keri challenged me on this one, so what i did was to firstly (as always) google ‘cool’ & find out exactly what it means. i think i know, but you know, my brain is a wasteland…blah blah…
so after googling for definitions of ‘cool’ i did a tag analysis to find out the most commonly used terms (there were lots of definitions). it turns out, as i suspected, that ‘cool’ is very often associated with music. on the internet at least, this association is much higher than any other particular term.
music then. poetry often gets lauded for a perceived musicality. is this ‘cool’? i don’t think so. i always get the sense the musicality descriptor relates to sound, but to refined melody, compositional exactitude – in short, music that is traditional, classic, orchestral. a teacher of mine used to say ‘ah, mozart’, & i can just imagine him saying in a similar tone ‘ah, musicality’. is this all in my head? again, i don’t think so.
the musical ‘cool’ then is to me music of a more ephemeral nature. or maybe more correctly, it is music that hasn’t been proven yet. we can ascribe many labels – punk, grunge, dance, hip-hop, metal etc – but i think in many cases ‘fineness’ of melody / harmony (indeed compositional mastery?) is not of the utmost importance (& i guess this works with jazz too, & i was worried the groovy cool of jazz just wouldn’t fit – the pre-composition being only a small part of the performative action). this is the musicality of ‘cool’: it’s about the times, the fashion, the resistance, the words & the music.
i think it makes sense to affirm cool as a compositional criteria. it adds to a mode of writing that is a mode of being. & interestingly, the sense of ephemerality (i may have been wrong to use this word) that comes with fashion / newness / vogue is not strictly associated with cool. & the tag analysis revealed this too, in a curious way. the definitions of cool of course take in the meteorological ones. & one of the most used words (along side ‘music’) is ‘heat’. what is hot right now is in both linguistic senses opposed to what is cool. the latest australian idol pop song release will be ‘hot’ for a while, but never cool.
cool does not amount to populism. come to think of it, i didn’t mix with the popular kids in high-school. but i’m pretty sure i was always cool. now that’s getting of the subject of poetry… but is it?
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a while ago we watched a doco on how temperature scales were developed and notions of cool, cold & freezing were attached to concrete numbers. it was really interesting. apparently francis bacon (not the painter) was so keen to find the ultimate scale of coolness that he contracted pneumonia from handling a frozen chook for too long, & subsequently died.
the subject of ‘cool’ has long fascinated me. as you point out, cool is not what is in vogue and trendy. it surpasses, even trascends, such, to use your word, ephemeral posturing. what then is cool? much like beauty it can be overly defined and rationalized but in the end it is a state of being and you know what is cool when you see it. cool is ultra sense and timeless. cool is like being the fonze.
that derek motion… he’s so hot right now
yeah but in a ‘cool’ way, right?
it dismays me how uncool coolness seems in poetry .. like someone can be considered a great poet while being far from cool .. as if a rock critic would call celine dion or someone great – ok my reference needs updating but i cdnt think of an 08 equivalent this morning. buble?