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Patrick Walsh-Scene4 Magazine

Patrick Walsh

Rock’s Poet Laureate Is Now A Nobel Laureate

If people have any poetry in their lives, if they’ve been moved from time to time by the triple magic of the sound, arrangement, and meaning of words (what Coleridge defined as “the best words in their best order”), it’s hardly thanks to modern poets. Having decamped to the well-tenured halls of the Academic-Industrial Complex, our contemporary poets have methodically alienated their reading public with bloodless, head-scratchingly abstruse versification while turning the enterprise of poetry into a Ponzi scheme called Creative Writing Programs.

 

No, if people enjoy poetry at all it’s because of modern troubadours–and none greater than Bob Dylan. (Only The Beatles loom larger as an entity in the Rock 'n' Roll firmament, but to be fair, there were four of them.)

 

On October 13, 2016, the Swedish Academy finally got around to formally recognizing America’s greatest poet since Walt Whitman. Rock’s Poet Laureate is now a Nobel Laureate. It’s nothing most of us didn’t think for a long time–you don’t need the Swedish Academy to know which way the wind blows.

 

Naturally, grumbles emanated from a few dusty corners that Dylan somehow doesn’t deserve a Nobel in Literature, that he’s a Folk singer and a Rock musician but not a poet (a particularly shrill protest stung the ears of many a terrier in the foggy Highlands when a Pop novelist awoke to find that the Swedish Academy had poured sour milk over his haggis.)

 

And there’s Dylan’s success–somehow his popularity, his commercial appeal and resultant wealth belie his artistic excellence; the spiders who weave this twisted web would have us believe that Nobel laureates ought to be penniless, obscure, and read in translation years after they die.

 

It’s funny, we regard William Shakespeare as the greatest writer of them all, but no one knocks the Bard of Avon for having been immensely popular and financially successful in his own lifetime. Then again, even Shakespeare had his critics, whoever they were.

 

Like Shakespeare, Dylan has crafted a sprawling oeuvre. Along with startling verbal facility, his mind has always been various, encompassing worlds, his influences as disparate as the Bible and the Beats, making a Dylan concordance truly encyclopedic.   

 

With some choice examples, the Dylan songbook includes:

Covers of traditional arrangements: “In My Time of Dyin' ”
and “House of the Risin’ Sun”

Folk ballads or “protest songs”: “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “The Times They Are
A-Changin’,” and “Who Killed Davey Moore?”

Odysseys of free association: “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and “I Want You”

Country classics: “One More Night,” “Peggy Day,” and
“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”

Love songs: “If Not For You,” “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,”
and “Lay, Lady, Lay”

Parables: “Desolation Row,” “Highway 61 Revisited,”
“I Am a  Lonesome Hobo,” and “All Along the Watchtower”

Polemics: “Positively 4th Street,” “Masters of War,”
and “Hurricane”

Anthems: “I Shall Be Released,” “Tangled Up in Blue,”
and “Like a Rolling Stone”

 

And then there are compositions so lyrically gorgeous, categorization demeans them: “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Visions of Johanna,” and “Shelter From the Storm” immediately come
to mind.

 

Part of the genius of Dylan’s craft is that many of his songs effortlessly cross or transcend categories; his polemics become anthemic, his love songs are odysseys, his odysseys parables. Long after Dylan “plugged in” and renounced his role as Folk’s anointed one, he could still fashion “Hurricane,” as barbed a protest as has ever been whipped against injustice. And songs like “Blowin’ In the Wind” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” sound so magisterial, so fundamentally classic that they now seem like traditional arrangements handed down from some misty morning when the Republic was still young.

 

The poetry has always been there. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a poem we’ve had with us for over 50 years. As a song, the more well-known version by The Byrds is like a sunlit drive with the top down on the Pacific Coast Highway, but at two minutes and thirty-one seconds it only has time for one of Dylan’s four ravishingly lyrical stanzas. Like a long-lost leaf of Leaves of Grass, here are all the words of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” an American canto with which Whitman would have happily clasped hands:

 

    Mr. Tambourine Man

     

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

     

    Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned to sand

    Vanished from my hand

    Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping

    My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet

    I have no one to meet

    And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming

     

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

     

    Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship

    All my senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip

    My toes too numb to step

    Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’

    I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade

    Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way

    I promise to go under it

     

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

     

    Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun

    It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run

    And but for the sky there are no fences facin’

    And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme

    To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind

    I wouldn’t pay it any mind

    It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing

     

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

     

    Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind

    Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves

    The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach

    Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

    Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free

    Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands

    With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves

    Let me forget about today until tomorrow

     

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to

    Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

    In that jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

 

“Timeless” describes so much of Bob Dylan’s work.
Timelessness, immortality–those are the stakes he always played for. To future ears, some of Dylan’s recordings may sound the way those crackly ‘78s of Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, or Woody Guthrie sound to us today. But the heart of his music has always been the words. And on the page, Dylan’s lyrics read as powerfully as ever, ready for new generations to discover and cover, interpret and internalize. 

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Patrick Walsh served four years as an infantry officer in the 25th Infantry Division. His articles and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers both here and abroad.
More at his Website: www.patrickwalshpoetry.net.
He is a columnist and Senior Writer for Scene4.
For more of his columns and other writings, check the Archives.

©2016 Patrick Walsh
©2016 Publication Scene4 Magazine

 

 

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November 2016

Volume 17 Issue 6

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