PD Dr. Erik Redling
Stockholm, 19 March 2010
Assistant Professor
Department of American Studies
University of Augsburg, Germany
Södra Huset, C307
Workshop
Temperature in Language and Cognition
Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm University and Swedish Scientific Council
1. The Temperature Adjective “Hot”
Example 1:
Example 2:
Frank Marshall Davis, “Dancing Gal”
Michael S. Harper, “Engagements”
Jazz—hot jazz
Gazelle graceful
Lovely as a lover’s dream (64)
Rage at the hottest tempos,
or play slow. (72)
Example 3:
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)
2. Conceptualizing HOT JAZZ in Terms of HEAT
Example 1:
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)
Example 2:
Example 3:
Sterling Plumpp, Ornate With Smoke
(“XV. Fifteen”):
Langston Hughes, “Trumpet Player”
But
Prez blow sweet
Fire into embers (53)
The music
From the trumpet at his lips
Is honey
Mixed with liquid fire (338)
Example 4:
Lawson Fusao Inada, “Louis Armstrong”
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 … (73)
3. Translating HOT JAZZ into “Hot” Poems
Example 1:
Example 2:
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.
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy
tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go hushahusha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.
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)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Notes:
2 Example 3:
Frank Marshall Davis’ “Jazz Band”
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 […]
Do that thing, jazz band!
Whip it to a jelly
Sock it, rock it; heat it, beat it; then fling it at
’em […]
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
[…]
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)
4. COOL JAZZ, Thelonious Monk, and the Noun “Snow”
Example 1:
Example 2:
Yusef Komunyakaa,
“Elegy for Thelonious” (excerpt)
Billy Collins, “Snow” (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)
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)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Notes:
3 Example 3:
Example 4:
Art Lange, Monk Poems:
“Trinkle Tinkle”
“North of the Sunset”
How very caustic and
as a sign in a cinema
illuminating
All those days new snow
below white to warm to write
“the lean foot”
but sat
fluorescent
or at least circular
as a thought
and still no sign of snowing
(n.p.; boldface mine)
and nobody seems very pleased
things even less:
anxious grey
like nerves caught in a graph […]
what lies behind the mind” door to door
moving blue frozen white
frozen thought frozen sight
(n.p.; boldface mine)
5. Cool Poems I: Translating COOL JAZZ into Writing
Richard Elman, “Low Celsius Notations”
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.
(82; emphasis mine)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Notes:
4 5. Cool Poems II: Translating COOL JAZZ into Writing
C.D. Wright, “The Complete Birth of the Cool”
CD Version (1998)
Under this sun voices on the radio run down,
ponds warp like a record.
In the millyard men soak; roses hang from the neck.
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. (21; emphasis mine)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Notes:
5 Works Cited
Carruth, Hayden. “Freedom and Discipline.” Collected Shorter Poems: 1946-1991. Fort Worden
State Park: Copper Canyon P, 1992. 60-62.
Chappell, Fred. “The Highest Wind That Ever Blew: Homage to Louis.” Feinstein and
Komunyakaa 33-36.
Collins, Billy. “Snow.” Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems. New York:
Random, 2001. 105-106.
Davis, Frank Marshall. “Dancing Gal.” Tidwell 64-65.
---. “Jazz Band.” Tidwell 20-21.
Elman, Richard. “Low Celsius Notations.” Homage to Fats Navarro. New York: New Rivers P, 1978.
82.
Feinstein, Sascha, and Yusef Komunyakaa, eds. The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1991.
Harper, Michael S. “Engagements.” Healing Song for the Inner Ear. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985.
72.
Hughes, Langston. “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret.” Rampersad 60.
---. “Trumpet Player.” Rampersad 338.
Inada, Lawson Fusao. “Louis Armstrong.” Legends from Camp. Minneapolis: Coffee House P,
1992. 73-75.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Elegy for Thelonious.” Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 110-11.
Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.
---. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York:
Basic Books, 1999.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.
Lange, Art. The Monk Poems. N.p.: Frontward, 1977.
---. “North of the Sunset.” The Monk Poems n.p.
---. “Trinkle Tinkle.” The Monk Poems n.p.
Plumpp, Sterling D. “XV. Fifteen.” Ornate With Smoke. Chicago: Third World P, 52-56.
Rampersad, Arnold, ed. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Sandburg, Carl. “Jazz Fantasia.” The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2003. 179.
Tidwell, John Edgar, ed. Black Moods: Collected Poems. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002.
Wright, C.D. “The Complete Birth of the Cool.” Further Adventures With You. Pittsburgh: CarnegieMellon UP, 1986. 21.
6