© Karen Johnson

Backstage of My Song, an evening with Harry Belafonte, a KPFA benefit held on the 30th of November at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church

BELAFONTE FOR BEGINNERS

Three years before “I Have a Dream” got preached,

the 1960 March on Washington

propelled us into DC. Once we reached

the Saturday when you were going on,

mean horseback cops reared up to stomp us. “Stop!”

one hollered in a trembling southern drawl.

“Let them kids live!” We thanked this rebel cop

with gut sighs, then we cut straight for the Mall.

You, Harry Belafonte, sang our songs.

You let us know you came down on our side.

Green college kids, we knew what rights, what wrongs

forced us to see you, hear you, while we died.

No caving in. No turning back. Just home.

Calypso? All we heard was: “Daylight, come!“

–Al Young

© 2011 Al Young

When she explained how she was set free

but her boyfriend and best friend weren’t

(“I don’t know what it was about him and her

and I”), you loathe the fool who would collar

her and say: “About him and her and me!”

So you shine it on, the same as you’ve given up

whom and less and fewer and good and well

and was and were as in If I Were a Bell (not

If I Was a Bell) I’d go “Ding-dong-ding-dong, ding!”

Well, look at where you’re coming from:

the grammar Nazi who knows subjunctive mode

(or, better yet, mood), knows indirect object

pronouns, verb-needy nouns, lie, lay, laid, lain.

You know its and it’s and neither, nor, further

farther, “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard.”

Besides, she’s younger than you. Bitten, mother

tongue suffers. Language, gauged and negotiated,

sends thumbs fumbling and twirling unjustly.

She compares and contrasts sweethearts and cohorts.

You feel their pain and her shame. You lighten up.

– Al Young

© 2011 Al Young

© vozamer

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]]> http://alyoung.org/2011/07/03/grammar-nazi/feed/ 0 http://alyoung.org/2011/05/08/elegy-for-a-life-loving-friend/ http://alyoung.org/2011/05/08/elegy-for-a-life-loving-friend/#comments Sun, 08 May 2011 08:36:58 +0000 Al http://alyoung.org/?p=24142

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Courtesy Tissa Eddy Stein, Roger Eddy, Glen Eddy

In memory of Edith Eddy | 23 July 1919- 3 January 2011

Light-years ago: Chapala afternoons,
a lake-like feel and smell, the way we met,
three children California-born, full moons,
the world not yet as gone as it would get.

Lifetimes ago: Kauai, Sri Lanka, France,
the U.K., Switzerland and Italy,
the island of Madeira, China. Once
upon a time you told all this to me.

You grew up in these places, went to school,
learned languages, then found the U.S.A.
Your sisters didn’t follow. You, uncool,
fell fast and hard in love, and there you’d stay.

But all too soon your voice, an earthy purr,
wore down. Still, where your love took root, you star.

– Al Young

© 2011 by Al Young

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Taylor Trio

for Nana

What’s most fantastical almost always goes

unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring.

Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee

your night, creameries your dream factories.

Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest

means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave

of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth

can still be the same earth our ancestors walked.

Chemistry strains to connect our hemispheres.

The right and left sidelines our brain forms

in the rain this new world braves—acid jazz.

The timeless taste her tongue leaves in your mouth,

stirred with unmeasured sugars, greens the day

the way sweet sunlight oxygenates, ignites

all nights, all daytimes, and you—this jumps.

Sheer voltage leaps, but nothing keeps or stays.

Sequence your afternoon as dance. Drink spring.

Holding her hard against you, picture the screenplay.

Take time to remember to get her spells together.

Up jumps the goddess gratified, and up jumped spring.

– Al Young
from Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006

© 2006 by Al Young

Spring Awakening |© John Fleshman

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Gini Savage’s Shape-Shifter | © Al Young

Bluebirds Bathing | © Vivian Torrence

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]]> http://alyoung.org/2011/04/04/up-jumped-spring/feed/ 2 http://alyoung.org/2011/04/01/april-in-paris/ http://alyoung.org/2011/04/01/april-in-paris/#comments Sat, 02 Apr 2011 03:00:11 +0000 Al http://alyoung.org/index.php/2008/04/01/april-in-paris/ ________________________________

click on the eiffel tower

JJWebb/Cruzio Blues Café

To animate the avatar of Al Young reading and singing with the Dartanyan Brown Trio, click here.
Dartanyan Brown, bass | Jorge Molina, piano | Sly Randolph, drums

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APRIL IN PARIS

after Yip Harburg & Vernon Duke

It was here in that one-time, one-step, lighted blue
of Paris at ease, close to the Cluny, in splendid,
straight-up noontime shadow that your slow and
measuring eyes met more than their burning match.

The smooth warmth of your whisper along my neck,
the nappy back of it, where you’d peeled back
its soft, excited collar to tell me everything you’d learned
or discerned in a city where love and prices flirt.

A product of standstill winters, sudden summers, sultry
prejudice, and heartland steak-and whiskey afternoons,
you’d blown in from the States, an orphan of the arts –
Mary Cassatt , Josephine Baker, Mary Lou Williams,

Jean Seberg. What breathlessness overtakes me here?
Brushing and combing out memories of your touch,
in a season as uncertain as coastal fog moving inland
from the loveless edges of that country we’d both fled,

I shiver. Whom could we run to if not one another?
Back home we knew what it was like to be the other –
displaced, despised, imprisonable. We watched and fought.
The colors of loss deepened. Yearning to break free,

unconsciously American, we counted our chickens, certain
that the ships we’d always banked on would sail in.
In Paris, our adopted country of each other’s arms,
whose borders blurred all time, all common market sense,

we saved the slow but steady squeeze of night, of time,
the way it smothered darkness, the way it mothered light.
The April of your frightened French was like that, too;
you had no words for holiday tables, for chestnuts in bloom.

Parisian light, like light at home — Detroit, Des Moines –
lit up your waifish eyes. I said, “Think twice before you speak.”
Over here you mostly knew the blues; rue rhymed with blue.
There couldn’t be too much light, too much touch.

Al Young
© 2001, 2006, 2008 by Al Young

Meet the Poet-Animator

Animation and design
© 2008 by J.J. Webb a.k.a. Beau Blue

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clickable

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— for Robert Hass

Dr. Eve Sweetser’s session in the Cross-Cultural Poetics series:
Early Welsh Metrics ~ “Metaphors and Metonyms for the Heroic Society” ~ UC Berkeley 3/19/2009

Celtic = old fash
Keltic = correct

Germans pushed Celts south
Romans pushed them onto islands

Celtic inscriptions in Italy, Spain, France

Curses dropped into wells for lower gods
Blessings burnt & sent up to higher gods

Sweetser charms w/ her love of subject

Imagined proto-bard

13th C = paleography (copied ms.)

Celts elegize defeat & even
love a poem of defeat claimed by the Scots
(odd becuz Scots = enemy)

Question of metrics
How syllabics work
Old Welsh we’re looking now at stress-metric lines

Accentual vs. quantitative verse
Accentual counts stresses,
incl phrasal stress vs. lexical stress

Celts obsessed with three-ness

“Wine-fed, mead-fed, feast-poison” ref to battle time
expected of men who received the mead or wine

(Euro obsession w/ war & dying)

Sweetser: “Hard to sep metaphor fr metonomy”
– waiter id’s diner to chef as “the BLT” –
“the BLT wants a coke” = metonymic

(Al’s POV: Washington & Paris enslave & kidnap Haiti) –
Sweetser: “But to call someone ‘honeybun’ or ‘sugar’ = metaphorical”

Cattle as wealth
Upward & downward responsibilities

Welsh verse doesn’t tell you what
metaphor refers to; Anglo-Saxon does –
The “hall” = example;
the “self” another

Cross-linguistic metaphor systems

The stack of bks went up = metonymyic frame:

Milk in glass

Metonymy is abt correlation
Metaphor is abt diff frames

Kulchur frames

© 2011 Al Young

Photo: John Ohala

Professor Eve Sweetser | 2007

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Bandoneón Player © Oscar Casas

“When the band strikes up a tango, people with Parkinson’s disease may want to head for the dance floor.”
– Eric Nagourney,
The New York Times, February 12, 2008

The tango and the blues shared more than funk
and disrespect; their pulse and heart moan softly
in the here-and-now, and swell with touch and
what touch needs to mean. Whether hand in hand
or slyly mouth to mouth, we move, we live again.
The steps we share still every deathly fear.

Our limbs know what it means that you can lean
into my outer step, the blood-orange of our dancing
duds a sultry tip-off. Darling, when Africa calls,
delayed responses sway. And yet the habanera
and candombe egg us on, egg static forces forward.

Big forms of blues feel endless sometimes, vast,
swirling deep up from the bloodstream, blending
sunrise with the closest Moon to Earth in years.
And when you move your face to mine, dark sky
our background, I know nothing will dissolve
that is not form. Long live local movements.

– Al Young
© 2010 by Al Young

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]]> http://alyoung.org/2010/08/04/tango-good-to-go/feed/ 0 http://alyoung.org/2010/07/08/solaris/ http://alyoung.org/2010/07/08/solaris/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:36:28 +0000 Al http://alyoung.org/?p=15583 __________________________________________________________

(top) Still from the USSR film Solaris (1972); directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
(bottom) Don Quijote y Sancho Panza image courtesy el blog de LeeTamargo

SOLARIS

“Science — nonsense! We don’t want to conquer space at all; we want to expand earth endlessly. We don’t want other worlds; we want a mirror.”
– Dialogue spoken by Snouth in the Soviet film, Solaris (based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem)

Explore earth evidently, rock by rock, root by root,
inch by inch, hair by hair, pixel by pixel, tock by tock.
There was a way once to get back; not to get even,
but to reach home without leaving the body.
Imagine the unsounded but fully heard voice
that clumps up within you, that fluffs into a hunch,
silver every time. If intimacy lit up like this,
all holiness could be speared and stuffed and mounted.
Thank God for invisibility, for the untraceable
trails we sink in, marking our journeys in electrical ink
upon mental score paper that reads us perfectly.
That thoughts are things is all the faith we need.
To think pure beauty, have it turn up in your arms
or at your feet or on your bourgeois walls means
business. To slow time down until the space between
moments stretches beyond the hours means eternity.
Unworldly gospel people who lean into the clouds
look for that uncloudy day. To others, matter matters,
nothing else, and business is business. Explore?

– Al Young

from The Sound of Dreams Remembered
© 2001 and 2006 by Al Young

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Caribbean culture this and Caribbean Studies that –
you lecture on these from notes so yellow with yesses
and yesterdays, who couldn’t help wondering
if your history hasn’t been ripped from the pages
of some other book? Maybe the double-book account
Columbus kept: one for the crew, one for himself,
the freighted version more truth than myth.

“What, My Lai?” the joke went after Lt. William Calley
and his GI marauders murdered most of a village
in a Vietnam your students still can’t locate.
Can they point out Port-au-Prince? Can they
unearth Haiti from a sea of island nations
set up as plantations to grow cash and more cash
and more cash? Unlike her Kerouacs, the Arawak
Indians stood little chance in mappable America.

Spaniards gave up and seeded the eastern half
of Hispaniola. Deft and slick, the French moved in
with African slaves to colonize the isle’s western
Left Bank. Tobacco, cacao, coffee, sugar, sugar
(azúcar up the kazoo) – all the dope your belly
can stomach, and all the cotton Europa needed.
This business of cheapness, this business of woe.

That nature is “niggardly” in her provisions
isn’t what Adam Smith intended to say or convey
in The Wealth of Nations. All Smith meant was:
To make a profit, you need a nigger. To make big
profits, you need a whole lot of niggers speaking
English or Dutch, speaking Spanish, speaking
Portuguese, German, Danish, Norwegian, Italian,
until inch by inch, you reached your French,
your Martinique, your Sénégal, your Ivory Coast,
your Equatorial, your Montréal, blesséd Québec,
La Nouvelle-Orléans , Louisiane. Toussaint L’Ouverture
– a  slave, self-taught and black as Miles at midnight;
blue-black, fearless, smart, an anti-body for a bruise:
it was stealth versus wealth. It was ancestral starlight
guiding a ship; it was paycheck loan time for Napoléon.
“We’ll give you $7 million dollars for all the Louisiana
you can pony up.” “I’ll take it,” said Napoléon, “in cash.”
Those Negroes in Haiti were kicking his ass. But how?

Word reached George Washington, who all but said:
France helped us joog and jam King George, so
we’ll send spare troops to beat back your insurgents,
only don’t let word of this get out to our slaves.
Hell could break loose! Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité –
inspire us some more. Ayiti, Hayti, Haiti blossomed
step by step in living, lifelong color. Port-au-Prince
could never hold a candle to Paris and Washington:
slash-and burn croppers of dreaming human cargo.

You know all this, you teach and earn your keep
with such detail. You know the Arawak would not
sit back and wait for such an earth attack to build
and seethe. The French and Spaniards didn’t care.
The king and queen were going to get their cut
no matter what: one-third of all the booty, all the loot.
With greed and pride now supersized — colonize!

– Al Young
© 2010 Al Young

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