The Best American Poetry

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

On May 15, 1871, fifteen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud wrote a letter to his friend Paul Demeny. In the letter, Rimbaud spoke of creating new poetic effects by engaging in a "rational disordering of the senses."

Bob Dylan became enraptured with Rimbaud. Dylan concluded that the disordering he sought needed to by-pass the rational; he evidently assumed the changed senses would change his imagination. Like some of his literary ancestors--such as Aldous Huxley who tried mescaline or Allen Ginsberg who tried many drugs--Dylan sought in using drugs to find and enter a hidden inner world, one buried beneath the structures that society had built there, one that his own conscious mind might not even recognize or acknowledge. Once there, he would see and understand the unique symbols of his own mind, and then he could present those symbols in songs to the world.

Various critics and fans have seen the influence of drugs in Dylan's work. But it's hard to make sense of such a notion. After all, if drugs could propel creativity, we would by now have an incredibly rich library of drug-induced books. We don't have the library. People who write while on drugs characteristically produce incoherent or disconnected fragments of the experience. And then comes the really cruel part. Even if a drug experience could produce a perfectly-rendered re-creation of the experience, who would want to read it? Either it is a secondary experience that can't subsitutute for a person's direct experience with the drug or it is somebody else's experience that has little meaning for us.

Writing is a rational act. When Dylan wrote, he was in command of his visions. When he took drugs, the visions were in command of him. Whether he needed those visions for inspiration, or as examples of the kinds of visions his mind was capable of producing, or to confirm that he was a leader of an emerging culture, or to experiment for its own sake is not clear. But using drugs as an explanation for Dylan's creative powers and mastery of words evades the still elusive aspects of his artistry.

"The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" [by Wilfred Owen]

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

-- Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918)

Wilfred Owen's "Parable of the Old Man and the Young" came up in recent conversations about Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited," so we thought we'd post it here.

Owen's version of Abraham becomes a parable of World War I: the slaying of "half the seed of Europe" for the sake of a war that did not need to be fought. Owen's Abram differs from Abraham in Genesis inasmuch as the former does not go forth in response to a divine summons, and he disobeys the rescuing angel. Formally, Abram's betrayal is enacted in the last two lines attached to the fourteen-line poem preceding it: the sonnet is busted, and the rich biblical language gives way to a tidy couplet.

-- DL

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

During a February 10, 1976 interview Allen Ginsberg made a startling comment about Bob Dylan. Ginsberg and Dylan had recently spent time together touring on the Rolling Thunder Revue and, while on the tour, filming Renaldo and Clara. The interviewer noted that Ginsberg knew Dylan well and asked about his possible interest in Buddhism. Ginsberg responded to the assumption of the question: "I don't know him because I don't think there is any him. I don't think he's got a self."

Many young seekers in the 1960s thought of themselves on a search for self, as though the philosophical essentialists had been correct in claiming that we all have an essence, a core self that is sometimes hidden from our own consciousness. Our job is to search for that authentic being and then live out our life to fulfill that self. Sartre and some other existentialists flatly disagreed with that, asserting that there is no essence, but that we were totally free to create our own selves. The solipsists denied that there was any reality outside the self. Sometimes solipsism is listed as a variant of psychological nihilism, as is the notion that the solipsistic self creates a fictional world which merely mirrors and extends the isolated self. In all these differing notions, there is one commonality: the existence or potential existence of a self.

If Ginsberg is right, Dylan exemplifies what might be termed radical psychological nihilism. Such nihilism means that there is no self to find or create. Any "self" is really a psychological or social construct meant to offer the pretense of stability in an unstable reality. There is no stable self during this moment that will continue into the next moment.

According to this interpretation, the consciousness that experiences life within Dylan keeps changing, keeps searching for the next door of perception, the next way to expand that consciousness, the next new experience. All of this is done without the expectation that these accumulated perceptions of the moment will be around long enough to enlighten the new consciousness during the next minute.

Unharnessed from normal social and psychological definitions, in this view, Dylan's consciousness is forced to keep moving, always curious and mercurial, endlessly re-inventing his music, refusing to sit still for interviews as though there were a stable self to capture, having a desperate need to record his fleeing sensory experiences, prizing the only constants he has--music, language, desire, and God.

From Natchez to Mobile

In his Chronicles (2004) Dylan remarks that growing up in Minnesota he responded with great feeling to Harold Arlen's songs. Woody Guthrie ruled Dylan's universe, and Arlen worked in a different genre altogether, but Dylan wanted it known that he loved Harold's bluesy sound.

Am I crazy to hear an echo of "Blues in the Night" (Arlen music, Johnny Mercer lyrics) in "Memphis Blues Again"? Listen:

Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again?

That's Dylan. Mercer's lyric, which begins with "My mama don' told me," concludes with these lines:

From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe, wherever the four winds blow
I been to some big towns, an heard me some big talk, but there is one thing I know,
A woman's a two face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night.

Blues, Mobile, Memphis. What do Dylanologists think?

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In the June 1849 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay titled "Song-Writing" in which he asserted, "For my own part, I would much rather have written the best song of a nation than its noblest epic."

Pulitzer Boards took a long time to see Poe's point. On April 7th, Bob Dylan won a Special Citation "for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." This award is not comparable to an honorary doctorate. It's a genuine Pulitzer Prize.

Dylan unquestionably is one of America's greatest songwriters. He was able, at one time at least, to take young people on a guided tour of the national subconscious. He could conjure arresting images that were projections of hidden but recognizable feelings. He invented new language for members of a generation, providing aphorisms and maxims that seasoned their conversations and affected their lives. He decoded the spirit of the time with a unique clarity and later re-encoded it into cryptic but resonant songs that sounded like dispatches from the front lines in the war between reason and madness.

The principal claim supporting Dylan as poet is that Dylan is on the most intimate terms with the English language, that his use of rhyme, assonance, alliteration, imager, simile, metaphor, meter, and other poetic devices reveals someone who uses words and sounds as well as poets.

Dylan prompts the thought that instead of maintaining a sharp demarcation between poetry and lyrics, we might expand the definition of poetry to include songs that provide the same pleasures as poetry.

Still, printing songs as though they were reducible to lyrics and meant to be read as poets is sometimes adequate, but the songs are never accurately represented on the the page even though all of us who are writers continue to present them that way. Dylan's musical achievements are those of a performance artist. Separated from the music and the nasal twang and the startling cadences of Dylan's voice, the written lyrics can seem desiccated.

Maybe if readers decide that a sufficient number of songs do provide the pleasures of poetry, the books we write in the future will have both pages with poems meant to be read privately and an accompanying CD with poems meant to be heard and those meant to be sung.

Such books would have pleased Poe.

Ricks on Dylan

I've been reading Christopher Ricks's book on Bob Dylan's lyrics, and I wonder how Dylan aficionados feel about it and especially about the discrepancy between style of critic and style of songwriter.

Ricks is probably the most talented practitioner of old-fashioned "close reading" that we have. His books on Milton, Keats, Eliot offer brilliant line-by-line analysis of great poems. "Dylan's Visions of Sin" shares much with his previous books: passionate advocacy of the writer, clever puns and allusions in every sentence, a controlling concept to organize and unify the book (T. S. Eliot and "prejudice," Dylan and "sin"). Thus, for example, "Positively 4th Street" becomes a condemnation of a former friend guilty of the sin of envy. It is exciting that Ricks has the same ardor for Dylan as for Eliot and Samuel Beckett.

The style of analysis and expression is so characteristic of Ricks -- logical, linear despite pirouettes, "English" -- and so seemingly antithetical to Dylan's non-analytical, non-linear, "American" manner that you can't help noting the incongruity.

Opinions, anyone?

-- DL

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

There are other worthy candidates for the title of "Most Evasive Interviewee of All Time," but Bob Dylan has surely labored the hardest to secure the title. It is not just that Dylan becomes hostile, surreal, or poetic. It is not just that he distorts reality, re-shaping it to make it more dramatic and interesting by adding what was once called a "vaudeville shine" to facts. It is not only that he slants the truth or sneaks in private references or presents useful insights packed slyly like dull afterthoughts in glittering parcels of exaggerations. It is that Dylan himself resists the stable identity necessary for any interview. He is protean. His voice, appearance, and politics shift along with his self. No such quicksilver personality can be genuinely interviewed because an interview seeks to capture the person, to present the person as a particular being at a particular time. To accept being interviewed is to accept being branded.

In April 1962, Dylan had a radio interview on WNYC with Henrietta Yurchenco, a well-connected ethnomusicologist. The interview is not discussed in any Dylan biography, and Yurchenco herself told me she wasn't sure if the program ever aired. (Henrietta Yurchenco died in 2007 at the age of 91; she wrote about the interview in her book Around the World in 80 Years.) At the interview, Yurchenco asked Dylan how he came to New York. He evaded the question. "I can't tell you because it would involve other people." For a half hour, he sidestepped all the other questions. The frustrated Yurchenco just stopped the show. After everone else had left, she snapped at him, "We haven't got a show. Why bother to come and then say nothing?" Dylan then proceeded to tell her a series of tall tales. On his first night in New York, he claimed, a man offered him to place to stay if he did some cleaning. Then, he said, he slept for the next four nights on a tabletop in a union hall. "One day," he said, "I watched the children playing in Washington Square Park; they were so happy, I decided I could be happy here, too."

That image is so delicate, so earnestly told, that it deserves to be true even if it isn't. But that's Dylan--always connecting the lines between the imagination and reality.

Dylan Entry in "Oxford Book of American Poetry"

Bob Dylan is represented in the 2006 edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry with "Desolation Row" and this head note. We're curious to know how readers react to the inclusion of Dylan's work, the specific choice of "Desolation Row," and the statements made below. -- DL

Bob Dylan, b. 1941. The songwriter and singer was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, and spent much of his boyhood in Hibbing, near the Canadian border. He named himself after Dylan Thomas. The lyrics in three of his record albums from the mid-1960s –– Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde –– particularly reward close analysis of the sort given to demanding examples of modern poetry. Read on the page, independent of musical accompaniment or vocal delivery, ""Desolation Row"" may be his finest lyric. The critic Christopher Ricks, who had previously written books about Milton, Keats, Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, and Samuel Beckett, devoted a lengthy volume to Dylan’s Visions of Sin in 2004. Ricks analyzes a stanza in "Desolation Row" –– the one in which Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are "fighting in the captain’s tower" –– in relation to Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'' Archibald MacLeish once complimented Dylan on the same lines. "Pound and Eliot were too scholastic, weren't they?'' MacLeish said. ""I knew them both. Hard men. We have to go through them. But I know what you mean when you say they are fighting in a captain's tower.'' Recalling MacLeish’s words, Dylan made no comment other than to allow that he liked Eliot, who was "worth reading,'' but disapproved of Pound's anti-American propaganda from Italy in World War II and never did read him

Abe says man you must be puttin me on

Abe says man you must be puttin me on

God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"

Abe says, "Man you must be puttin' me on"

Compare to "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest" (Genesis, 22:2).

In Dylan’s lines the key word is the vernacular "Man" cutting god down to size. The god in Dylan's song is a diminished thing reigning over a diminished universe. Any son will do for the desired sacrifice. Note the sacred individuality of the biblical Isaac: "thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest."

You can do what you want Abe, but

The next time you see me comin' you better run

Compare to the biblical Abraham: "God will provide" (Genesis 22:8). God, all action no talk, makes no threats. Abe has faith equal to doubt. The rest is silence.

But now we're on highway 61, the dawn of a noisy new age, 1961, with a handsome new president and a short-lived new frontier, it's over and we're visiting, revisiting if not revising it, and JFK has given way to LBJ how many kids did you kill today -- it's time for VIETNAM -- and Abe, successor to honest Abe, who freed the slaves -- Abe clears his throat:

Abe say "Where do you want this killing done?" '

God say "Out on Highway 61."

And God directs traffic.

And grammar go out window.

And young Isaac is not content with observing the fire and wood and noting the absence of the lamb for the offering.

Young Isaac doesn't want to work for Maggie's brother no more.

He is tired of working for the white man boss and when he thinks of the stream he wants to cross to cool his feet in the heat of a summer day he thinks of death, gambling, and the Mississippi River.

He is tired of bullshit friends who have a lot of nerve and just want to be on the side that's winning.

He has done his share of quarreling in the captain's tower. He has read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books. And he knows what is happening (the vandals took the handles) though he doesn't know something is. A strange man, Mr. Jones, Isaac Jones that is.

-- DL

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

David Lehman asked me to “talk about the opening of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ in relation to the chapter in Genesis that is its source. This re-telling of Abraham's ‘binding’ of Isaac reminds me a little of Wilfred Owen's poem in which the massacred soldiers of World War One are the victims of a bloodthirsty god and an obedient Abraham on Mount Moriah.”

            

The Owen poem is “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” The poem draws a parallel between the well-known Biblical story (Genesis 22:1-19) in which Abraham feels called to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah, but an angel stops the sacrifice.

The ending of the poem departs from the Biblical text.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Owen’s bitterness stems from his view that the older generation of European leaders sacrificed the youth of Europe rather than any national pride.

In “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan finds a contemporary version of Mount Mariah in American life. Highway 61 is a place where people who kill their own children, losers, con men, incestuous parents, and warmongers go for safety. It is a place where American values have been sacrificed in the name of lust and power and greed.

The real Highway 61 runs from New Orleans to Minnesota. Before 1991, it went through Duluth, where Dylan was born. Additionally, in Dylan’s song, God tells Abraham, “Kill me a son.” Dylan’s real father was named Abraham, so the story is not abstract to him.

There is an irony to both the Owen and Dylan references. The Biblical text was written to protest the common practice of sacrificing the firstborn son by showing that such a practice was counter to God’s moral code. Unfortunately, the historical context has been lost and its moral progress has come to be seen as a near act of barbarity. Still, despite the inaccurate comparisons by both Owen and Dylan, their larger points remain poignant. How often have governments refused to admit mistakes but resorted to violence in which the young die? And how far does one have to look to see decency sacrified on the altar of desire?

-- Lawrence J. Epstein