No.7 - December 2016
“To Dance Beneath the Diamond Sky”
by David Graham
The other day my dentist asked, out of the blue, what I thought of Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was odd timing, since my well-numbed mouth was packed in cotton at that moment, with various noisy instruments being applied to repair a broken tooth. But it’s a fair question, one I’ve been asked more than a few times, in fact, since I am both a poet and a longtime professor of literature. Still, all I could do in reply was raise one shaky hand in what I hoped was a jaunty thumbs-up sign.
Maybe that’s just as well. The argument over whether Dylan’s lyrics are “really” poetry goes back more than half a century, and I for one am rather tired of it. Of course they are, I say. Isn’t it obvious? Long before there were books or even written language, there was poetry—which was sung, recited, chanted in public by priests, bards, minstrels, shamans, et al. Homer’s Odyssey was presumably composed and performed from memory on ceremonial occasions; original listeners didn’t read it in a book. Thus you could argue it has more in common with Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” say, than with T. S. Eliot’s magnificent but page-bound “Four Quartets.”
We sometimes forget the history buried in the term “lyric poetry”; whatever you think of his songs, Dylan takes his place in a long tradition going back at least to ancient Greece, whose bards strummed their lyres while reciting what came to be called, after the instrument itself, “lyrics.” Only relatively recently, historically speaking, did song lyrics branch off, at least in many minds, from lyric poetry. William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” are in all the anthologies now. I won’t be around to witness it, but I expect Dylan’s words may well be in all the anthologies 200 years from today.
Furthermore, whether or not Bob Dylan “deserves” this particular honor doesn’t strike me as a very interesting matter, either. After all, look at the list of U.S. poets who have won the Nobel Prize for literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries. There is T. S. Eliot, of course, but who else? Nobody, that’s who. (I Googled.) While a number of novelists and playwrights from our country have won, Eliot is the lone poet from our fair land—and even he was an expatriate, a British citizen for two decades by the time of his Nobel. That’s right, the ranks of Americans passed over would include Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and on and on. Dozens of worthy writers are ignored every year. The fact is, all prizes are ridiculous at some level, the Nobel being notable mostly for its more majestic absurdity.
I’ve been listening to Dylan’s songs for half a century myself, and the truth is, he was an earlier and in some respects more potent influence on my own poetry than Emily Dickinson or W. B. Yeats. Certainly I was immersed in his lyrical world long before I had studied Keats, Frost, or Whitman. Along with the Beats and earlier poets like Langston Hughes and William Carlos Williams, Dylan became an integral part of two of the most intriguing developments in 20th Century American poetry: the revival of interest in the oral tradition, along with a radical democratization that freed poetry from academic domination. Obviously, his influence has been immeasurable on many poets of my generation, children of the 1950s and 1960s.
Aside from questions of awards and influence, though, what about Dylan’s songs as poems? How good are they? Can they stand with Blake’s, Shakespeare’s, or Burns’s? Is he even as good as Cole Porter? That’s the interesting question, as far as I’m concerned, and I can only give the briefest of replies in this space. But for what it’s worth, here’s what I meant with my thumbs-up to my dentist.
It’s true that some of his lyrics lie pretty limp on the page, if deprived of their musical context. The same is true for most songwriters. But for my money, Dylan has composed more than his share of really good ones, songs whose words themselves display considerable depth, inventiveness, reach, surprise, and technical brilliance. Have you listened lately to Dylan’s long, odd story-song, “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (from Blood on the Tracks in 1975)? It’s not one of his most famous pieces, but read the lyrics without the music (http://bobdylan.com/songs/lily-rosemary-and-jack-hearts/) and see if you don’t agree with me: this is really just as complex, ambiguous, and well crafted a narrative as one of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.
Not all poets will agree with me, of course. At a reading once, I heard Robert Bly disparage Dylan as a poet, insisting in his usual hyperbolic style that the songwriter was no good because “he refuses to read Lorca, he refuses to read Whitman, he refuses to read Neruda. . . ” and so forth; instead, Bly claimed, Dylan just wants to be “a simple country boy from Nashville.” The ignorance of that assessment is breathtaking. (Is it possible the only record Bly ever listened to was Nashville Skyline?). All the many biographies of Dylan discuss his intense reading in history, philosophy, the Bible, and the poetic tradition, with special emphasis on poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the man he stole his last name from, Dylan Thomas. Dylan and Allen Ginsberg were lifelong friends, with the older poet often suggesting books to read. Hell, in his lyrics Dylan even name-checks Verlaine, Rimbaud, Frost, Pound, and Eliot, among others.
But beyond the biographical facts, if you read a love song with lines like these, and still think the writer was unaware of poets like Lorca and Neruda, you’re either blind or stubbornly biased:
My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful,
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire.
As a teenager just beginning to write poems, I was stopped cold by the line “she’s true, like ice, like fire,” and immediately yearned to write passages of comparable simplicity, mystery, and grace. Later on the same album, Dylan begins a song with these haunting lines, a tour-de-force of skillful rhyming and suggestive imagery:
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
Clearly Dylan had not only read poets like Dylan Thomas, but had learned a fair amount from them.
Dylan’s poetry also shows great range, from simple and heartfelt love lyrics through crazy surrealistic collages to narratives and dramas of surefooted skill and power. Like Whitman he glories in the full range of the American language, from lofty to down-and-dirty. He can do a straightforward bluesy folk song with economy and evocativeness:
Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast
I'm drownin' in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free
I've got nothin' but affection for all those who've sailed with me
(Note the artful mouth-music in “ship’s been split to splinters,” for one thing). With equal skill he can craft a mythic narrative, as in these razor-sharp yet enigmatic lines:
The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who's gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden
For sheer verbal exuberance and poetic command, these famous lines have lost none of their spark, at least for me:
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.
Dylan’s many poetic modes have also evolved and developed over time. Nothing in his work in the 1960s prepared listeners for the brilliance of a song like 1975’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” for example, one of his greatest songs, which constructs a fractured and elusive narrative full of spiky details about romantic love, with time and place blurring into each other, point of view shifting, and scenes of the speaker(s) encountering many different women—who somehow are also all one woman. It’s maybe my favorite of his lyrics. Unless that would be “Desolation Row”! Or “Mississippi!” Or “Buckets of Rain!” Or or or. . . . But instead of listening further to me blather on, why not go re-read some yourself? To that end, I highly recommend Dylan’s official web site, which provides lyrics for all his songs. Here’s “Tangled Up in Blue”: http://bobdylan.com/songs/tangled-blue/
Maybe that’s just as well. The argument over whether Dylan’s lyrics are “really” poetry goes back more than half a century, and I for one am rather tired of it. Of course they are, I say. Isn’t it obvious? Long before there were books or even written language, there was poetry—which was sung, recited, chanted in public by priests, bards, minstrels, shamans, et al. Homer’s Odyssey was presumably composed and performed from memory on ceremonial occasions; original listeners didn’t read it in a book. Thus you could argue it has more in common with Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” say, than with T. S. Eliot’s magnificent but page-bound “Four Quartets.”
We sometimes forget the history buried in the term “lyric poetry”; whatever you think of his songs, Dylan takes his place in a long tradition going back at least to ancient Greece, whose bards strummed their lyres while reciting what came to be called, after the instrument itself, “lyrics.” Only relatively recently, historically speaking, did song lyrics branch off, at least in many minds, from lyric poetry. William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” are in all the anthologies now. I won’t be around to witness it, but I expect Dylan’s words may well be in all the anthologies 200 years from today.
Furthermore, whether or not Bob Dylan “deserves” this particular honor doesn’t strike me as a very interesting matter, either. After all, look at the list of U.S. poets who have won the Nobel Prize for literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries. There is T. S. Eliot, of course, but who else? Nobody, that’s who. (I Googled.) While a number of novelists and playwrights from our country have won, Eliot is the lone poet from our fair land—and even he was an expatriate, a British citizen for two decades by the time of his Nobel. That’s right, the ranks of Americans passed over would include Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, and on and on. Dozens of worthy writers are ignored every year. The fact is, all prizes are ridiculous at some level, the Nobel being notable mostly for its more majestic absurdity.
I’ve been listening to Dylan’s songs for half a century myself, and the truth is, he was an earlier and in some respects more potent influence on my own poetry than Emily Dickinson or W. B. Yeats. Certainly I was immersed in his lyrical world long before I had studied Keats, Frost, or Whitman. Along with the Beats and earlier poets like Langston Hughes and William Carlos Williams, Dylan became an integral part of two of the most intriguing developments in 20th Century American poetry: the revival of interest in the oral tradition, along with a radical democratization that freed poetry from academic domination. Obviously, his influence has been immeasurable on many poets of my generation, children of the 1950s and 1960s.
Aside from questions of awards and influence, though, what about Dylan’s songs as poems? How good are they? Can they stand with Blake’s, Shakespeare’s, or Burns’s? Is he even as good as Cole Porter? That’s the interesting question, as far as I’m concerned, and I can only give the briefest of replies in this space. But for what it’s worth, here’s what I meant with my thumbs-up to my dentist.
It’s true that some of his lyrics lie pretty limp on the page, if deprived of their musical context. The same is true for most songwriters. But for my money, Dylan has composed more than his share of really good ones, songs whose words themselves display considerable depth, inventiveness, reach, surprise, and technical brilliance. Have you listened lately to Dylan’s long, odd story-song, “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (from Blood on the Tracks in 1975)? It’s not one of his most famous pieces, but read the lyrics without the music (http://bobdylan.com/songs/lily-rosemary-and-jack-hearts/) and see if you don’t agree with me: this is really just as complex, ambiguous, and well crafted a narrative as one of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.
Not all poets will agree with me, of course. At a reading once, I heard Robert Bly disparage Dylan as a poet, insisting in his usual hyperbolic style that the songwriter was no good because “he refuses to read Lorca, he refuses to read Whitman, he refuses to read Neruda. . . ” and so forth; instead, Bly claimed, Dylan just wants to be “a simple country boy from Nashville.” The ignorance of that assessment is breathtaking. (Is it possible the only record Bly ever listened to was Nashville Skyline?). All the many biographies of Dylan discuss his intense reading in history, philosophy, the Bible, and the poetic tradition, with special emphasis on poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and the man he stole his last name from, Dylan Thomas. Dylan and Allen Ginsberg were lifelong friends, with the older poet often suggesting books to read. Hell, in his lyrics Dylan even name-checks Verlaine, Rimbaud, Frost, Pound, and Eliot, among others.
But beyond the biographical facts, if you read a love song with lines like these, and still think the writer was unaware of poets like Lorca and Neruda, you’re either blind or stubbornly biased:
My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful,
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire.
As a teenager just beginning to write poems, I was stopped cold by the line “she’s true, like ice, like fire,” and immediately yearned to write passages of comparable simplicity, mystery, and grace. Later on the same album, Dylan begins a song with these haunting lines, a tour-de-force of skillful rhyming and suggestive imagery:
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
Clearly Dylan had not only read poets like Dylan Thomas, but had learned a fair amount from them.
Dylan’s poetry also shows great range, from simple and heartfelt love lyrics through crazy surrealistic collages to narratives and dramas of surefooted skill and power. Like Whitman he glories in the full range of the American language, from lofty to down-and-dirty. He can do a straightforward bluesy folk song with economy and evocativeness:
Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast
I'm drownin' in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free
I've got nothin' but affection for all those who've sailed with me
(Note the artful mouth-music in “ship’s been split to splinters,” for one thing). With equal skill he can craft a mythic narrative, as in these razor-sharp yet enigmatic lines:
The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who's gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden
For sheer verbal exuberance and poetic command, these famous lines have lost none of their spark, at least for me:
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.
Dylan’s many poetic modes have also evolved and developed over time. Nothing in his work in the 1960s prepared listeners for the brilliance of a song like 1975’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” for example, one of his greatest songs, which constructs a fractured and elusive narrative full of spiky details about romantic love, with time and place blurring into each other, point of view shifting, and scenes of the speaker(s) encountering many different women—who somehow are also all one woman. It’s maybe my favorite of his lyrics. Unless that would be “Desolation Row”! Or “Mississippi!” Or “Buckets of Rain!” Or or or. . . . But instead of listening further to me blather on, why not go re-read some yourself? To that end, I highly recommend Dylan’s official web site, which provides lyrics for all his songs. Here’s “Tangled Up in Blue”: http://bobdylan.com/songs/tangled-blue/
©2016 David Graham