like the idea of Vachel Lindsay rather than
the practice of reading his work, or even listening to it, the often made
apology of some of his defenders who maintain that his works are meant to be
performed, not scanned in anthologies. As Lindsay was entranced by song and its
subversive adeptness of slipping past a censoring intellect and infest and
infect the soul with all manner of radical and subtle emotional stirrings, his
work was meant to be exclaimed and dramatized for their power to be fully felt
and fairly surmised.
Fair enough, I say, but too often what I find
in his work is the cadence of a creaky gate swaying in a steady wind, or a
swing rattling on its chain. He seeks to grasp the moment of when he discovers
the unchanging difference between right and wrong; he wants to create an
emotional response in the reader that will not tolerate injustice nor stand for
suffering; he wants the poetry of the period to influence the listener to cease
with their odious doses of bad faith and to instead live genuinely, fully, not
taking a breath nor another life for granted. All this is well and good, but to
me it is hokey. His task was to grant everyday things and ordinary lives
a dignity they hadn't been given before, but in doing so he manages to add yet
another thick layer of metaphorical tonnage that keeps us further from the
metaphysical presence he is longing for.
I have a difficult time even considering
his writings the evidence of a fevered imagination setting up and alternative
universe, of a sort, in his quest to unearth and reveal the true nature of the
everyday. The Congo, I think, is racist bombast, pure and simple, an example of
a well-intentioned progressive in spirit trying to pay homage the culture of a
people whom whites kidnapped and subjugated with slavery; he comes off as
condescending and half baked. I think he only added to the problem he wanted to
remedy. There is a difference between VL attempting to write something he
called a history of the negro race and Duke Ellington, a black composer and
intellectual, taking ownership of his own ancestry , traditions and , most
importantly, the stereotypes of his race and culture and creating some
astounding art. Good though his intentions were, VL's poem is paternal ,
presumptuous and racist by attitude and application; there is the fundamental
assumption that Africans and those of African descent were incapable of telling
their own story. Ellington, along with a good amount of the work of Langston
Hughes coming out the Harlem Renaissance redefined the terms. VL's attitude
is simply hard to sit through without a session of exaggerated defenses and
hearty condemnations. Spirited debate is fine, of course, but it seems to me
that Ellington's "jungle music" is the superior work of art becomes
the genius, verve and timelessness of the composer and his singular orchestra's
work puts one in the center of the music, not a field of footnotes and gutter
sniping. The seeming irony of a black artist using the world "jungle"
to describe his own music seems irrelevant at best.
I understand the interest Allen Ginsberg had
in Lindsay, since VL would, at the time, be the closest America had to a
William Blake. Blake, however, gave into his visions to the extreme and allowed
them to cohabit with him in his daily life; there incredible things he
maintained in his public life about his visions and his dialogues with angels
that he spoke of as a matter -of -fact.
The further evidence is Blake's work which is
truly unique, ungainly in syntax, but completely unforgettable as to how the
universe was structured, at the core, rubbing against the flesh of the god or
gods that created the heavens and the earth. Blake zipped past the clichés and
ready-made paradigms that available to him and created something from
whole cloth. His work broadened and became denser as he grew older; he wasn't
much interested in getting others to change their behavior so much as he was in
creating a vivid sense of what it is everyone man, woman and child will have to
face.
He considered himself a poet of the
Inevitable. Lindsay, of course. An intriguing intersection of influence and
cross influence; you can see how Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs were attracted to
Lindsay not just as a public poet , but a public visionary, someone who could
capture the public's imagination with broad , sweeping movements of image and
colorful narrative. Lindsay did, of course, argue through his career a series
of conclusions informed by a firm sense of what was right and wrong in society
and wrote in such a flamboyant fashion that he might seduce, persuade, cajole
those attracted by his theatricality to change the limited way they came to
regard the world. He desired to instill in his listeners (and readers) the
notion that everyone has a humanity that cannot be reduced by economic
oppression or removed by harsh laws. It was the idea, a powerful one, that the
morally upright thing to fight for--fairness, justice, equality, democratic
virtues--were self-apparent, or would become so once the best case was made
with the most persuasive language only one who is touched by the muse can write
and recite, compose and exclaim.
Dylan and Ochs perhaps had an easier
time, being songwriters connected with a host of progressive causes--civil
rights, anti-war movements largest among them--and it was their skill at
composing brooding, simple, compelling melodies to hammer away at their
inspired rhetoric that kept their songs, their lyrics in the public mind. Much
of the oft repeated support of his work, even at its most anemic ,is the
puffery one suspects zealots contrive in a mission to raise the importance of a
hero they've embedded deeply into the soft tissue of their consciousness. This
is something that we find with writing about Dylan--so many elaborations and
comparisons that the apologies are more nuanced than Dylan's actual work. All
the same, there is a strong connection, an awareness, a deliberate alignment on
Dylan's part with a tradition other than rock and roll. The claims that Dylan
was influenced by Lindsay, the Beats, Whitman, or "the usual Modernist
suspects" are far from fantasy. The influences are traceable, noticeable,
conspicuous in a great many songs, like "Desolation Row",
"Visions of Johanna", "Memphis Blues Again", "Gates of
Eden"; surreal though rock and roll geniuses Little Richard, Chuck Berry
and Bo Diddley may seem and have been in their work and personas, the
aforementioned songs definitely came from exposure to a good number of modern
poets, ranging from the Symbolists through Whitman, Eliot, Burroughs, Kerouac,
Ginsberg.
Those influences are in Dylan's work; how much
he absorbed of what he read is the wrong question, but rather how well. Dylan,
as any good artist would, took what he liked and what he found useful in
musical styles and literary modes and made them his own. Dylan’s
accomplishment, his singular bit of real genius, was blending Chuck Berry with
his personal version of street level surrealism. Nothing like it existed in
lyric writing before it--and I am not insisting that Dylan is the one who made
song lyrics poetry, a notion I've railed against for years--and to diminish or
dismiss literary influences in the creation of this body of work is, I think,
short sighted. This is the kind of ruthlessness of the creative process no one
really likes to talk about--it is the cliché of the amateur borrowing as
opposed to the professional, who steals, who literally talks ownership of what
he came across. VL is part of the circle of influences, more for inspiring a
public persona and purpose than for direct influence on the work. Like it or
not, VL did set the groundwork for what a public artist with literary/musical
inclinations would be, and Dylan is among the generation of songwriters who
adopted JL's conceit for their own purposes.
Along with Ginsberg, who desired to become a
the voice of a perceptions that found expression before a conservative superego
diluted whatever power might have been had in the first thought, songwriters
who had grown up with Lindsay's work were inspired to write about things that
were meant to resound beyond the music hall, wrote for his audience, which is
valid on the face of it, but his temperament is closer to that of a songwriter
than a poet on the grandest scale. It was, for Lindsay about what would sell,
in a manner of speaking; his is also a cautionary tale against pleasing an
audience too well, as there is the threat that will not let you change. And
that is the frustration that kills a talent that has the potential to evolve.