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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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(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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“Dear me. Think of it! Niggers speaking French.”
– William Jennings Bryan,
U.S. Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson

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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Courtesy photo

Rhymes with phone or moan and

means: I’ve grown so dense and lazy

I can’t even be bothered to bomb you

personally, so I dispatch a robot to rob you,

relieve you of everything you thought

rightful or yours. Rhymes with snores.

– Al Young

© 2010 by Al Young

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