Translating Jazz Into Poetry

Erik Redling

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110395280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The study develops a new theoretical approach to the relationship between two media (jazz music and writing) and demonstrates its explanatory power with the help of a rich sampling of jazz poems. Currently, the mimetic approach to intermediality (e.g., the notion that jazz poetry imitates jazz music) still dominates the field of criticism. This book challenges that interpretive approach. It demonstrates that a mimetic view of jazz poetry hinders readers from perceiving the metaphoric ways poets rendered music in writing. Drawing on and extending recent cognitive metaphor theories (Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier), it promotes a conceptual metaphor model that allows readers to discover the innovative ways poets translate "melody, " "dynamics, " "tempo, " "mood, " and other musical elements into literal and figurative expressions that invite readers to imagine the music in their mind's eye (i.e., their mind's ear).

1Introduction

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 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, 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 “jazz-infused” 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, 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 interpretations 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 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.

2Mimesis: 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-tonemotif (“someone”) and “stutters” (“another”). The poet thus transforms Rollins’s style of improvising on a musical motif into a play ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mimesis: Intermediality and Reductive Interpretations of Jazz Poems
• 3 Metaphor: Intermedial Translation as a Metaphorical Process
• 4 “Oh Play that Thing you Jazz Mad Fools!” Exploring the Creatively Inspired Metaphor JAZZ MUSIC is writing in Jazz Poetry
• 5 Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Poetry Index
• Credit Lines
• Name Index
• Subject Index