Translating Jazz Into Poetry: From Mimesis to Metaphor (2017)

Erik Redling

How does a jazz poet recreate a jazz song or style of a jazz musician? Translating Jazz Into Poetry challenges the current mimetic approach to jazz poetry, which regards jazz poems as “imitations” of jazz music. Instead, this study promotes a conceptual metaphor model, building on the theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, that highlights the creative “translation” of melody, tempo, dynamics, and other musical elements into figurative expressions. It demonstrates the explanatory power of the cognitive approach to intermedial relations between music and writing, with a rich sampling of jazz poems from a wide range of jazz poets, including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Elizabeth Alexander.

 

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