional state of sadness expressed by the blues. Hence the two images manifest the orientational metaphor sad is down and, in addition, exhibit the metaphorical conceptualization of the Blues as a beggar. In short, Emanual realizes a combination of the metaphors sad is down and blues is a beggar in these two stanzas. In the fourth stanza, the speaker’s voice changes from commiseration to a cheerful but forceful tone in his exhortation directed at the Blues: Get up, Blues. Fly. Learn what it means To be up high. (Emanual, “Get Up, Blues” 51)

The speaker encourages the Blues to get up and fly. His exhortation promotes a shift from the metaphor sad is down to the unusual metaphor sad is up which probably entails that the Blues should leave his sadness and drooping posture behind and learn what it means to be happy. The form of the final stanza underlines the speaker’s instruction: first, it does not begin with the initial “Blues” as the other stanzas and thus deviates from the regular rhythm established in the first three stanzas; second, an end rhyme occurs in line two (“Fly”) and line four (“high”) of the fourth stanza whereas the other three stanzas are rhymeless. Both digressions from the form of the first three stanzas give special emphasis to the metaphor sad is up. Other poems follow the often-cited saying that African Americans laughed to keep from crying and describe a complex emotion involving sadness and humor at the same time. In the initial two stanzas of Langston Hughes’s “Too Blue,” for instance, the first-person speaker tells the audience that he has the “old weary blues” – an intertextual reference to “The Weary Blues” published in The Weary Blues (1926) – and considers shooting himself for a moment: I got those sad old weary blues. I don’t know where to turn. I don’t know where to go. Nobody cares about you When you sink so low. What shall I do? What shall I say? Shall I take a gun And put myself away? (Hughes, “Too Blue” 280)

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The speaker, however, makes light of his thoughts on committing suicide in the next two stanzas: I wonder if One bullet would do? As hard as my head is, It would probably take two. But I ain’t got Neither bullet nor gun – And I’m too blue To look for one. (280; emphasis not mine)

The poem ends with a mixture of despair and gallows humor and perfectly illustrates Ellison’s claim about the blues. Many other poems are not serious and melancholic and highlight the poets’ playful treatment of the blues. Two prime examples are the only two blues poems written by Tennessee Williams, “Kitchen Door Blues” and “Gold Tooth Blues”: 1.

Tennessee Williams, “Kitchen Door Blues”: My old lady died of a common cold. She smoked cigars and was ninety years old. She was thin as paper with the ribs of a kite, And she flew out the kitchen door one night. Now I’m no younger ‘n the old lady was, When she lost gravitation, and I smoke cigars. I feel sort of peaked, an’ I look kinda pore, So for God’s sake, lock that kitchen door! (65)

2.

Tennessee Williams, “Gold Tooth Blues”: Now there’s many fool things a woman will do To catch a man’s eye, she’ll wear a tight shoe, She’ll wear a light dress and catch a bad cold And have tooth pulled for a tooth of gold. I’m a gold tooth woman with the gold tooth blues ’Cause a gold tooth makes a woman look old!

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Now gold in the bank is a wonderful thing, And a woman looks nice with a nice gold ring, But, honey, take a tip, and the tip ain’t cold, Your mouth’s no place to carry your gold! I’m a gold tooth woman with the gold tooth blues ’Cause a gold tooth makes a woman look old! Some late Sunday mawnin’ when you’re still in the hay And you want a little lovin’, your sweet man’ll say, With a look that’ll turn your heart’s blood cold, Woman, that gold tooth makes you look old! I’m a gold tooth woman with the gold tooth blues ’Cause a gold tooth makes a woman look old! When your man’s out of money and he must have a drink, He’ll sneak up behind you at the kitchen sink, And before you can holler, I’m telling the truth, He’ll brain you with a black-jack and pull your gold tooth! I’m a gold tooth woman with the gold tooth blues ’Cause a gold tooth makes a woman look old! (65–66; emphasis not mine)

These two humorous poems by the prize-winning playwright Williams demonstrate the pleasure he had of fooling around with the genre of blues poems and represent an immense field of poems covering a wide spectrum of topics and emotions other than heartrending misery. Like all the other blues poems discussed above, they do not manifest the metaphor minor key is a sad mood and, though falling short of my expectations, surprised me by calling attention to a hitherto neglected aspect of Williams’s work.

4.6.2 major key is a happy mood Similarly, I anticipated encountering several poems, which document the effort of translating a jazz piece composed in a major scale into a joyful mood, but I was on the wrong track. I discovered only a single poem embodying the metaphor major key is a happy mood: Ron Welburn’s “Miles, Trane, Wilbur Hardin [sic].” The title and the improvisation on the theme “spring” point to the upbeat and lyrical jazz piece “Spring is Here” on Standard Coltrane (Prestige, 1958), in which Coltrane plays the tenor saxophone, Harden the trumpet, Red Garland the piano, Paul Chambers the bass, and Jimmy Cobb the drums. At the time of the recording

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(July 11, 1958), Coltrane was still playing with Miles Davis whom Welburn mentioned in the title, but he performed with Harden, who was not well-known at the time, on “Spring is Here.” Welburn begins with the homophone of “here” taken from “Spring is Here,” namely “hear,” which hints at the nearly homophonic reference to the last name of Wilbur Harden in “Miles, Coltrane, and Wilbur Hardin” (boldface mine), and then improvises on the first two words of the title “Spring is Here” before he engages in an experimental linguistic “solo” on the evocative “cheer up” which moves from variations of the expression “cheer up” (e.g., “cheerup,” “cheereupe,” and “cheerupe”) to a type of angel called “cherub” known to sing praises to God and to the chirping of birds greeting springtime (e.g., “ch’rup” and “ch’rub”): hear spring is spring sprung is sprung is sprung spring is is spring is sprung is sprung sprung is spring spring is here cheerup cheereupe cheerup cheerupe cheerup cheerupe cheerup cheerup cheerupe cheerup cheerup cheerupe cheerup cheerup cheerup cherup cherub cherub cherub cherub cherup ch’rup ch’rub ch’rup ch’rup cherup cheerup ch’rupe cherupe cheerup here is spring spring is sprung sprung is sprung is spring is

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is spring sprung is sprung is sprung spring is spring hear. (Welburn, “Miles, Trane, Wilbur Hardin” 19)

A second improvisation on the title of “Spring is Here” and the homophone “hear” mark the conclusion of a poem which metaphorically correlates with the traditional structure of that jazz composition: intro (A) – solo (B) – end (A). Hence the poem shows that Welburn translated the cheerful spirit of the jazz piece played in a major key into the cheerful poem entitled “Miles, Trane, and Wilbur Hardin.” I expected to come across jazz poems in general and blues poems in particular that were products of translating musical keys and their emotional equivalencies into writing. I discovered only two poems – Robson’s “Blues for the Lonely” and Ron Welburn’s “Miles, Trane, Wilbur Hardin” – which document the metaphors minor key is a sad mood and major key is a happy mood, respectively. Yet, I discovered a wealth of ways poets devised to render a sad mood, among which are elegiac jazz poems, lyrics of blues songs, blues poems à la Mari Evans’s “Blues in Bb ,” Ira Sadoff’s multiple use of the lowercase letter “b” in his poem “Mood Indigo” to indicate blue notes ( ), and James A. Emanual’s literary transformation of the everyday metaphor sad is down into the unconventional metaphor sad is up. I also detected poems with a mixture of sadness and laughter such as Langston Hughes’s poem “Too Blue” as well as silly poems such as Tennessee Williams’s “Kitchen Door Blues” and “Gold Tooth Blues.” What struck me most, however, was the lack of poems conveying a joyful mood. Only Ron Welburn’s poem “Miles, Trane, and Wilbur Hardin” expresses a happy and lively mood, but even it implies a sad and gloomy mood offset by the arrival of spring and, as such, shows parallels to Emanual’s poem “Get Up, Blues.” Despite some exceptions, jazz poets predominantly focus on cheerless moods.

4.7 Dynamics: Forte and Piano, Crescendo and Decrescendo Since jazz includes the aspect of dynamics, the question arises as to how these poets render the volume of music expressed by dynamic indications such as “forte” (It. “loud,” “strong”) and “piano” (It. “flat,” “low”) and “crescendo” (It. “growing,” “becoming louder”) and “decrescendo” (It. “to decrease,” “wane”). Given the metaphors aural is visual and jazz music is writing, I would expect that

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they create metaphorical equivalencies between forte and upper case, piano and lower case, crescendo and gradual change from lower case to upper case, and between decrescendo and gradual change from upper case to lower case. Indeed, several poets translate the loud and soft dynamics of jazz into capitalized and small letters while others select different ways of rendering the volume of music. The following discussion will concentrate on the pair of metaphors forte is upper case and piano is lower case (4.7.1 “Forte and Piano”) and then investigate the second pair of metaphors crescendo is a gradual change from lower case to upper case and decrescendo is a gradual change from upper case to lower case in jazz poetry (4.7.2 “Crescendo and Decrescendo”). In each section, I will begin with literal descriptions of jazz dynamics before I present diverse visualizations of this aspect in the poetry.

4.7.1 Forte and Piano Some jazz poets simply describe the dynamics and do not create metaphorical cross-domain correspondences between forte and upper case and between piano and lower case. A case in point is Langston Hughes whose twelve-part poem Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods For Jazz (1961) consists of an experimental, proto-postmodernist text on the left-hand side of the page, in which he mixes black and white cultures (e.g., German “lieder” and “Hesitation Blues”), past and present, fantasy and fact, and so on (see, for instance, the imaginative depiction of the African-American writer Ralph Ellison as the Italian explorer and cartographer Americus Vespucius, in the first line of the second stanza below), and of instructions to a jazz band on the right-hand side margin of the page (excerpts): 1.

“cultural exchange” pushcarts fold and unfold in a supermarket sea. and we better find out, mama, where is the colored laundromat, since we moved up to mount vernon. ralph ellison as vespucius ina-youra at the masthead arna bontemps chief consultant molto bene mellow baby pearly may

“Hesitation Blues” with full band up strong for a chorus in the clear between verses then down under voice softly as deep-toned

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shalom aleichem jimmy baldwin sammy come what may — the signs point: ghana guinea and the toll bridge from westchester is a gangplank rocking risky between the deck and shore of a boat that never quite knew its destination

distant African drums join the blues until the music dies. …

(Hughes, Ask Your Mama 478–479)

2.

“ride , red , ride” in the quarter of the negroes riding in a jaguar, santa claus, seems like once i met you with adam powell for chauffeur and your hair was blowing back in the wind.

Loud and lively up-tempo Dixieland Jazz for full chorus to end.

(484)

Hughes visualizes the difference between the poem and the instructions to a jazz band by capitalizing the text (small caps) and italicizing the instructions. Aligned with the right margin, the “thin” column provides detailed information about the kind of music the musicians should play at any given moment (e.g., “Hesitation Blues” and “Dixieland Jazz”), the type of instrument they should include in their musical performance (e.g., African drums), and the tempo as well as the dynamics of it. In the first excerpt from the “Cultural Exchange,” for instance, he instructs the band to play “Hesitation Blues” loud for one chorus and then shift to a soft volume and, in the second excerpt from “Ride , Red , Ride,” he instructs the band to end part two with a “[l]oud and / lively / up-tempo / Dixieland / Jazz.” Also, the side-by-side of the poem and the instructions to the band exhibits an interaction between both: for instance, the sound of African drums coincides with a passage about “ghana” and “guinea” and the soft volume of the blues song overlaps with the expression “mellow” in “the line “molto bene mellow baby pearly may.”⁶⁷

67 For a more detailed discussion of the interaction between the poetic text and the music, see R. Baxter Miller’s article “Framing and Framed Languages in Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz” 3–13.

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Throughout the poem Hughes provides these and other literal descriptions – and not translations – of the dynamics of jazz in the margins. A group of theme-related poems not only give literal instructions on volume, but they also exhibit the metaphors loud is upper case and soft is lower case as well as the metaphors forte is upper case and piano is lower case, whereby the first pair of metaphors refer to language and the second pair to musical “screams” in jazz. Inspired by John Coltrane’s style during the early 1960s, each of the following three poets translates his avant-gardism into an experimental arrangement of words: Haki R. Madhubuti (“Don’t Cry, Scream”), Amiri Baraka (“AM/TRAK”), and Sonia Sanchez (“a/coltrane/poem”). Of the three poems, Sanchez’s represents the most radical translation of Coltrane’s style into written form, and an excerpt from the beginning will illustrate its various metaphors: my favorite things is u/blowen yo/favorite/things. […] are u sleepen (to be are u sleepen sung brotha john softly) brotha john where u have gone to. no mornin bells are ringen here. only the quiet […] WHO HAVE KILLED WILL CONTINUE TO KILL US WITH THEY CAPITALISM/18% OWNERSHIP OF THE WORLD. (Sanchez, “a/coltrane/poem” 69–70)

The irregular layout of the lines on the page and the erratic breaks indicated by the slashes manifest the metaphors john coltrane’s free jazz is an experimental arrangement of lines and words, john coltrane’s erratic jazz style is an irregular rhythm, and musical breaks and syncopation are typographical slashes. This poem instructs the readers to sing the refrain “are u sleepen / are u sleepen / brotha john / brotha john,” which alludes to the

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French round “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, Dormez vous? Dormez vous?,” softly: “(to be / sung / softly).” Additionally, Sanchez uses the metaphors staccato is a string of disconnected words and legato is a string of connected words to create several variations of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (e.g., “a/love/supreme. alovesupreme a lovesupreme.” and “a lovesupremealovesupremealovesupreme,” 69) and she uses upper- and lower case to render the dynamics of spoken words and sounds. For instance, she introduces “screech” to transpose Coltrane’s “screams” on his saxophone and adds (or subtracts) one or more vowels to the word to draw out (or shorten) the pronunciation of the scream: “screech screeech screeeeech screech.” She then alternates between lower case and upper case letters to indicate the change in volume of Coltrane’s “screams”: scrEEEccCHHHHH screeeeEEECHHHHHHH sCReeeEEECHHHHHH SCREEEECCCCHHHH SCREEEEEEEECCCHHHHHHHHHHH (69)

In fact, Sanchez’s gradual increase in using upper-case spellings for Coltrane’s “screams” manifests the metaphor crescendo is a gradual change from lower case to upper case (see below for further examples) while the last part of the excerpt demonstrates that she predominantly employs this technique to visualize the loudness and the angry tenor of the “screams.” Like Sanchez, Lee Meitzen Grue capitalizes entire words in “Jazzmen” to metaphorically indicate loud volume. In the middle section, the first person narrator listens to a jazz performance in a nightclub and focuses on the piano player: Old Sly-face, the piano player, half-masks his eyes smug cat says: How do you like that? I like it. I like men who play music who bind me in their fine conspiracy. My man says: STOP IT. You give yourself to the piano player The bass the horn the thin reed of the clarinet (Grue, “Jazzmen” 70)

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The narrator’s statement that the “smug cat / says: / How do you like that?” leaves it uncertain as to whether the piano player actually asks the question or whether he plays a series of notes with a rise in pitch at the end of the musical phrase. The subsequent lines, however, clarify the ambiguous statement and allow readers to imagine that the narrator is listening to a musical “question” played by “Old Slyface” on the piano and translates it into language. Accordingly, the line “How do you like that?” manifests the metaphors a series of notes is a line and a rise in pitch at the end of a musical phrase is a question. The identification of the metaphors, in turn, makes it easy to understand the piano player’s next statement “STOP IT” as two loud notes or chords. So “STOP IT” documents the combination of the two metaphors musical notes are words and forte is upper case. Aside from capitalizing words, many poets conclude their works with an expression or phrase in upper case to mark a loud and strong finale. A brief discussion of four different “loud” endings will show how poets translate emphatic jazz endings. Perhaps the most common ending is a forceful statement as exemplified by Ted Joans’s “Jazz is My Religion”: Jazz is a unique musical religion the sermons spread happiness and joy to be able to dig and swing inside what a wonderful feeling jazz is/YEAH BOY!! JAZZ is my religion and dig this: it wasnt for […] but it can be your religion too but JAZZ is a truth that is always black and blue Hallelujah I love JAZZ so Hallelujah I dig JAZZ so Yeah J A Z Z IS MY RELIGION (Joans, “Jazz is My Religion” 71)

Besides the metaphor jazz is a religion, the poem manifests loud is upper case to accentuate exclamations such as “YEAH BOY!!,” the noun “JAZZ” within the text, and as a means to conclude his celebration of jazz with an emphatic and “loud” reiteration of the final statement “J A Z Z I S M Y R E L I G I O N.” Michael Longley presents another type of “loud” ending in “Words for Jazz Perhaps” which consists of four separate poems about the well-known jazz musicians and singers Fats Waller, Bud Freeman, Bessie Smith, and Bix Beiderbecke. In the last stanza of “Elegy for Fats Waller,” Longley alludes to Waller’s ragtime song “The Sheik of Araby” and uses the title as the source domain the sheik of araby to metaphorically understand the target domain fats waller:

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He plays for hours on end and though there be Oases one part water, two parts gin, He tumbles past to reign, wise and thirsty, At the still centre of his loud dominion – the shook the shake the sheikh of araby. (Longley, “Elegy for Fats Waller” 28)

The stanza documents the metaphor fats waller is the sheik of araby and the metaphorical equivalencies between the desert and the long performance, the oases and the mixed alcoholic beverages he drinks during his long performance, and between the sheik reigning in his dominion and Waller ruling over his music. It ends with a capitalized line sung by Waller in a 1938 version of “The Sheik of Araby” found on A Handful of Keys (Buddha, 1999) and invites readers to imagine that, at the end, Waller sings “the shook the shake the sheikh of araby” in a loud voice. Some upper-case endings also ask readers to interpret them as loud musical notes. Lance Jeffers’ poem “How High the Moon,” for instance, depicts a young black trumpet player who, according to the description of his performance in parentheses, first plays the usually up-beat melody of “How High the Moon” in a “clean and hard” style with barely audible “flat slurs” (200): (first the melody, clean and hard, and the flat slurs are faint; […] with the street of the quiet pogrom: the beat of the street talk flares strong, the scornful laughter and the gestures cut the air.) “BLOW! BLOW!” the side-men cry, and the thin black young man with an old man’s face lungs up the tissue of a trumpet from his deep-cancered corners, racks out a high and searing curse! Full from the sullen grace of his street it sprouts: NEVER YOUR CAPTIVE! (Jeffers, “How High the Moon” 200)

Close to the end of the first chorus, the trumpeter plays “strong” slurs and his sidemen encourage him to continue by shouting “BLOW! BLOW!” He then blows “a high and searing curse” which is “[f]ull from the sullen grace of his streets it sprouts: / NEVER YOUR CAPTIVE!” In contrast to the sidemens’ encouragement,

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the final declarative statement allows for a literal and a figurative interpretation: the literal meaning helps readers imagine the rebellious tone expressed by the black trumpeter in his concluding “curse.” This upper-case ending, then, manifests the metaphors a series of notes is a series of words and forte is upper case which permit readers to translate the last three words as musical notes played in forte by the angry young black trumpeter. Another variation of a “loud” finale occurs in the last line of Sterling A. Brown’s poem “Cabaret,” in which he juxtaposes the enactment of idyllic “Life upon the river”-scenes in Chicago’s Black and Tan clubs of 1927 with the tragedy of the Mississippi River flood of 1927. A speaker describes the attempt of a jazz band and a chorus of girls “[t]o bring to mind […] / Life upon the river” for the “[r]ich, flashy, puffy-faced, / Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon, / […] overlords” (22). Yet, several italicized passages disrupt the fake scenes presented to the “grandees” (22) and inform the readers about the terrible aftermath of the flood. The last few stanzas illustrate the alternation between the two disparate realms: (Along the Yazoo The buzzards fly over, over, low, Glutted, but with their scrawny necks stretching, Peering still.) […] The band goes mad, the drummer throws his sticks At the moon, a papier-mâché moon, The chorus leaps into weird posturings, The firm-fleshed arms plucking at grapes to stain Their coralled mouths; seductive bodies weaving Bending, writhing, turning My heart cries out for M U D DY WAT E R (Down in the valleys The stench of the drying mud Is a bitter reminder of death.) Dee da dee D A A A A H (Brown, “Cabaret” 24; emphasis not mine)

The final line probably represents the speaker’s imaginary translation of a jazz finale into a sequence of scat syllables that suggests a harmonic movement towards a final cadence, with the cadence resolving the whole piece. Due to the “ee” of the first scat syllable “[d]ee,” the first note’s pitch is higher than the second note’s, indicated by the syllable “da” and also the longer vowel duration in the first note.

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After playing the note designated by the scat syllable “da,” the band plays once more the same note specified by the syllable “dee” before it concludes the performance with the same note indicated by the previous syllable “da,” but this time the band plays the note longer and louder: “D A A A A H.” The capitalization of the last scat syllable distinguishes it from the other ones and visualizes the metaphor forte is upper case. Together with the other three examples presented above, it constitutes an individual realization of the metaphor a loud jazz finale is an uppercase word or phrase at the end of a jazz poem. Other poets employ image-based metaphors rather than typography to render the dynamics of music in their poems. In Ira Sadoff’s “At the Jazz Concert,” the first-person speaker listens to a performance and describes it with the help of a bizarre narrative about life in the U.S.: The sax shattered into eighth notes as if it had been dropped. I’ve only lived in America for forty years, so I know the need to invade, for kids to scream at their mamas to stop slapping them at the superette. The drummer’s taking out his history on the snare, the trombones are terribly unstable, and the whole cargo of notes could change with a nod of the horn. The woman who used to be your wife could start a family on the struggling side of town. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in peace in some far-off corner of the globe? Now the bass is traveling: we’re resting at a truck stop halfway between North Platte and nowhere else. So tap your foot to the national music. Your country’s nightmare is a mean café and you’re effeminate. The cowboy’s gun is made to make you dance. (Sadoff, “At the Jazz Concert” 67; boldface mine)

After a hypothetical comparison between shattered notes and a shattered saxophone, the speaker claims that, having lived in the U.S. for forty years, he or she knows the necessity “for kids to scream / at their mamas to stop slapping them / at the superette” (boldface above). Within the context of a jazz concert and the saxophone, the image of screaming kids refers metaphorically to a “screaming” saxophone and invites readers to embellish the image with further metaphorical

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entailments: for instance, readers know that kids scream more than once when they start screaming and so they can connect the kids’ multiple screams with the saxophone’s. Following the image of screaming kids and a metaphorical reference to “unstable” jazz with the image of a “used to be” wife, the speaker poses a question to indicate a change in dynamics (boldface): “Wouldn’t it be nice to live in peace / in some far-off corner of the globe?” The combination of the phrases “to live in peace” and “in some far-off corner of the globe” metaphorically corresponds to a quiet, distant sound played by the jazz band and indicates a shift from loud to soft music. As the discussion of the different approaches to expressing the dynamics of jazz in poetry has shown, poets tend to visualize loud volume by capitalizing one or more words. This common practice distinguishes the words in upper- from the ones in lower case which metaphorically points to a “normal” or “neutral” volume and not – as expected – to a soft volume. The mind, then, assumes a “normal” volume when it encounters texts written in “regular” orthography and imagines a loud volume in relation to the pre-set “normal” volume whenever it realizes the conceptual metaphor loud is upper case (forte is upper case) or image metaphors that refer to loud dynamics. Even when a text switches from realizations of the metaphor loud is upper case (forte is upper case) to “normal” spellings, the mind does not automatically interpret the latter words as softly pronounced words or softly played notes. Rather, it switches back to the “normal” volume and, assuming gradiency, perceives the “normal” volume of words or notes as softer than the loud words or notes. Authors such as Sonia Sanchez, and Haki R. Madhubuti compensate for the shortcoming of scripts by instructing readers to speak or sing a specified word or phrase softly (see above), but they do not try writing in a very small script to metaphorically indicate a soft volume. Before the advent of word processing programs in the 1980s, typewriters usually had no small scripts, but the absence of small scripts even in contemporary jazz poetry suggests that writers care about easy readability and, for that reason, avoid writing words or passages in small scripts. Contrary to the expectations raised by the metaphor soft volume is lower case or piano is lower case, the lower-case words in jazz poems do not explicitly ask readers to understand them in terms of soft volume. Likewise, the upper-case text in Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods For Jazz does not invite readers to conceptualize it in terms of loud jazz music. Upper-case spellings, then, can have several meanings. Readers have to check the texts for clues before they ascertain the particular literary function of such defamiliarized words and sentences, given how poets use means other than typographical to render the dynamics of jazz music.

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4.7.2 Crescendo and Decrescendo A number of poets simply mention the musical concepts of crescendo and decrescendo without translating them into typographically altered scripts or image metaphors. Useni Eugene Perkins, for instance, describes the smooth sound of the recurring crescendos heard in Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll” (The Duke: The Columbia Years (1927–1967), Sony, 2004) to which Perkins’s “Satin Doll” alludes as “mellifluous” (excerpt): a Satin Doll is for lovers of mellifluous crescendo who dream of ebony-legged girls swinging their curvaceous hips to the staccato of a jazz symphony (Perkins, “Satin Doll” 99; boldface mine)

Likewise, Eugene B. Redmond refers to the concept of crescendo in his poem “Sound of a Heart-Train” dedicated to the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and the jazz singer Johnny Hartman (“For John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman”). Punning on the last names of the two musicians in the title of the poem (“Heart-Train”), he provides information about a record below the dedication “(Impulse Stereo LP: -40)” which permits readers to identify the italicized names of the musicians as the title of the all-ballad album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (Impulse, 1963) and, in turn, see that the poem describes the performances of Coltrane, Hartman, and the other members of the band McCoy Tyner (p), Jimmy Garrison (b), and Elvin Jones (d) on the album (excerpt): Beneath rails, between rails Daring drumheart arches a crescendo of thumps and thunder, Bumps and hums: a cardiacting rhythm section, Drumbass, for rails of sound, for ails of sound, Soaring! Exploring! Horned voice! Brassflesh and rail! Cocaine, sometimes, and tail! (Redmond, “Sound of a Heart-Train” 101; boldface mine)

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While expressions such as “drumheart” and “a cardiacting rhythm” manifest the metaphor jazz rhythm is a beating heart, the term “crescendo” in the second line (boldface) constitutes a literal account of a gradual increase in volume. Unlike Redmond’s poem, Langston Hughes’s twelve-part poem Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz already discussed above makes a reference to decrescendo in the right-hand side instructions to a prospective jazz band accompanying a live performance of the poem (excerpt): 4.

“ode to dinah” when niagara falls is frozen there’s a bar with windows frosted from the cold that makes niagara ghostly monument of winter to a band that once passed over with a woman with two pistols on a train that lost no passengers on the line whose route was freedom through the jungle of white danger to the haven of white quakers whose haymow was a manger manger where the christ child once had lain. so the whiteness and the water melt to water once again and the roar of niagara drowns that rumble of that train distant almost now as distant as forgotten pain in the quarter quarter of the negroes with a bar with frosted windows no conductor and no train.

tacit

Verse of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” through refrain repeated ever softer to fade out slowly here tacit

(Hughes, Ask Your Mama 490; boldface mine)

The instruction to repeat a section of the hymn “ever softer to fade out slowly here” circumscribes the musical concept of decrescendo and, in effect, asks the jazz band to repeat the passage with a gradual decrease in volume. Other poets, however, employ typography and imagery to visualize the concepts of crescendo and decrescendo. In “The Revelation,” Stanley Crouch embeds a gradual increase in volume of “screams” played by John Coltrane in an improvisation on the line “[t]o tremble in prayer and trepidation” (excerpt):

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To tremble in prayer and trepidation To tremble against trepidation in prayer Screech Scream Cry To tremble in prayer against trepidation Screech-screech Holler Cry Scream To tremble with prayer and arch the muscles of my back in face of trepidation, transparent beads bubbling from my forehead SCREECH CRY: (Crouch, “The Revelation” 33)

The repeatedly iterated image of a devout person trembling in fear metaphorically corresponds to a sustained “trembling” played by the band, which Coltrane disrupts with sounds that metaphorically correspond to the sounds made by a bird of prey: the line “Screech Scream Cry” denote a single “Screech,” a single “Scream,” and a single “Cry” with which Coltrane cuts through the “trembling”; the intensity of his bird-like “screams” increases when he plays the sounds indicated by the verse “Screech-screech Holler Cry Scream”; finally, moving towards a climax, the line “SCREECH CRY:” manifests the metaphor forte is upper case and asks the readers to imagine that Coltrane plays a forceful “screeching” sound and a “cry” which break through and end the “trembling” of the jazz performance. Like Crouch, Langston Hughes employs typographical means to render a gradual increase in volume of a spoken statement in “Harlem Night Club.” It begins with a stanza in which the speaker, invoking the idea of “carpe diem,” encourages a band in a Harlem cabaret to play jazz: Sleek black boys in a cabaret. Jazz-band, jazz-band, – Play, plAY, PLAY! Tomorrow. … who knows? Dance today! (Hughes, “Harlem Night Club” 90)

The volume increases with each time the speaker repeats the exhortation “play”: the “normal” spelling of “Play” at the beginning of the line “Play, plAY, PLAY!” metaphorically corresponds to the “normal” volume of “play”; in turn, the combination of two lower case and two upper-case letters in “plAY” indicates a louder volume than the “normal” volume of “Play” while the upper-case rendering of “PLAY” marks the loudest volume of the three typographical versions of the word

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“play.” In short, Hughes’s verse “Play, plAY, PLAY!” documents the metaphor a vocal crescendo is a gradual change from lower case to upper case. The exploration of the corpus of jazz poems has shown that a number of poets realize the metaphors forte is upper case and crescendo is a gradual change from lower case to upper case rather than the metaphors piano is lower case and decrescendo is a gradual change from upper case to lower case. This unexpected finding reveals that poets generally prefer to translate “loud” and “crescendo,” be it speech or music, into upper- and lower-case spellings (e.g., Sonia Sanchez, Lee Meitzen Grue, Lance Jeffers, Sterling A. Brown, and Stanley Crouch). However, many poets have discovered quite a few different ways of rendering the dynamics of jazz. Some of them simply employ expressions such as “loud,” “soft,” and “crescendo” to describe jazz’s dynamics (e.g., Langston Hughes, Useni Eugene Perkins, and Eugene B. Redmond), other poets use image metaphors (e.g., Sadoff).

4.8 acoustical pitch is a vertical scale For the most part members of a Western culture rely on the embodied up-down orientational metaphor when they understand pitch in terms of a vertical scale. They correlate a “high” pitch with the upper part of the scale and a “low” pitch with the lower part of the scale. This kind of conceptual process involves gradiency; that is, they can only perceive the pitch of a sound as “high” or “low” in relation to another pitch or in relation to a prototypical, standard pitch. So when they merely use the expressions “high” or “higher” to characterize a pitch, they depend upon the inherent quality of the metaphor acoustical pitch is a vertical scale. I assume that jazz poets will create metaphorical correspondences between acoustical pitch and a vertical scale whenever they translate “high” and “low” pitches of jazz music into written form in their jazz poems. Indeed, my investigation of jazz poetry verifies the assumption: several poets render “high” and “low” pitches with the help of image-based metaphors, similes, and typographical means, but more often poets just use the expressions “high” and “low” to describe the musical pitch.

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A case in point is the speaker’s use of the adjective “high” to describe the register of his jazz performance in John Engels’s poem “In the Palais Royale Ballroom in 1948.” It depicts a jazz musician who plays “Summertime” from George Gershwin’s musical Porgy and Bess on his trombone in a high register (excerpt): They wait, and suddenly I raise to my lips the red-gold Olds trombone, and hit high G so clean, so sweet, so unendurably sustained, that the girls I am remembering myself to have loved beyond desire go faint with desire, and the song is “Summertime,” and I am alone with it, and play it out, drive through to the last sweet resolution of the last phrase. And then, my solo finished, the great band riding it out behind me, the song diminishing forever into the sky beyond the starry sky which was the ceiling of the Palais Royale Ballroom in 1948, my lips still numb from the embochure, I think of it as if in fact it might have been, as if those dancers to whom too late and far too late I have thought to offer this as a memory might truly have gathered themselves around and have remembered such a thing: the song in its starry, high, unlikely register, the surging of their bodies to that song: the fragrance of light again. (Engels, “In the Palais Royale Ballroom in 1948” 226–227; boldface mine)

The first-person narrator hits the “high G” with his trombone while playing “Summertime” and imagines that his solo ascends into “the sky beyond the starry sky” of the ballroom. He returns to the memorable event at the end and adds the adjective “starry” to his description of the register as a “starry, high, unlikely register,” which, on the one hand, refers back to the “starry sky” of the ballroom and, on the other hand, emphasizes the unusually high register of “Summertime.” An example of the use of the adjective “low” to describe a low pitch in jazz music is found in Stephen Jonas’s “CLV,” in which the speaker compares a solo performed by a saxophonist to a poet’s speech:

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when the man blows his saxophone we listen as to a poet speaking of his abandon’d or slower, in a lower octave, speaks of this everlasting enigma (Jonas, “CLV” 73; boldface mine)

Jonas translates the solo’s abrupt breaks and rhythmic changes, the omission of melodic material, and its slower tempo into sudden line breaks (e.g., “a- / bandon’d”), the omission of letters and words (e.g., “a- / bandon’d [the ellipsis invites speculations on the omitted word or phrase] or”), and the repetition of / oʊ / in the verse “slower, in a lower.” At the same time, the phrase “lower / octave” refers to the saxophone solo’s low acoustical pitch played. Both examples discussed above illustrate the frequent use of “high” and “low” to describe the pitch of jazz music in poetry. Yet some poets, like Ron Welburn, employ image-based metaphors to visualize jazz’s high and low pitches. His poem “Piano” exhibits two images that metaphorically refer to high-pitched jazz (excerpt): Piano such a sweet way and tell me a story cover me a song or bathe me in images of how you feel God or lesser ranks of men downhome for this one not like organ sound or piano-with-buttons but now high nepalian ceremony to another kilaminjaro peak above clouds or strain of blues (Welburn, “Piano” 4; boldface mine)

Different from the sound of an organ and the sound of an electric keyboard or synthesizer (“piano-with-buttons”), the “downhome” sound of the piano “bathes”

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the speaker in the image of a “high nepalian ceremony” and the image of a “kilaminjaro peak” lying above a “strain of blues.” The speaker’s references to Everest and Kilimanjaro allow for the metaphorical identification of the high-pitched “peaks” of the pianist’s jazz music and manifests the metaphor acoustical pitch is a vertical scale: the acoustical pitch is higher than the “strain of blues” situated below the peak of Kilimanjaro. To underscore the two high-pitched “peaks,” Welburn switches around the two vowels “a” and “i” in “kilaminjaro” (boldface) and thereby makes the readers aware of the two phonological “peaks” marked by the two vowels “i” and the low pitch of the vowel “a” in the curiously spelled word “kilaminjaro.” Other poets visualize a change in musical pitch typographically. The anthology Jazz Poems edited by Kevin Young offers an example that illustrates the use of typographical means to indicate a high-pitched note. It first introduces the lyrics of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” and then presents Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “Billy Strayhorn Writes ‘Lush Life’,” in which Alexander pretends that Strayhorn is playing on the piano the phrase “Life is lonely” for Duke Ellington: Billy Strayhorn, “Lush Life” (excerpt)

Elizabeth Alexander, “Billy Strayhorn Writes ‘Lush Life’”

I used to visit all the very gay places, Those come-what-may places, Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life To get the feel of life From jazz and cocktails. The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces With distingué traces That used to be there. You could see where They’d been washed away By too many through the day Twelve o’clock tails. Then you came along With your siren song To tempt me to madness. I thought for a while That your poignant smile Was tinged with the sadness Of a great love for me. Ah, yes, I was wrong, Again, I was wrong! Life is lonely again, And only last year Ev’rything seemed so sure.

Empty ice-cream carton in a kitchen garbage can. Up all night with your mother. He beat her again. Up all night eating ice-cream, you made your mother laugh.

(68; boldface mine)

(70)

ly Life

is lone

Duke’s hands on your shoulders, you play it again. Cancer eats moth holes through you and you and you. ly Life

is lone

Speeding upstate in the backseat, on the Taconic, cocktail in one hand, book in another as autumn leaves blur by. This life, New York, piano, love, then lonely, this life, love.

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Alexander professes a detailed knowledge of Strayhorn’s life when, in the first stanza, she alludes to the fact that Strayhorn composed “Life is Lonely,” which was afterward renamed into “Lush Life,” as a teenager. The subsequent italicized phrase “Life is lonely” manifests the metaphor musical execution of “life is lonely” is typography and invites readers to imagine that Strayhorn, who became a member of Duke Ellington’s band in 1939 and worked for Ellington for nearly three decades as an arranger and pianist until he died of cancer in 1967 (Hosiasson, “Strayhorn, Billy”), plays the musical phrase “Life is lonely” (italics are music) twice while Duke Ellington is listening: he first plays the note metaphorically indicated by “Life,” hesitates for a moment (musical pause is a visual gap), and then plays the note “lone-” and, indicated by the typographically higher positioned syllable “-ly,” the higher pitched note “-ly.” Yet whereas the literal meaning of the phrase “Life is lonely” and the story of love found and lost in Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” invoke a sad mood, Alexander ends her poem affirmatively with “love.” In contrast to Alexander, Michael S. Harper employs typography to visualize the notion of a “contact high” in relation to “high modes” and not specifically to high-pitched jazz music. His “High Modes: Vision as Ritual: Confirmation” begins with the back-to-Africa theme expressed by the four-time repetition of “Black Man Go Back to the Old Country” which asks readers to imagine the “vision” to be either spoken or sung in a ritualistic fashion, and then recognize the translation of getting “high” into a step-like pattern of italicized “contact-high”-phrases in the second stanza below (excerpt): Black Man Go Back To The Old Country Black Man Go Back To The Old Country Black Man Go Back To The Old Country Black Man Go Back To The Old Country […] We danced, the chocolate trees and samba leaves wetting the paintbrush, and babies came in whispering of one, oneness, otherness, forming each man in his music, one to one: and we touched, contact-high, high modes, contact-high, and the images, contact-high, man to man, came back. Black Man Go Back To The Old Country. The grooves turned in a human face, Lady Day, blue and green, modally, and we touched, contact-high, high modes: Black Man Go Back To The Old Country

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Bird was a mode from the old country; Bud Powell bowed in modality, blow Bud; Louis Armstrong touched the old country, and brought it back, around corners; Miles is a mode; Coltrane is, power, Black Man Go Back To The Old Country Black Man Go Back To The Old Country Black Man Go Back To The Old Country (Harper, “High Modes: Vision as Ritual: Confirmation” 94–95; italics not mine)

The italics of the three “contact-high”-phrases in the second stanza links them to the refrain “Black Man Go Back To The Old Country” and visualizes the upward movement indicated by the semantics of the reiterated phrase “contact-high.” Like a person who receives a “contact high” when close to a person on drugs, black people (“we”) become high when they come into contact with the “high modes” shaped in Africa: for instance, “Bird was a mode from the old country” and “Louis Armstrong touched the old country, / and brought it back, around corners.” So the three upward steps marked by the three “contact-high”-phrases illustrate the “contact high” black people receive when they listen to the high musical modes derived from Africa and performed by black jazz singers and musicians such as Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Other poets arrange a poem’s last words as downward steps to emphasize each word of the final verses and to indicate the end of the poem and a drop in pitch of the spoken discourse. Two examples will demonstrate such typographical visualizations of a declining pitch: 1.

Joy Walsh, “Ferguson’s Conquistadores 77” (excerpt): Smoke rose and the drummer Gadd Jumped out of his skin The music screamed beyond passion Tripletimed ragas rolled The night the Conquistadores Played Pillaged And prayed. (227)

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Sarah Webster Fabio, “For Louis Armstrong, A Ju-Ju” (excerpt): Louis, Louis, Louis, Louis, we gotta know right now. […] Go Man, Go right now. Blow, Man, blow right now. Blow on out of this world. (58)

In the first example, Walsh imagines a hot performance by Walter Maynard Ferguson and his band recorded on Conquistador (Columbia, 1977) and, triggered by the album title, perceives the band members as conquistadores who “Played / Pillaged / And prayed.” In the second example, Fabio portrays Louis Armstrong as a saint and encourages him to “Blow on out / of / this / world.” Both step-like arrangements of the last words and, in the case of the first example, the alliteration of the consonant “p,” result in an emphatic pronunciation of the final words and a fall in pitch. Finally, some poets employ similes to describe the ascending and descending order of notes. David Henderson, for instance, compares the order of Pharaoh Sanders’s saxophone notes to a drunken women walking up and falling down the stairs in his multipart poem “Egyptian Book of the Dead” (excerpt): tenor roars obbligato laughin like a drunken woman walk up the stairs scream and then fall back down again (Henderson, “Egyptian Book of the Dead” 114)

Sanders’s “laughing” sounds map onto the drunken woman’s laughter. The ascending order of musical notes played by the saxophonist maps onto the image of a drunken woman walking up the stairs. The “scream” of Sanders’ saxophone maps onto her scream and the descending order of musical notes played by the jazz musician maps onto the image of her falling down the stairs. This metaphorical linguistic expression, thus, allows readers to metaphorically envisage the gradual rise and fall of Sanders’s musical pitches.

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All in all, the brief exploration of the metaphor acoustical pitch is a vertical scale demonstrated that jazz poets always rely on the up-down orientational metaphor when they convey acoustical pitch. Frequently they employ the adjectives “high” and “low” to describe the pitch of jazz. Yet some poets such as Ron Welburn and David Henderson make use of image-based metaphors that allow readers to metaphorically identify high and low pitches as well as an ascending and descending order of pitches. Finally, a few poets use typography to visualize high pitches (see, for instance, Elizabeth Alexander’s “Billy Strayhorn Writes ‘Lush Life’”) and low pitches in spoken discourse (e.g., the step-like ending of jazz poems). Such creative renderings of acoustical pitch come as no real surprise since they all manifest the metaphor acoustical pitch is a vertical scale and thereby illustrate just how well-entrenched the up-down orientational metaphor is in Western cultures.

4.9 “Voices” of Instruments The final subchapter focuses on a jazz instrument’s musical “voice.” In music, the term “voice” denotes the specific sound quality of an instrument and comprises the timbre as well as the way an artist approaches playing and improvising on the instrument. Proceeding from this concept of musical “voice,” I expected to come across jazz poems documenting the translation of “voices” of instruments into assonance-consonance-alliterations: for instance, a poem which illustrates a translation of the “voice” of a piano into a consonant alliteration such as “peter pan played the piano perfectly.” My exploration shows that, indeed, several poets established systematic equivalencies between individual “voices” of instruments and consonance-assonance-alliteration, but not all poems manifest the metaphor “voices” of instruments are consonanceassonance-alliteration. Many other poets developed different ways of treating the “voices” of instruments in their poetry such as detailed descriptions of an instrument’s “voice,” the use of onomatopoeia, and translating instruments’ “voices” into human ones. As these and other techniques remain outside the explanatory power of the metaphor “voices” of instruments are consonanceassonance-alliteration, I will always incorporate the other possibilities in my discussion of how jazz poets render instruments’ “voices” to suggest additional possibilities beyond my current scope. Several poems exhibit the metaphor “voices” of instruments are consonanceassonance-alliteration. For instance, Frank Marshall Davis’s and William Wantling’s translation of a piano’s “voice” into onomatopoetic expressions in

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their respective poems (ex. 1 and ex. 2) and William Carlos Williams’s alliteration of “d” and “t” to render the sound of drums in “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” (ex. 3) manifest the conceptualization of “voices” of instruments in terms of consonanceassonance-alliteration: 1.

Frank Marshall Davis, “Jazz Band”: Short tan notes from the piano And the short tan notes from the piano Plink plank plunk a plunk Plink plank plunk a plunk Chopin gone screwy, Wagner with the blues Plink plank plunk a plunk Got a date with Satan – ain’t no time to lose […] Plink plank plunk a plunk Plink plank plunk a plunk Plunk Do that thing, jazz band! (20–21)

2.

William Wantling, “A Plea for Workmen’s Compensation”: creative day for coming way out all you little monks BLAH ? where’s your soul monk ? plink plank plunk monk cant funk where’s your soul thelonious m o n k ? (47–48)

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3.

William Carlos Williams, “Ol’ Bunk’s Band”: Drum, drum, drum, drum, drum drum, drum! The ancient cry, escaping crapulence eats through transcendent – torn, tears, term town, tense, turns and backs off whole, leaps up, stomps down, rips through! (149; boldface mine)

Davis refers to the “short tan notes of the piano” before he translates the supposed sound of the piano into the reiterated onomatopoetic line “[p]link plank plunk a plunk” and disrupts the onomatopoeia with bizarre improvisational lines such as “Chopin gone screwy, Wagner with the blues” and “Got a date with Satan – ain’t no time to lose” in order to portray the frenzy of the music played by the jazz band (ex. 1). Wantling employs a similar onomatopoetic line for the sound made by a piano when he rhymes Thelonious Monk’s last name in “? where’s your soul monk ?” with “plink plank plunk” and “monk cant funk” (ex. 2). Williams, by contrast, repeats “drum” and the initial “t” (boldface) seven times to mimic drumbeats.⁶⁸ By contrast, Sue May’s description of bass music in “Double Bass” manifests a combination of metaphors, metonymies, and similes rather than the metaphor “voices” of instruments are consonance-assonance-alliteration. At the outset, the speaker establishes several links between images of a prototypical tree and a shy person holding a hat and the image of a prototypical bass and perceives the nonhuman bass as a modest, talking object: There is a tree in the orchestra. It talks softly, like a bear. It stands holding its hat by the rim. Bashful. It has quiet conversations with drums and paint brushes. It is a humble instrument. […]

68 See also the discussion of Feinstein’s interpretation of Williams’s poem “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” in Chapter 2.2.1.

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The wood talks, it murmurs like a person in their sleep when you wonder what they mean. It can’t be fierce but it can keep a secret. It looks solid but it sounds sad sometimes and stands on one leg. (May, “Double Bass” 71)

Anthropomorphizing the bass, the speaker states that it “talks softly,” modifying the statement with the simile “like a bear” in the next clause, and asserts that it converses quietly with drums and “paint brushes” – an expression that shows the associative word play of changing “drum brushes” to “paint brushes.” After a short passage on the “people who play it [bass],” the narrator focuses again on the bass and uses the expression “[t]he wood talks,” which manifests the metonymy material for object and the metaphor object is a talking person, and the simile “it murmurs like a person in their sleep / when you wonder what they mean.” The subsequent metaphorical expression “[i]t can’t be fierce but it can keep a secret” refers to the bass’s “voice” and allows readers to identify it as a non-aggressive one that can sometimes be silent (“it can keep a secret”). A reference to a “blue,” melancholy sound (“it sounds sad sometimes”) and to the bass’s endpin (“stands on one leg”) conclude the description of the instrument and its “voice.” Other poets create correspondences between instruments’ particular “voices” and onomatopoetic expressions. The following three excerpts, for instance, illustrate the translation of a saxophone’s “voice” into onomatopoetic sounds: 1.

Amiri Baraka, “AM/TRAK”: The cadre came together the inimitable 4 who blew the pulse of then, exact The flame the confusion the love of whatever the fuck there was to love Yes it says blow, oh honk-scream (bahhhhhhh – wheeeeeeee) (194)

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2.

Useni Eugene Perkins, “The Last Flight” (For Coleman Hawkins): The Hawk is grounded his musical wings penned beneath the earth BODY & SOUL still ringing with sounds from his last flight Be bop beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Be bop beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee yet no more (96)

3.

Quincy Troupe, “Words That Build Bridges Toward a New Tongue”: a coaltrain burning across flat plains of kansas city, flight & barbeque sauce up in the flavor of your drenched hot giddiup, scorching as red pepper chili sauce, yo boy of bebop phrasing in groovin’ high, you blew: bebop, bebop, beedoo beeboli, doodle-li, bebop, bebop, beedoo beeboli, doodle-li, bebop, bebop, beedoo beeboli bop baw baw baw bo de baaaaaaaaa daaaaaaa . . . . . . . . & you ran it all the way to new york city, minton’s & birdland, chicken eating boy turned hip man skeedaddleing choochooing chords, (308)

While Baraka renders John Coltrane’s “honk-scream” as a drawn out “bahhhhhhh – wheeeeeeee” (ex. 1), Perkins translates the sound of Coleman Hawkins’s supposed last performance before his death into a two-time iteration of “Be bop beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” to indicate his central role in advancing bebop in the 1940s (ex. 2). Similarly, Troupe repeatedly employs “bebop” (and other scat syllables as well) in his onomatopoetic transposition of Charlie Parker’s “bebop phrasing in groovin’ high” (see italicized section in ex. 3).⁶⁹ Due to the repetition of “bebop” and other words with the initial “b” (e.g., “beedoo”), the last

69 Another type of onomatopoetic translation of a saxophone’s “voice” are the “screams” played by John Coltrane such as Sonia Sanchez’ depiction of John Coltrane’s “screams” as “SCREEEEEEEECCCHHHHHHHHHHH” in her poem “a/coltrane/poem” (69).

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two translations also document the metaphor “voices” of instruments are consonance-assonance-alliteration. Lawson Fusao Inada’s alliteration in “Bud Powell” differs from the alliterative onomatopoeia found in the works discussed above. His poem invites speakers to imagine the italicized part as an impressionistic interpretation of Powell’s composition “Parisian Thoroughfare” and recognize the alliteration of consonants as a device to underline the unity and uniqueness of each melodic “image”: Bud Powell “Parisian Thoroughfare” Shops gleaming wares, windows streaming with the streets of commerce as fragrance from a nearby bakery fills and gilds the air burgeoned to the brim with birds, butterflies, blossoms, rising and falling calls of children quickening the courtyards, women whisking walks in the sunlit briskness of rhythm propelling, pulsing the entire populace, the entire thoroughfare into action after the night’s refreshing rain promising spring thick with brilliance, the surprising turn of events where everything turns out happy … (“Hey, cut it, man!”) (Inada, “Bud Powell” 83)

The repetition of “b” in “burgeoned to the brim with birds, butterflies, blossoms” (boldface mine) distinguishes the melodic “image” from other impressionistic “images” such as “women whisking walks in the sunlit / briskness of rhythm” and “propelling, pulsing the entire populace” (boldface mine) with their own characteristic repetition of consonants. Hence Inada uses the alliteration of consonants to create compact impressionistic images.⁷⁰ Victoria McCabe exploits multiple ways of rendering a jazz piece in “For Albert Ayler.” In it, the speaker pays tribute to Albert Ayler with a metaphorical statement about his avant-garde music (see the opening line)⁷¹ and then pretends to be present at a free jazz performance:

70 For a more detailed discussion of Inada’s poem “Bud Powell,” see Chapter 4.1.1. 71 The statement alludes to the fact that Ayler was found dead in the Hudson River.

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For Albert Ayler —his works defied the norm. —record blurb You owned the surge and swill of water, depths strange and murky as the Hudson. Energy bash: honk and whirr: gut rhythms of the ages. Raucous snazz: now whine: and boomboom hustled fine. A crew of wolves hovering in chorale: basic O’s thrashing through the horn in a black fist: now angst: now blast: the hushbomb of some almost literal babe fresh into the human predicament: O and it is painful, it is too painful Then: an old, chiding refrain burppats the heart into journey: LIVE. But O: the Nearly Unbearable Lucidity of the river’s silence, the stash of breath done in, stopped. by a sadsad neighbor whose own wail this aylerman had stroked. Ah whimper: ah bang: ah out, out, out: cacophony of lovenoise : blurt : of defiance—— O rage and understanding, more than worlds ever allow. No wonder you died, unsung, your records unrealized, selling cheap. (McCabe, “For Albert Ayler” 150)

The performance begins with extreme sounds and dissonances and, overall, corresponds to a surge of a water: the energetic bash of timpani, the honking of Ayler’s tenor saxophone, a general whirring sound, and the “gut rhythms” give way to a “raucous snazz,” a whining noise, and the loud and deep “boomboom” of the drums. The speaker then uses “[a] crew of wolves hovering in a chorale” to describe the howling sound of a group of instruments that floats above the other music and employs the phrase “basic O’s thrashing through the horn in a black fist” to refer to laments – indicated by the expression “basic O’s” – played aggressively by a black trumpet player. The plaintive and forcefully played sighs change to a fearful sound (“now angst:”) and then to a subdued eruption that almost sounds like the repressed screaming of a newly born baby which people try to silence with “hushes” (“hushbomb”): “now blast: the hushbomb of / some almost literal babe fresh / into the human predicament.” The screaming sound contains an extended painful note as well: “O / and it is painful, it is too / painful.” Picking up the im-

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age of a newly born, screaming baby, the speaker embellishes it by portraying the refrain as an old grandmother rebuking the screaming child and giving the child “burppats”: the “old, chiding refrain / burppats the heart into journey.” The neologism “burppats” represents a blend of “burp” (a baby’s first breath) and “pats” (given to it right after birth to stimulate breathing) and metaphorically alludes to the “burppat”-sounds of the refrain while the whole phrase “burppats the heart into journey” manifests the metaphor life is a journey and metaphorically refers to the refrain that sets a driving beat in motion. The energized jazz performance – like the surge of a river – ends with a loud, assertive, and hopeful sound indicated by the capitalized word “LIVE” which documents the metaphor forte is upper case. The phrase “But O:” marks a change from the occasionally wild jazz performance to a more peaceful one. Ayler and his band start to play weightless and clear music which the speaker metaphorically describes as “the Nearly Unbearable Lucidity / of the river’s silence.” While the first line alludes to Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Engl. transl.), the second line ties the performance to the opening statement about Ayler’s music. The expression “stopped. by,” the period, and the gap between “stopped” and “by,” which manifests the metaphor pause is a spatial gap, allow readers to identify an unpredictable stop that pauses the music before one of Ayler’s jazz musicians or Ayler himself – the expression “this aylerman” and the whole statement remain ambiguous – plays an extremely melancholic wailing indicated by the doubling of “sad” in “sadsad”: “by a sadsad neighbor / whose own wail this aylerman had stroked.” Expressing delight, the speaker uses the interjection “ah” three times when she describes the succession of sounds and the collective improvisation of the jazz band as a sexual act: “Ah whimper: ah bang: ah out, out, out: / cacophony of lovenoise.” The performance ends with a furious cry of defiance, which corresponds to another surge of the river, and the speaker’s comments on Ayler’s bold music: his rage and understanding was too much for this world, so his death received no attention and his records remained “unrealized, selling cheap.” The main part of the poem, thus, invites readers to imagine it as an Ayler performance. It documents McCabe’s various ways of rendering the style and the “voices” of the instruments in the poem: for instance, she visualizes Ayler’s staccato phrases with the help of colons, periods, and spatial markers (e.g., “Energy bash: honk and whirr: gut rhythms”) and employs onomatopoetic expressions to characterize the sounds made by different instruments such as “bash,” “honk,” “snazz,” and “boomboom.” In addition, she uses the image “A crew of wolves hovering in chorale” to metaphorically describe the howling “voices” of a group of instruments and creates odd word/image combinations

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such as “hushbomb,” which refers to loud and soft music and the same time, and the capitalized “LIVE” (forte is upper case) to render the sound and the dynamics of the free jazz performance. Another group of poets translate the “voices” of instruments into human voices. LeRoy Stone, for instance, transforms the sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet in “Flamenco Sketches” (Kind of Blue, Columbia 1959) into a human voice in the second part (“selim”) of the five-part poem “Flamenco Sketches (To Miles Davis)”: selim Comment blue uutterance uttering in mutes a passion whisper intoned in fifths slivered through Davis durations furtive chuckle on many passing tones of multi-colored n-dimension shadings (Stone, “Flamenco Sketches (To Miles Davis)” 54)

Each stanza begins with a short characterization of the trumpet’s “voice” and continues with a more detailed embellishment of the aspect in the next two lines. In the first stanza, for instance, the speaker first perceives a musical phrase played by Davis as a “comment” before he modifies his first impression and describes it as “a blue uutterance / uttering in mutes of passion.” The second verse shows that the speaker translates the pensive and melancholic sound of Davis’s trumpet solo in “Flamenco Sketches” into “a blue uutterance” and duplicates “u” as a means of emphasizing / uː / in “blue.” The repetition of “utterance” in the third verse refers back to the duplication of the consonant “u” in “uutterance” while the word “mutes” in the last part of “in mutes of passion” designates soft tones generated by a mute. So the last two lines of the first stanza document the blend of the domain “voice” of a trumpet with the domain human voice (see also the lines “whisper / intoned in fifths”) as the result of a translation process. Similarly, the first stanza of Frank Marshall Davis’s “Cabaret” manifests the metaphor “voice” of an instrument is a human voice, which, however, is embedded in the overall metaphor jazz band is a religious congregation:

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O the big bassoon leads the members in prayer The sax sings hymns, cornet hums the air The banjo’s conscientious, begs the viol to reform The piano titters lightly, goo-goo eyes the trombone horn And the solemn bass drum takes up collection And the solemn bass drum takes up collection. (Davis, “Cabaret” 23)

The bassoon prays, the saxophone “sings hymns,” the cornet “hums the air,” the banjo implores the violin to amend his or her evil ways (“begs the viol to reform”), the piano giggles lightly as it “goo-goo eyes the trombone,” and the bass drum solemnly asks for monetary contributions. With the exception of the trombone, Davis maps a religious congregation, in which some “members” perform different vocal activities such as praying, singing, entreating, and laughing, onto the band’s instruments. Several poets frame jazz works as monologues “spoken” by individual instruments. The title of Henry Dumas’ poem “Black Trumpeter” and the assertive structure, for instance, suggest that the poem pretends to be a translation of a black trumpet player’s solo into spoken language, as in the following two stanzas: we must kill our gods before they kill us not because we will to kill but because our gods think themselves gods they are always actors who have lost their script cannot remember the lines, and fake visions of themselves without mirrors phantoms screaming without voices we must kill our gods before they kill us this then is the law and the testament with malice toward none we give you warning when the statute falls the pedestal remains black birds do not light upon the roots of trees the wing praises the root by taking to the limbs we are Americans looking in the mirror of Africa (Dumas, “Black Trumpeter” 50–51; boldface mine)

Each stanza begins with the same verse but then elaborates the militant message differently in the following lines. The analogous structure of both stanzas corresponds metaphorically to an aggressive trumpet solo. The trumpeter first states a theme, develops it, and returns but takes it into another direction, yet repeating a similar phrase from the first improvisation (boldface). The poem also alludes

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to classical texts and one musical piece: for instance, the last four lines of the first stanza probably represent an intertextual reference to a famous passage in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: they are always actors who have lost their script cannot remember the lines, and fake visions of themselves without mirrors phantoms screaming without voices

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Excerpt from “Black Trumpeter” by Henry Dumas

Excerpt from Macbeth (V.v.) by William Shakespeare (204)

The phrase “they are always actors who have lost their script / cannot remember the lines” points to the expression “poor player” and the verse “phantoms screaming without voices” describes the “poor player” who is “heard no more” and the “tale […] Signifying nothing.” Also, the expression “with malice toward one” refers to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865): With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. (Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address” 687; italics mine)

Finally, “black birds” within the context of a black trumpet player possibly alludes to Miles Davis’s “Bye Bye Blackbird” found on ‘Round About Midnight (Columbia, 1957). Apparently, Dumas, who participated in the Black Arts movement and sympathized with the Black Power movement, had Davis in mind when he pretended to translate the “voice” of the trumpet. Another version of an instrument’s “spoken” monologue takes place in Michael S. Harper’s “A Narrative of the Life and Times of John Coltrane: Played by Himself.” Referring to the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself, Harper’s title and poem manifest the metaphor frederick douglass’ slave narrative is john coltrane’s “narrative”:

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Hamlet, North Carolina I don’t remember train whistles, or corroding trestles of ice seeping from the hangband, vaulting northward in shining triplets, but the feel of the reed on my tongue haunts me even now, my incisors pulled so the pain wouldn’t lurk on “Cousin Mary”; in High Point I stared at the bus which took us to band practice on Memorial Day; I could hardly make out, in the mud, placemarks, separations of skin sketched in plates above the rear bumper. Mama asked, “what’s the difference ’tween North and South Carolina,” a capella notes of our church choir doping me into arpeggios, into sheets of sound labeling me into dissonance. I never liked the photo taken with Bird, Miles without sunglasses, me in profile almost out of exposure: these were my images of movement; when I hear the sacred songs, auras of my mother at the stove, I play the blues: what good does it do to complain: one night I was playing with Bostic, blacking out, coming alive only to melodies where I could play my parts: And then, on a train to Philly, I sang “Naima” locking the door without exit no matter what song I sang; with remonstrations on the ceiling of that same room I practiced in on my back when too tired to stand, I broke loose from crystalline habits I thought would bring me that sound. (Harper, “A Narrative of the Life and Times of John Coltrane: Played by Himself” 92–93; italics not mine)

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Apart from the title, Harper’s transformation of Douglass’ slave narrative into Coltrane’s “narrative” highlights several metaphorical correlations between the two texts. For instance, Douglass’s account of his birthplace in the first sentence of his narrative corresponds to Coltrane’s birthplace given at the beginning: Frederick Douglass:

Michael S. Harper:

I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. (Douglass 1997: 12)

Hamlet, North Carolina (Harper, “A Narrative” 92)

Both authors note the town and the state of the respective birthplace and both omit the date of birth, but while Douglass is unable to provide his exact date of birth because he does not know it (see sentence below), Harper deliberately leaves out Coltrane’s date of birth (September 23, 1926) and creates an almost identical correspondence between the first part of Douglass’s statement “I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday” (12) and the assertion “I don’t remember train whistles” Harper attributes to Coltrane (Harper, “A Narrative” 92). Also, Douglass mentions a place called “North Point” on his trip northward with a steamboat (Douglass 1997: 38), which corresponds to a place called “High Point” in Coltrane’s “narrative” (Harper, “A Narrative” 92), and he talks about slavery in the South, which corresponds to Coltrane’s “account” of segregation in the second stanza (92). A further correlation exists between Douglass’s general story about his path from bondage to freedom and Coltrane’s supposedly successful effort at breaking away from drug addiction mentioned at the end: “I broke loose from crystalline habits / I thought would bring me that sound” (93). Such correspondences between Douglass’s slave narrative and Harper’s poem manifest Harper’s metaphorical translation of the former into the latter, which asks readers to imagine it as the “voice” of Coltrane. The exploration of the ways jazz poets render “voices” of instruments has shown that some create metaphorical equivalencies between specific “voices” of instruments and consonance-assonance-alliteration (Davis, Wantling, and Williams). Many others, however, used different techniques to render instruments’ “voices”: for instance, May’s anthropomorphization of a bass in “Double Bass,” McCabe’s combination of metaphors, metonymies, similes, and other literary devices in her translation of an imagined jazz performance by Albert Ayler and his band, Inada’s use of alliteration to indicate the compactness of impressionistic “images” performed on a piano, and the translation of “voices” of instruments into human voices (Dumas and Harper). The discussion has demonstrated the partial explanatory power of the metaphor “voices” of instruments are consonance-

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assonance-alliteration. To overcome the one-sided view promoted by this metaphor, I had to explore other creative treatments of the subject to gain a more comprehensive perspective of this phenomenon. By analyzing poems that do not document the metaphor “voices” of instruments are consonanceassonance-alliteration, I countered the tendency of looking only for a symmetry between a given metaphor and jazz poems and opened the door to further “asymmetric” discoveries in this particular field. The method of first proposing a metaphor at the outset of an investigation of the jazz poetry corpus and then analyzing poems that manifest and do not manifest the metaphor in each subchapter of Chapter 3 has led to an overview of the many creative ways poets have rendered aspects of jazz music, such as melodies and notes, tempo, rhythm, hot and cool jazz, tone-color, mood, dynamics, pitch, and the “voices” of instruments, in their poetry. The practice has also revealed a spectrum ranging from “All examples document a given metaphor” (e.g., pitch) to “No examples document a given metaphor” (e.g., rhythm). Each conceptual metaphor raised the expectation that at least some poems would exhibit the respective metaphor. In Chapter 3.7, for instance, I anticipated seeing poems that would manifest the poets’ reliance on the up-down orientational metaphor to describe “high” and “low” pitches and, indeed, all poems I looked at documented, in one way or another, the metaphor acoustical pitch is a vertical scale. A completely different outcome was the case in Chapter 3.3 pulse is rhythm. Proceeding from the metaphor pulse is rhythm, I expected to come across poems that showed, for instance, the metaphorical correlation of a 24 or a 44 pulse with iambic or trochaic feet in jazz poems, but, surprisingly, none of the jazz poems had a strict meter. Above all, I was astonished that hardly any poem displayed dialect forms, except for the few dialect expressions in Sonia Sanchez’ “a/coltrane/poem” and Amiri Baraka’s poetry. Since people usually link jazz to African-American culture and language, I assumed that poets would translate it into a dialect grapholect, but, as it turns out, they generally translate jazz into a standard grapholect (which people often associate with white culture). In brief, the method exposed puzzling inconsistencies in the genre of jazz poetry.

5 Conclusion As shown in the previous chapter, the shift from a mimetic to a metaphoric perception of the intermedial relationship between music and writing made us aware of writing’s creative potential. Inspired by jazz, poets innovatively translated elements of jazz such as melody, fast and slow tempo, hot and cool jazz, rhythm, dynamics, tone-color, high and low pitches, and mood. Poets created idiosyncratic written renderings of jazz due to their original combination of typographic features such as upper case, lower case, italics, boldface, hyphens, dashes, slashes, commas, periods, and the arrangement of words with various jazz contexts. The mixture of these features enabled poets to attribute different figurative meanings to the same typographic feature. For instance, Langston Hughes translated the melody of a jazz standard into capitalized lines in “The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.)” while Paul Blackburn translated loud musical notes of a Sonny Rollins solo into capitalized words in “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot.” Overall, the combinatory practice guarantees that each jazz poem is a singular work, which documents its author’s particular creative thought processes. Yet the comparison of groups of jazz poems, which treat the same musical element, also highlighted several general cognitive patterns. For instance, they avoided using poetic meters to render fixed rhythms such as 24 , 34 , and 44 time (that is, “common time”). Instead, they favored free verse to stress the aspects of freedom and free improvisation, although jazz music and improvisation typically depend on regular rhythms. Surprisingly, recent criticism in the fields of literary and intermedial studies pays little attention to the creative potential of writing to translate jazz. As demonstrated in Chapter 2, critics treat jazz music and jazz poems as two distinct entities and, comparing them, identify literal similarities between the two media. Derived from the view of jazz poems as imitations, their method of analysis allows them to see the mimetic role of writing but precludes them from discovering its figurative dimension. Poems like Blackburn’s “Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot” ‘imitates’ certain aspects of Rollins’s jazz style, but, in addition, it asks the reader to imagine the poem as music. In Chapter 2, therefore, the examination of several critical works on jazz poetry showed that the mimetic view of the intermedial music-writing relation always leads to a reductive view of the poems. To gain access to the figurative dimension of jazz poetry, I presented the basic tenets of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor and claimed that it helps to explore jazz poetry’s metaphorical dimension when the intermedial relationship is understood in terms of metaphor: the product of such conceptual metaphors are jazz poems that can be interpreted both literally and DOI 10.1515/9783110339017-005

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figuratively. This inclusive approach to the relationship between music and jazz poetry is essential because it enables readers to discover the full intermedial potential of the written medium. In a next step, I defined Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory as the domain conceptual metaphor theory and argued that the “application” of a theory to a text represents the conceptual metaphor text is theory before I illustrated the explanatory power of the concrete metaphor paul blackburn’s jazz poem “listening to sonny rollins at the five-spot” is conceptual metaphor theory. This highlighted several ‘metaphoric’ aspects, such as Blackburn’s process of mapping upper-case words onto loud musical notes (loud music is upper case) but not the reader’s role of imagining the poem as music. The subsequent reversal of the two domains text and theory produced the metaphor theory is text and introduced another approach to the process of understanding a literary text. The conceptualization of the domain conceptual metaphor theory in terms of paul blackburn’s jazz poem “listening to sonny rollins at the five-spot” highlighted further metaphoric and non-metaphoric aspects of Blackburn’s poem, especially the reader’s metaphoric process of mapping elements of music onto it. Despite these findings, the metaphor conceptual metaphor theory is paul blackburn’s jazz poem “listening to sonny rollins at the five-spot” did not illuminate the aspect of transforming the medium “music” into the medium “writing.” Accordingly, I introduced the Translation Metaphor, which always involves transformation, and, adapting Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, inscribed the two terms text and theory into a differential play that led me to generate the meta-level metaphors text is text and theory is theory, in addition to text is theory and theory is text. The ‘metaphoric play’ revealed further possibilities of understanding texts and theories and, relying on diverse literary texts taken from Western culture as well as literary and linguistic theories, I developed a communication model of translation which paved the way for exploring the superordinate metaphor jazz music is writing and the creatively inspired submetaphors in Chapter 4. In drawing an analogy, I claim that the destabilization of the metaphor text is theory, which is still used in literary criticism, will help to develop additional ways of understanding texts and theories. People have always been conceptualizing texts in terms of something else, without being aware of the metaphorical process. The metaphoricity of understanding a text came only to the fore in Biblical hermeneutics.⁷² As I have shown in my reading of the medieval text Ovide Moralisé

72 In contrast to ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, who focused on the logic and the literal semantics of language in his work Peri Hermeneias (which was later referred to as

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in Chapter 3, the method of allegorical interpretation commonly called “allegoresis” involved a literal and an allegorical reading of a text, which, instead of uncovering meaning, created figurative meaning. In his exegesis of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the anonymous scribe retained the literal meaning of Ovid’s work across his translation into Old French and then generated many metaphorical correlations between the “pagan” text and Christian religion (e.g., cupid is god). During the Age of Enlightenment, biblical scholars abandoned the exegetical schema of allegorical interpretation in favor of identifying the literal meaning of the Scripture in a given historical and social context. With the rise of modern hermeneutics, thinkers of every couleur turned their attention towards the “hermeneutic circle” as a model of understanding. Friedrich Schleiermacher, for instance, extended the subject matter of hermeneutics to all texts in his “general hermeneutics” and argued that the strict practice of understanding “the meaning” of a person’s speech or text necessitates the task of avoiding misunderstanding. According to Schleiermacher, the combination of two types of interpretation (grammatical and technical), results in a better understanding of the objective (i.e. literal) meaning and the author’s intention. Since this process never leads to a complete understanding of a spoken or written text, the interpreter is moved towards further interpretations (Grondin 2009: 17–24). Wilhelm Dilthey used the concept of the “hermeneutic circle,” that is, the process of understanding “the whole in terms of the detail and the detail in terms of the whole” (Gadamer 2004: 291),⁷³ to describe Schleiermacher’s interpretive practice and introduced the distinction between the natural sciences (Ger. “Naturwissenschaften) and the humanities (Ger. “Geisteswissenschaften”). He asserted that natural scientists “explain” phenomena in terms of cause and effect while human scientists “understand” phenomena via the hermeneutic circle and, as Bjørn Ramberg and Kristin Gjesdal phrased it, was “the first to ground hermeneutics in a general theory of human life and existence” (Ramberg and Gjesdal, “Hermeneutics”).⁷⁴ Martin Heidegger subsequently instigated the so-called “ontological turn”

De Interpretatione), biblical scholars introduced the distinction between literal and allegorical interpretations of the Bible as early as the third century (A.D.). In the Middle Ages, they developed a fourfold allegorical model of interpretation in order to discover hidden meanings of the Bible and works of classical authors such as Ovid, Homer, and Virgil. For a general introduction to the diachronic development of hermeneutics, see Grondin and Jung; for a detailed discussion of the allegorical method used in the Middle Ages, see Wiebke Freytag’s entry “Allegorie, Allegorese” in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (1992), 330–393. 73 See Tietz 2000: 48–56. 74 Critics still invoke Dilthey’s differentiation between the natural sciences and the humanities to demarcate the empirically oriented natural sciences (and linguistics) from the supposedly hermeneutically oriented humanities.

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in philosophical hermeneutics when he changed the subject matter of philosophical hermeneutics from understanding language to ontology, that is, the nature of being in the world. His student Hans-Georg Gadamer, however, returned to a pre-Heideggerian notion of the hermeneutic circle and redefined it in terms of the ontological paradigm established by Heidegger. For Gadamer, the hermeneutic act of understanding a linguistic utterance is an ontological act and involves the gradual fusion of the interpreter’s horizon with the speaker’s or writer’s horizon (Ger. “Horizontverschmelzung”).⁷⁵ All of the above-mentioned philosophers were concerned with the hermeneutic circle and, thus, paid little, if any, attention to the metaphoric process of understanding something in terms of something else (conceptual metaphor). Likewise, Ferdinand de Saussure neglected the figurative process of understanding in his theory of the linguistic sign. In his Cours de Linguistique Générale, he delineated a communication model in which a speaker pronounces a linguistic signifier such as “tree,” which the listener understands when he or she identifies the literal signified conventionally associated with the respective signifier (here: the mental concept of a tree).⁷⁶ His structural theory of language, however, served as a model for various thinkers – such as Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss – who applied it to the analysis of phonology (Jakobson) and narratives (Propp), Freud’s psychoanalytic theory (Lacan), and anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), and, as a result, ushered in the dawn of structuralism.⁷⁷ With the rise of structuralism and, later on, poststructuralism, critics began to ‘apply’ such theoretical models to literature and thus the ‘method’ of understanding literary texts in terms of theoretical models (text is theory) became prominent. The conceptual metaphor became increasingly popular in academia and yet, strangely enough, remained in the shadows of critical attention. Fascinated by theory and the method of applying theory to texts, critics used the theoretical models provided by poststructuralist (or postmodern) thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Judith Butler, among many others, to highlight theory-specific aspects in literature (e.g., critics employed ‘Foucault’ to highlight power relations in literary texts). As a consequence of innumerable applications of diverse theories to literary texts, the metaphor text is theory permeated Western criticism (and parts of Eastern

75 For an introduction to Gadamer’s ontological model of hermeneutically understanding a spoken or written text, see Tietz 2000: 37–104. 76 See my discussion of Saussure’s semiotic theory in Chapter 3. 77 Terry Eagleton offers a useful overview of structuralism and its major players in the chapter “Structuralism and Semiotics” of his book Literary Theory: An Introduction (1998), 79–109.

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criticism) and became a well-entrenched metaphor in Western societies, attaining an almost unassailable, powerful status in the academy. Simultaneously, poststructuralist (and postmodern) thought informed and shaped postmodern literary texts, which in turn allowed critics to further reinforce the metaphor text is theory. And although the outright enthusiasm concerning theory that governed the 1980s, 1990s, and the early 21st century has ebbed in recent years, the metaphor still governs academic approaches to literature. I want to raise awareness to the (previously overlooked) practice of using conceptual metaphors in academic work. As I have argued in Chapter 3, the meta-level metaphor text is theory brings to light only a limited number of aspects of literary texts (see also above). I propose to destabilize the dominant metaphor of our times, text is theory, by first reversing the order of its two domains and then inscribing them into a differential play. Why not use a literary text to ‘read’ a theory? Why not use a literary text to highlight aspects in another literary text? The metaphoric play produces the four meta-level metaphors text is theory, theory is text, theory is theory, and text is text, which, I hope, will liberate critics from the monotony of the unidirectional metaphor text is theory and permit them to develop novel ways of interpreting literary texts, discover formerly unnoticed phenomena in literature and gaps in theoretical frameworks, and, like the anonymous scribe of the medieval text Ovide Moralisé and jazz poets around the world, enjoy the pleasure of being creative.

Works Cited 1 Primary Sources 1.1 Paintings and Photographs “Eric Dolphy album cover.” Image. Universal Music, 1964. Web. Delaunay, Robert. Rhythme/3. 1938. Oil on canvas. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington. Mondrian, Piet. Broadway Boogie Woogie. 1942/1943. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York. —. Trafalgar Square, 1939–1943. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. —. Victory Boogie Woogie. 1944, unfinished. Oil on canvas. Gemeente Museum, Den Haag. Motley, Archibald J., Jr. Hot Rhythm. 1961. Oil on canvas. Chicago History Museum, Chicago. Russolo, Luigi. Dinamismo di un automobile. 1912/1913. Oil on canvas. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. —. La Musica. 1911. Oil on canvas. Estorick Collection, London. “Thelonious Monk album cover.” Image. Universal Music, 1959. Web.

1.2 Film Davis, Miles, Musician. 1958. Elevator to the Gallows [Ascenseur pour l’échafaud]. Dir. Louis Malle. Rialto. Film.

1.3 Sound Recordings and Lyrics Armstrong, Louis. 2001. “Everybody Loves My Baby.” Satchmo: A Musical Biography. Geffen, 2001. CD. Armstrong, Louis. 2006. “A Monday Date.” The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Sony. CD. Armstrong, Louis. 2006. “Cornet Chop Suey.” The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Sony. CD. Armstrong, Louis. 2006. “Heebie Jeebies.” The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Sony. CD. Armstrong, Louis. 2006. “Hotter Than That.” The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Sony. CD. Armstrong, Louis. 2006. “King of the Zulus.” The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Sony. CD. Armstrong, Louis. 2006. “Potato Head Blues.” The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Sony. CD. Armstrong, Louis. 2006. “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue.” The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings. Sony. CD. DOI 10.1515/9783110339017-006

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Poetry Index Name of Poet

Title of Poem

Page number

Alexander, Elizabeth Anonymous Baraka, Amiri (or Jones, LeRoi) Baraka, Amiri (or Jones, LeRoi) Baudelaire, Charles Blackburn, Paul Brathwaite, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Edward Kamau Brown, Frank London Brown, Sterling A. Carruth, Hayden Chappell, Fred Collins, Billy Collins, Billy Crane, Hart Crouch, Stanley Cuney, William Waring

Billy Strayhorn Writes “Lush Life” Ovide Moralisé AM/TRAK

264 55, 56 271

The Speed

103, 105

Correspondances Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five-Spot Klook (1975 version)

61 8, 24, 39, 45 148

Klook (1986 version)

148

Jazz Cabaret Freedom and Discipline The Highest Wind That Ever Blew: Homage to Louis The Invention of the Saxophone Snow For the Marriage of Faustus und Helen The Revelation Charlie Parker, 1922–1955

Davis, Frank Marshall Davis, Frank Marshall Davis, Frank Marshall

Cabaret Dancing Gal Jazz Band

Davis, Frank Marshall Davis, Thulani Davis, Thulani Dumas, Henry Dumas, Henry Dumas, Henry

Swing It Brother Swing the attack could not be seen by night C.T.’s variation Black Trumpeter Brown sound Play Ebony Play Ivory

Eady, Cornelius Eady, Cornelius Early, Gerald Early, Gerald Elman, Richard Elman, Richard Elman, Richard Elman, Richard Emanual, James A.

Hank Mobley’s The Sheets of Sound Innocency, or Not Song X Tribute to Art of the Chest Beets Cathedral-Tree-Train 1 Chet’s Jazz Low Celsius Notations Get Up, Blues

113, 114 255 177 178 72 130, 202 28 213, 260 108, 109, 110, 111 277 177, 210 196, 198, 224, 269 167 225, 226 70 277 222, 223 217, 219, 220, 221 115 76, 85 75, 200 159 118, 121, 123 210 207 204 243, 244

Poetry Index |

301

Name of Poet

Title of Poem

Page number

Engel, John Eshleman, Clayton Evans, Mari Fabio, Sarah Webster Feinstein, Sascha France, Linda France, Linda Harper, Michael S. Harper, Michael S. Harper, Michael S. Harper, Michael S.

In the Palais Royale Ballroom in 1948 Variation on a Line by Pound princeling For Louis Armstrong, A Ju-Ju Sonnets for Stan Gage (1945–1992) Blues for Bird Sonia Delaunay Listens to Miles Davis Bandstand Engagements High Modes: Vision as Ritual: Confirmation A Narrative of the Life and Times of John Coltrane: Played by Himself Egyptian Book of the Dead Two Jazz Poems Jamming my funny valentine Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.) Harlem Night Club Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret Too Blue Trumpet Player Hollywood Jazz Poem in the Shape of a Saxophone Billie Holiday Bud Powell Louis Armstrong

262 92 165 267 137 93 231 201 177 265 279

Henderson, David Hines, Carl Wendell, Jr. Hoagland, Everett Hope, Akua Lezli Hughes, Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes, Langston Hull, Linda Hummer, T.J. Inada, Lawson Inada, Lawson Inada, Lawson

Inada, Lawson Inada, Lawson Jacobson, Ethel Jeffers, Lance Jellema, Rod Joans, Ted Joans, Ted Johnston, Percy Jonas, Stephen Kaufman, Bob Kaufman, Bob Knight, Etheridge Knight, Etheridge Knight, Etheridge Komunyakaa, Yusef

Plucking Out a Rhythm Two Variations on a Theme By Thelonious Monk as Inspired By Mal Waldron Air de Barrelhouse How High the Moon Holy Week Jazz is my Religion Lester Young Fitchett’s Basement Blues, Opus 5 CLV Mingus Walking Parker Home 9 (9th poem of Haiku series) For Eric Dolphy Ilu, the Talking Drum Dolphy’s Aviary

211, 267 142 206 151 249, 259 81 260 194 244 179 180, 181 84 193 74, 273 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189 151, 152 161, 208 164 254 209 253 236 153 263 26 26, 144 167 20 171, 172 139

302 | Poetry Index

Name of Poet

Title of Poem

Page number

Komunyakaa, Yusef Kostelanetz, Richard Kostelanetz, Richard Lange, Art Lange, Art Longley, Michael Mackey, Nathaniel Major, Clarence Martínez, Dionisio Martínez, Dionisio May, Sue McCabe, Victoria McClane, Kenneth McElroy, Colleen J. Meitzen Grue, Lee Meltzer, David Miller, Vassar Neal, Larry Overton, Ron Perkins, Useni Eugene Perkins, Useni Eugene Plumpp, Sterling D. Plumpp, Sterling D. Redmond, Eugene B. Rexroth, Kenneth Robson, Jeremy Sadoff, Ira Sadoff, Ira Sanchez, Sonia Sandburg, Carl Scruggs, Anderson M. Shange, Ntozake Shange, Ntozake Shirley, Aleda Sorrentino, Gilbert Stone, LeRoy Troupe, Quincy Troupe, Quincy Troupe, Quincy Valentine, Jean Waldman, Anne Waldman, Anne Walsh, Joy Wantling, William Weaver, Michael

Elegy for Thelonious STRINGFOUR STRINGFIVE North of the Sunset Trinkle Tinkle Elegy for Fats Waller John Coltrane Arrived With An Egyptian Lady In Walked Bud With a Palette Three or Four Shades of Blue Three or Four Shades of Blue (2) Double Bass For Albert Ayler Harlem Jam Music from Home Jazzmen No Eyes: Lester Young Dirge in Jazz Time Kuntu Goodbye Pork Pie Hat The Last Flight Satin Doll Thirteen XV. Fifteen (Ornate With Smoke) Sound of a Heart-Train Written to Music: Eight for Ornette’s Music Blues for the Lonely At the Jazz Concert Mood Indigo a/coltrane/poem Jazz Fantasia Meditation on Swing i heard eric dolphy in his eyes It Hasn’t Always Been This Way Ellington Indigos Riff Flamenco Sketches (To Miles Davis) Ode to John Coltrane Snake-Back Solo Words That Build Bridges Toward a New Tongue Coltrane, Syeeda’s Flute Song Bluehawk Eric Dolphy Ferguson’s Conquistadores 77 A Plea for a Workmen’s Compensation The Last Jazz Club

201 126 126 202 202 254 140 229, 230 97 99 270 274 86 214, 215 252 141 212 168, 170 128 272 258 144 178 258 227 240 256 239 251, 252 194 164 145 155 233 91 276 199 86 272 146 131 191 266 269 154

Poetry Index | 303

Name of Poet

Title of Poem

Page number

Welburn, Ron Welburn, Ron Welburn, Ron Welburn, Ron Williams, Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Williams, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Wilson, Ted Wright, C.D. Wright, Jay

3 AND 4 Miles, Trane, Wilbur Hardin Piano Streams: Sam Rivers Gold Tooth Blues Kitchen Door Blues Tenor Sax Taking the Breaks Ol’ Bunk’s Band

157 247 263 88, 89 245 245 79 270

S, C, M, The Complete Birth of the Cool Twenty-Two Tremblings of the Postulant (Improvisations Surrounding the Body)

216, 217 204 94

Credit Lines “Five Elegies: 5. Billy Strayhorn Writes Lush Life” from American Sublime, © 2005 by Elizabeth Alexander, is used with the permission of Elizabeth Alexander. “The Invention of the Saxophone” from The Art of Drowning, by Billy Collins, © 1995. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. “Snow” from Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins, © 1998. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh. “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” from THE COMPLETE POEMS OF HART CRANE by Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon. © 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. “C.T.’s variation” and “the attack could not be seen by night” from playing the changes, by Thulani Davis, © 1985 Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Cornelius Eady, “The Sheets of Sound” and “Hank Mobley’s” from The Gathering of My Name, © 1991 by Cornelius Eady. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University Press. “Innocency, or Not Song X” and “Tribute to the Art of the Chest” from How The War In The Streets Is Won, by Gerald Early. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Memory” and “Cathedral-Tree-Train” from Cathedral-Tree-Train and Other Poems, by Richard Elman. Published by Junction Press, © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Alice Elman. “Beets,” “Low Celsius Notations,” and “Chet’s Jazz” from Homage to Fats Navarro, by Richard Elman. Published by New Rivers Press, © 1978. Reprinted by permission of Alice Elman. Sascha Feinstein, “Sonnets for Stan Gage” from Misteriso, © 2000 by Sascha Feinstein. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. “Blues for Bird” from Storyville, by Linda France, © 1997 Bloodaxe. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Sonia Delaunay Listens to Miles Davis” from The Simultaneous Dress, by Linda France, © 2002 Bloodaxe. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Bandstand” and “A Narrative of the Life and Times of John Coltrane: Played by Himself” from Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems. © 2000 by Michael S. Harper. Used with permission of the poet and the University of Illinois Press. “Highs Modes: Vision As Ritual: Confirmation” from Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems. © 1977 by Michael S. Harper. Used with permission of the poet and the University of Illinois Press. “The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.),” “Too Blue,” “Harlem Night Club,” “Ode to Dinah,” “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” “Cultural Exchange,” and “Ride, Red, Ride” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “Bud Powell – Parisian Thoroughfare,” “Two Variations on a Theme By Thelonious Monk as Inspired By Mal Waldron,” “Louis Armstrong,” and “Billie Holiday” from Legends from Camp, by Lawson Fusao Inada. Published by Coffee House Press, © 1992. Reprinted with permission of Coffee House Press.

Credit Lines |

305

“Plucking Out a Rhythm” from Before the War: Poems As They Happened, by Lawson Fusao Inada. Published by Morrow, © 1971. Reprinted with permission of Coffee House Press. “Holy Week” from Something Tugging the Line, by Rod Jellema. Published by Dryad Press, © 1974. Reprinted with permission of the author. “Mingus” and “Walking Parker Home” by Robert Kaufman, from SOLITUDES CROWDED WITH LONELINESS, © 1965 by Bob Kaufman. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Ilu, the Talking Drum” from The Essential Etheridge Knight, by Etheridge Knight, © 1986. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. “Elegy for Thelonious” and “Dolphy’s Avery” by Yusef Komunyakaa, from the book Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, © 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa, published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT, and used by permission. “Stringfour” and “Stringfive” by Richard Kostelanetz, © 1983. Published in Fetiche Journal 4/5 (1983). Reprinted by permission of the author. “Elegy to Fats Waller” from Collected Poems by Michael Longley, published by Jonathan Cape. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. “John Coltrane Arrived With an Egyptian Lady” from Eroding Witness by Nathaniel Mackey. Published by University of Illinois Press, © 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author. Clarence Major, “In Walked Bud With a Palette” from Configurations: New and Selected Poems 1958-1998. © 1998 by Clarence Major. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. “For Albert Ayler” by Victoria McCabe as published in The Jazz Poetry Anthology, editors Sascha Feinstein & Yusef Komunyakaa. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Harlem Jam” from Take Five by Kenneth McClane. Published by Greenwood Pub Group Inc, © 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Music from Home” from Music from Home: New and Selected Poems with the permission of the author, Colleen J. McElroy “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” from Hotel Me: Poems for Gil Evans and Others, by Ron Overton, © 1994, by permission of Hanging Loose Press. “Written to Music” by Kenneth Rexroth, from SELECTED POEMS, © 1940, 1956 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Blues for the Lonely” published in Thirty Three Poems by Jeremy Robson, © 1964. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Mood Indigo” and “At the Jazz Concert” from Emotional Traffic by Ira Sadoff. Published by David R. Godine, © 1990. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Ode to John Coltrane” and “Words That Build Bridges Towards a New Tongue” from Transcircularities by Quincy Troupe. Published by Coffee House Press, © 2002. Reprinted with permission of Coffee House Press. “Coltrane, Syeeda’s Flute Song” by Jean Valentine, from the book Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, © 2004 by Jean Valentine, published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT, and used by permission. “The Last Jazz Club” from Multitudes: Poems Selected and New. © 2000 by Afaa Michael Weaver. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Sarabande Books, Inc., www.sarabandebooks.org. “3 AND 4” and “Piano” from Brownup and Other Poems by Ron Welburn. Published by Greenfield Review Press, © 1977. Reprinted with permission of the author.

306 | Credit Lines

“Streams: Sam Rivers” and “Miles, Trane, Wilbur Hardin” from Heartland by Ron Welburn. Published by Broadside Press, © 1981. Reprinted with permission of the author. “Tenor Sax Taking the Breaks” and “Gold Tooth Blues” by Tennessee Williams, from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, © 1939 by The University of the South. Reprinted by permission of the New Directions Publishing Corp. “Kitchen Door Blues” by Tennessee Williams, from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, © 1944 by The University of the South. Reprinted by permission of the New Directions Publishing Corp. “The Complete Birth of the Cool” by C.D. Wright, published in Further Adventures with You by Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986. “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” by William Carlos Williams, from THE COLLECTED POEMS: VOLUME II, 1939–1962, © 1948 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Name Index Adorno, Theodor W. 1, 2 Alexander, Elizabeth 264 Anderson, T.J. 3, 18, 19, 23–27, 30 Baraka, Amiri 55, 56, 103, 105 Baudelaire, Charles 50, 61, 62 Barthelme, Donald 27 Blackburn, Paul 8, 24, 39, 45 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 148 Brown, Frank 113, 114 Brown, Sterling A. 255 Carruth, Hayden 177 Chappell, Fred 178 Collins, Billy 72, 130, 202 Crane, Hart 28 Crouch, Stanley 213, 260 Cuney, William Waring 108–111 Davis, Frank Marshall 167, 177, 196, 198, 224, 269, 277 Davis, Thulani 70, 225, 226 Delaunay, Sonia 230–233 Derrida, Jacques 41, 49, 62 Douglass, Frederick 278, 280 Dumas, Henry 217, 219–223, 277 Eady, Cornelius 76, 85, 115 Early, Gerald 75, 159, 200 Elman, Richard 118, 121, 123, 204, 207, 210 Emanual, James A. 243, 244 Engel, John 262 Eshleman, Clayton 92 Evans, Mari 165 Fabio, Sarah Webster 267 Fauconnier, Gilles 5, 31, 46, 64 Feinstein, Sascha 2, 3, 18–25, 27, 30, 98, 102, 137–139, 174, 236 France, Linda 93, 231 Freud, Sigmund 211 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 285 Giddins, Gary 98, 106, 184 Grady, Joseph 36

Harper, Michael S. 177, 201, 265, 279, 280 Henderson, David 211, 267 Hines, Carl Wendell, Jr. 142 Hoagland, Everett 206 Hope, Akua Lezli 151 Hughes, Langston 81, 179, 194, 244, 249, 259, 260 Hull, Linda 180, 181 Hummer, T.J. 84 Inada, Lawson 74, 151, 152, 161, 208, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 193, 273 Iser, Wolfgang 50, 58, 60, 63, 116 Jacobson, Ethel Air 164 Jeffers, Lance 254 Jellema, Rod 209 Joans, Ted 236, 253 Johnson, Mark 4–6, 31–38, 40–42, 45–47, 49, 51, 54, 176, 243 Johnston, Percy 153 Jonas, Stephen 263 Joyce, James 17 Kaufman, Bob 25, 26, 144 Knight, Etheridge 20, 167, 171, 172 Komunyakaa, Yusef 2, 3, 125, 139, 141, 201, 203 Kostelanetz, Richard 126 Kövecses, Zoltán 34, 35, 176 Lakoff, George 4–6, 31–38, 40–42, 45–47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 176, 243 Lange, Art 202 Longley, Michael 254 Mackey, Nathaniel 140 Major, Clarence 229, 230 Martínez, Dionisio 97, 99 May, Sue 270 McCabe, Victoria 274 McClane, Kenneth 86 McElroy, Colleen J. 214, 215 Meitzen Grue, Lee 252 Meltzer, David 141

308 | Name Index

Neal, Larry 168, 170

Shirley, Aleda 233 Sorrentino, Gilbert 91 Steiner, George 49 Stone, LeRoy 276

Overton, Ron 128 Ovid 50–55, 57–61, 63–65

Troupe, Quincy 86, 199, 272 Turner, Mark 5, 31, 36–38, 41, 46, 64

Miller, Vassar 212 Mondrian, Piet 133–136

Perkins, Useni Eugene 258, 272 Plumpp, Sterling D. 144, 178 Rajewsky, Irina 10 Redmond, Eugene B. 258 Rexroth, Kenneth 227 Robson, Jeremy 240 Russolo, Luigi 68, 83, 90, 101, 102 Sadoff, Ira 239, 256 Sanchez, Sonia 251, 252 Sandburg, Carl 19, 21, 193, 194 Saussure, Ferdinand de 50, 52–54, 62 Scher, Paul 16 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 284 Scruggs, Anderson M. 164 Shange, Ntozake 145, 155

Valentine, Jean 146 Waldman, Anne 131, 191 Walsh, Joy 266 Wantling, William 269 Weaver, Michael 154 Welburn, Ron 88, 89, 157, 247, 263 Williams, Tennessee 79, 245 Williams, William Carlos 270 Wilson, Ted 216, 217 Wolf, Werner 4, 9–18, 27, 30 Wright, C.D. 204 Wright, Jay 94 Yaffe, David 8, 9, 19, 27–30

Subject Index Aesthetic experience 9, 17, 18, 30, 43, 72 Analogy 16 Armstrong, Louis 182–190, 266–267 Ayler, Albert 95–96, 273–275, 283

Improvisation 7, 8, 19, 24, 39, 40, 42, 43, 66, 67, 70, 79, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 100, 101 Intermediality 3–5, 7–10, 12–18, 31, 32 Key 5, 235–237, 239, 241, 246, 248

Bebop 23, 106–110, 112, 113, 117, 118, 124, 128, 129, 143–145, 148, 158, 159, 201, 272 Black Arts Movement 28, 168, 174, 213, 234, 278 Blending 5, 31, 46, 64 Blues 29, 86, 93, 94, 96–99, 108, 109, 128, 147–149, 153, 158, 174, 195, 196, 217–219, 226–228, 235–241, 243–246, 248–250, 263, 269, 279 – Blues progression 96, 97 Coltrane, John 77, 78, 85, 86, 106, 115, 140, 141, 146, 147, 199, 247, 251, 252, 258–260, 266, 272, 278–280 Conceptual metaphor theory 5, 6, 31–33, 38, 42, 43, 49, 54, 57, 283 Crescendo 66, 248, 249, 252, 258, 259, 261 Davis, Miles 77, 86, 150, 151, 205, 230, 232, 233, 241–243, 276, 278 Deconstruction 33, 41, 49 Decrescendo 66, 248, 258, 259, 261 Dialect 63, 196, 281 Dolphy, Eric 19–21, 139, 141, 145, 179, 180, 191, 192 Forte 39, 40, 43, 66, 142, 143, 248, 251, 253, 255–257, 260, 261, 275, 276 Free jazz 23, 69, 70, 77, 88, 89, 96, 106, 226, 228, 251, 273, 276 Free verse 70, 133, 137, 139, 142, 143, 150, 168, 173, 174, 282

Linguistic sign 50, 52–54, 62, 63 Metamorphosis 51–55, 64 Mimesis 4, 5, 9, 18, 31 Mobley, Hank 115–118, 125 Monk, Thelonious 129–133, 160–163, 175, 200, 201, 203, 207, 208, 228–230, 234, 269, 287 Piano 66, 142, 143, 248, 249, 251, 252, 257, 261 Pitch 11, 71, 75, 114, 142, 162, 224, 253, 261–268, 281 Powell, Bud 73–76, 200, 266, 273 Ragtime 198, 199, 253 Reader-response theory 50, 58, 60 Rhythm 65 Rivers, Sam 89, 90 Rollins, Sonny 5, 7, 8, 18, 24, 25, 38–43, 45, 46, 49, 57, 61, 282, 283 Simile 21, 27, 261, 267, 270, 271, 280 Strayhorn, Billy 264, 265 Swing 164–168 Syncopation 137, 143, 146, 150, 186, 187, 251 Synesthesia 61

Gage, Stan 137, 138

Tempo 65, 101–103, 105–107, 113, 125, 126, 128–132, 135, 137, 154, 156, 174, 175 Tonic 235 Transformation 3, 5, 7, 10, 15, 18, 31, 32, 41, 46, 49–52, 54, 57, 60, 62, 63, 90, 111, 283 Translation 5, 32, 47–49, 54, 55, 57, 63–65, 67, 101, 102, 106, 283

Hermeneutics 283–285 Holiday, Billie 193

Young, Lester 128, 129, 141, 179, 193, 236, 237