A break from my policy of not posting my own poems here.

What can say other than I like this one? I run myself at such a volume about the work of others that it's probably time to let others take a shot at my free verse chops. All the same, I hope you find something to like. Tomorrow, more dissonance.-tb
___________________

Can't buy me love
We think like you think
but we have the goods

and all you have is cash or credit
that does you no good

if we weren't on every corner
you drive by, leering like sirens

with signs for hardware, malt liquor
and Japanese cars that smirk

while you drift into a stupor
of brand names,

your son says daddy, please, we need a new TV,
your wife exclaims that the furniture seems

old, like your shirts, which are grey
and full of holes you dislike

but know the history of each tear in
the fabric and frayed thread in the collar,

Sweetie, give me a dollar
and pull over here

'cause I need a beer and a paper
to see where these sales will take us

when I get
wind of them,

all your money gets you things
and the middle of the week

resembles less a day to get through
than it is a hole to crawl out of ,

speaking of which,
you look like you need a ladder

to climb up from or up to
where ever it is you'd like to go,

see our ad in the Penny Saver,
clip our add from your mailbox,

cash, credit card, local checks
w/ street address and current phone,

and a photo ID showing you scowling
in cruel institutional light

where everyone looks like
they're going to jail ,

you're family will love you,
returns thirty days after purchase w/store receipt,

we love you too,
but easy there,

it's nothing personal,
it's only business.

Mary Baine Campbell's poem

A poem by Mary Baine Campbell , posted three years ago by Slate's poetry Robert Pinsky ,has elicited some vigorous responses, with my words mingling with the various choruses. Pinsky has a preference for the less obvious poems, offering instead pieces that cause no end of head scratching. Half the time I think the selections are self-indulgent gruel that are a subspecies of fraud, and the other half I defend said selections because they hit me as a unique view of a situation, an interesting vision, let us say, wedded with a style that matches the ambition and quirky desire of the writer to say something different about experience. Campbell's poem is that rarest of things I come across, a poem I am curiously ambivalent about.


This seems to be another soul who cannot get out of Plato's Cave, except that this nameless one must have done especially offensive to warrant being gripped in a vise rather than merely chained to the wall of the cavern. But it seems the same old punishments, the same tortures and teases, all those fleeting signifiers in front of him (or her), forcing all the senses onto to one set of appearances (and appearances only) so that they have to construct an idea of the world outside the cave, free of the vise, a faith, so to speak, that this vise that holds the head is exactly where it should be, doing what it must do to whom it is doing it in the framework of an infinitely larger universe , multiverse, omniverse, what have you, that is unseen.

Or it might be something else entirely, such as description of being dead, with the world burning and eroding and washing away with the monsoon as described. This may well be a poem of a great journey that starts at death and ends when a soul has reached the other side, a particular culture's conception of an afterlife. The wind , from which the head cannot shield itself from, blows over the face and whisks along whatever has turned to dust back into the unmade earth. To be honest, I haven't the foggiest what Campbell is getting at here, other than to describe the quality of being dust in the wind, but this is plainly too obscure and mannered for me to even care. It used to be that I thought it was cool to be mysterious and cool and utterly and completely baffling with my writing, but hey, I was fifteen at the time and reading too much Dylan and Jim Morrison and the cursed share of Kerouac, and it took me years to learn to stop being abstruse by design and instead become interesting by intent. That might have happened when I finally got something to write about, some comprehensible subject matter , which I managed to link up with a credible language, a combination that created whatever mystery I sought. The abstract quality is a result of writing well about something, not writing syntactically challenged pieces in a mistaken notion of what cubist writing might sound and read like.

Campbell's poem is well structured, the language clean, spare, exacting to the the objects and their qualities, but this is just too much to put together beyond saying that it seems to be out funerals, death, and the perspective of the deceased once they've left this life, observant yet powerless to intervene in the affairs of the living .There is that odd mix of regret and acceptance that mingles in the images. There's a feeling of loss that pervades the stanzas, and a feeling of powerlessness that there is nothing one can do with what is slipping from their grasp, whether youth or life itself.


There exists here a tangible feeling that the narrator is in some fixed place of observation, taking it all in, motionless and unable to speak or intercede on behalf of the world; I took this too mean that the speaker had died and was in some astral place , perhaps from a cloud, maybe from a closet as a ghost as yet unseen, because the imagery Campbell have a museum quality, implying gold ornamentation, fruits, things one employs in funeral preparations from an unspecified culture and time.


I'd read Norman Mailer's quizzical and enthralling Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings which deals quite a bit with the cult of the dead, reincarnation, and has a good amount of description of funeral preparation, all of which this poem brought to mind. But I do see the other side, the observations of one getting older who is so much wiser and suffers the eventual regrets of bad decisions, missed opportunities, consequential expressions of arrogance and pride that cannot be undone, and how all this comes to the eventual acceptance that everything in our view is somehow as it must be in the larger pattern we can only faintly imagine.


I don't want to say that this is a bad poem, since I keep re-reading it to puzzle it out a bit more. Unless it's from the pen of the insanely over rated and over cited--Kerouac, Neruda, Bukowski, insert you own pet peeve here-- a bad poem does not stay long in my thinking, and it is the easiest thing to pass on, like beer. Life is too short to deal with wooden, cryptic, stick-in-the mud language. Campbell's work has it's attractions, and I would say her minimalism succeeds to the degree that The Vise gets more than one going over. Death, though, seems to be the operative idea here--as you say, and to paraphrase crudely, life may be good and pleasantly cushioned for our narrator, but there is a defeated tone to the words, a sense that one's comfort is also one's manacle around the neck. Maybe it's the sense of defeat that puts me off about this--I am of the notion that one shouldn't require anything of a poet other than to be interesting and their work to be nothing other than good, ie, worth reading--but the lack of rage here is vaguely troubling:

It is not
That the world is unkind.
Kind hands once touched
My lips and eyes
To say whatever such
Touches say.

And every day
A spoon, laden
With softer gold
Of honey
Spilling
Forces me
I would want more of a rage against the stasis, the sterility of the apparent perfection of this flesh and blood life; I would read the above lines as being something of a junkie's reverie as he nods into whatever oblivion he seeks through the needle and the spoon. Every care and dread is dissolved as a slowly corrosive bliss over takes the body and the spirit that attends to it. But this may be exactly what Campbell sought to get across in her tightly sealed stanzas, that being alive is filled with it's own kind of death, our material and mental blockades to the world, save for a noise, a chime of a phone, a flash of light in the sky at dusk that reminds us of the churnings outside the body and its republics of dulled sensation:


From all directions
Lightning tells us
What is lost
Or burnt
In the collapsing
World.


The nod produces its own ceremonial Edens from which the glance of old archetypes, readings from the nursery or a junior college text book are conflated in a shifting illusion that replaces the substance of one's history, objectified into notions of the weather taking a personal care
of the layabout's bedding:

Tonight, a monsoon.
The diamond-fall of rain
Bruises my face
Washes honey
From it, andAll else.


This is all that can be seen, that can be comprehended through the suggested splendor or comfort the narrator cryptically speaks from, and so the poem may be ironic in that we have veiled comments emanating from what are already a veiled , not the least blinded sense of reality, and what is maddening for me is the acceptance that the speaker suggests as to what their situation is, hazy as it is. Although there is a chance that Campbell intended our subject to be alive as they recited their spare vistas, it suggests ritualized death all the same, a ceremony of surrender:

But in the vise
I can still stare --
Through brilliant
Obliterations of storm --
At what is
Still there.Well and good, I suppose, but a bit too fatalistic for me. Fatalistic and vague. A less than perfect combination.

Fat Chance for Britney Spears

Britney Spears' performance at the most recent MTV Video Awards was, by consensus, an unmitigated disaster; she appears to have gone on to the stage the way George W.Bush went into Irag, ie, unprepared, unrepentent and delusional in the thinking that he/she had the slimmest idea of what they were doing. She was bad, of course,but the worst sin for some the numbskull gossiptistas was that was fat, a real pig, trailer trash smoking Kools by the BBQ. Well, c'mon now, let's dial it down.She wasn't fat, but she is not in the shape she needs to be in to pull off the kind of act she attempted to. Madonna, foundational diva from whom Spears and others learned their trade in sexpot kitsch, maintained herself even in her long periods off the road. Think of it what you will, but she had the body to justify the occasionally scarce clothing.

It's also worth noting Madonna continually changed her musical and visual style; even as she got older in a market that's unkind to middle aged women pop stars, she kept people interested in what she was up to. I don't especially like her work(too much surface, too little worrisome things that might make it all the more interesting), but I do respect her work ethic and the energy spent to keep matters interesting. Britney's basic mistake was to try to go with an act she had nearly a half decade ago, when she was buffed, just out of her teens, and could pull off the sleaze factor, at least up to the standard such cheesy entertainment requires.

She is not fat at all, but she is soft, sexy for a new mom, but not sexy as every male teen horndog's pin up girl. It was sad to witness, and I felt embarrassed for her. And she was wobbly, with more than her attention distracted. There's an unhealthy trend in celebrity bashing currently, with remarks aimed toward Spears by allegedly reputable media sources being mean, just plain mean. But the poor woman's showing up to a comeback gig in the shape she was didn't help her cause.

9/11 burn out: LIFE AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD

It seems the memorials were substantially muted this year than they've been in the recent past.And where before one anticipated and dreaded the anniversary of the attack, more than a few people I ran into yesterday didn't realize the significance until it came up in passing conversation or from a glimpse of a newscast or a newsstand headline.

I suspect my anecdotal evidence is a clue to millions nationwide who started their day as if it were merely one like the day before, twenty four hours to be productive, decent, responsible, or to be miserable sons of bitches; it wouldn't have occurred to any of us to stop what it was we were doing as family members and economic citizens and just watch the streaming cablecasts of parroted opinions , or to hold a candle for hours or drive with the headlights on in a vain and empty gesture of solidarity with fellow Americans and the souls of those who were killed.

There is something perverse about expecting a stereotypically united America ritualistically reliving the shock, horror, rage and grief of 2001, a collective habit the Bush minions tried to sustain with their clubfooted attempts to keep the population in perpetual fear. There is a 9/11 burn out happening, and more of us are about getting on with the work that remains to be done; we're tired of being sand bagged, brow beaten, lectured, pilloried, and threatened on many psychic levels that Something Horrible Is About to Happen while at the same instance being entreated by the same powers to go about our business as if nothing is wrong.

It's a small wonder that the handful I met yesterday shared similiar reactions when informed of what day it was. A pause, a bowed head, downcast eyes, a hint of exasperation in the deeper reaches of the eyes. A resentment, perhaps , unshared but felt in common.

"I have a new baby and I'm starting a new job" was what one of my associates responded, "I've other things I was thinking about having to do than mark this date for crying all over again..."

We move on because we have to, and the mood now seems to be not mourn the dead but to figure out how to live life meaningful after the worse-thing-that-could-happen takes place.

Notes on a Jack Kerouac

photo by John Cohen

The idea that Jack Kerouac is a great American writer and that On the Road is a great American novel has been an ongoing hard-sell by his publishers and those who own the copyrights on his books ever since I can remember. It seemed that way since I first encountered his name in high school. One read the books one was supposed to in one's teens—Slaughterhouse 5, Steppenwolf, Naked Lunch—and however much one might have changed their estimation of their youthful heroes, one was also expected to hold their first opinion of Kerouac and his particular book for all the time. One only grew to love it more over the decades, so the combination went, and it was unthinkable that a literate person from the boomer generation would have less than glorious things to say about Kerouac and the revolution he inspired. But all this is too much, and enough already. I never liked the novel; I never cared for Kerouac. However, I lied that I liked him due to peer pressure and the prospects of scoring with hip young girls I wanted to bed. It was a lie extracting a cost. Now I say that one might write an article of those who didn't care for Kerouac, thought him a mediocre scribe, a balled-up novelist, an indulgent you crossed the street if you saw him coming toward you.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac was a book I detested when I read in high school, and it remains the most overrated book by an American writer I've encountered. There are moments of real poetry here, yes, but the waxing and waning of dated and contrived hip argot were embarrassing to read through. It was during a bloody argument about the merits of Jack Kerouac's writing when the woman I was arguing with, a twenty-five-year-old who planned to be a penniless, wine drinking mooch like her hero Jack told me, "You know Ted, your very extreme opinion of him stinks of jealousy." The look on his face would be a smirk, maybe a half-grin, the eyes swimming as if in a jar of viscous fluid, with just a glint of hope radiating from his jellied irises that he might borrow some money from you. Resentment is the better term, the sort of anger arising when you realize that you have uncountable hours under siege by the Kerouac cult as the thick weave of truisms and sagging homages to the spirit of rebellion poured forth. This is all time you can never reclaim. I have no reason to be jealous of a man who drank himself to death before the age of fifty while living with his mother, and it is impossible to be jealous of a man who wrote so poorly. The truth is that after spending nearly twenty years trying to accommodate Kerouac's work by reading many of his books and a good many biographies and secondary sources about him and his fellow beats, I admitted to my innermost self that my gut instinct was right, Jack wasn't a good writer and that his continued popularity has more to do with a cultist hype that surrounds the work and persona of Ayn Rand; there's an invested interest in making sure that the author is always spoken of in the most regaling terms.

Others like me, cursed with literature degrees, broad readings, and an appreciation of craft in the service of genuine inspiration, regale him far less, finding his writings charmless, undercooked, ill-prepared, all sizzle and no steak. Those willing to say that Kerouac's oeuvre was wholesale bullshit are in the minority, as the Jack Kerouac Industry shows no sign of slowing down. Every smokestack is fired up, and what might have been clear skies are blackened all the more with his loopy circumlocutions. So much of what has passed as analysis and informed commentary on Kerouac's work has been in the form of undigested memoir and idealized recollection when the author would recall their first encounter with On the Road or The Subterraneans and how the experience changed their lives, changed the way they thought about the incident, changed the very culture of American Life. Personal anecdotes and testimonials, at best, multiplied by decades, nearly all exhibiting soft thinking regarding Kerouac's skills as a writer. Such easy estimations of whom I think are better, more extraordinary writers (Mailer, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Gaddis) would be unacceptable to the demanding reader, Kerouac's critical reputation gets a pass. My compressed gripe, grumpy autobiography, and condensed criticism are personal, sure, but no more than the love notes Kerouac receives from his fans. My squib is of no less value in this context, and it still makes a point.

And it's not all Jack, of course; otherwise, I wouldn't have included that brief bit of pretending to like his writing for reasons extraneous to literary appreciation. I was petty, vain, insecure, the whole teenage/college freshman shot, but as fucked up as I was in my nonintellectual use of Kerouac's name, it typifies what I think consumers of the counterculture name brands were actually doing, using the Beats, Buddhism, drugs and varying degrees of political cant to satisfy baser desires. In Kerouac, what people saw wasn't literature or art, but an invitation to indulge in The Fuck-Up Within.

Kerouac was still chasing after the rapid stream style of both Joyce and Thomas Wolfe; there is the quality of someone beset with twitches and jitters which is talking in a charging rush of language, attempting to get everything, everyone and every idea in the confines of a few single, very long sentences, but who hasn't the capacity to leave himself a frame of reference and imagine the qualities and textures of things apart from himself. Joyce gives us Dublin in a single day, Virginia Woolf conveyed a mind negotiating the harder edges of a real-world, and Thomas Wolfe, I think, offered a more successful record of his narrator's experience as his novels moved slowly through their rhapsodic, if glacial paces. The reader witnessed growth, ambiguity, increasing complexity of spirit, and worldview variously, and these qualities make the novels move. And dumbfounding, in the best sense. Kerouac, for me, rarely sounded as if he ever got up out of his chair, for all his rapid chatter about trains, highways, hitchhiking. The failure of his work is that he sounds like a man who's trying to convince himself that he's having a good time. All the same, the assumption is that all these varied, subjective responses to On the Road need to be positive ones and that a personal reaction, loudly and assertively put forward, is not allowed.

The sheer popularity of the book does not confer innate brilliance upon it; this is herd-think, and it's an ironic situation at odds with a book extolling non-conformism. The attempt is to inoculate the book against criticism, whether as abrasively subjective like mine or subtler and more considered another reader might offer up. This turns Kerouac and the mindset of his core adherents into something resembling zealots. There's been a cottage industry of Kerouac biographies and commentary over the last twenty years—the bookstore I worked in before my current job had a most minor thirty recent, in secondary print sources on the man, nearly all of it subscribing to Kerouac's greatness. The recent coverage of Kerouac and the anniversary of On the Road has more or less with what's taken to be a given as to the book's high merit. It's my experience, over many years, that saying you don't like On the Road causes makes many folks give you the stink eye. Some acts threatened and treated me like I was mentally ill. And it gets somewhat predictable, speaking of which, for Kerouacians to try to get me to change my mind with the usual dogma of liberation, freedom, non-conformism, bizarrely.

This makes me suspect all the more that those enamored of On the Road from an early age did so because they wanted to be non-conformist, just like everybody else. This is hero-worship, a cult of personality stuff, and an undiluted form of celebrity obsession. It is less Kerouac's talent the readership is responding than the image he represents, carefully manufactured and maintained by publishers and the owners of his estate. A defender of the novel wrote me that "Life doesn't have any structure. It doesn't have any narrative arc. And Kerouac blows away all that rigid contrivance with one brilliant explosion of language. "I scratched an itch, considered the statement, and got long-winded all over again. Life, actually, does have structure, in the communities we create and the institutions we formulate to hold them together, and in the culture that is shared that provides a diverse citizenry with a sense that there is a purpose to where and the way we live, and that there are the means to improve, correct, or change the conditions of our lives. This is the structure. While Life has no narrative arc, by itself, literature certainly does. In the art of that narrative, the contingencies of life, all those things that one cannot predict (let alone prevent from happening) are contained in the fictive form and can be appreciated as drama, comedy, moral instruction, what have you. Literature is a means to make sense of Life, to provide resolutions to brief joys and significant traumas, and it is a way to prepare a reader for whatever strange turn one's Life might come to. It's funny that some of us get antsy when Kerouac's legacy is challenged.

One can't diminish the quality of the camaraderie, though. Their friendships were and continue to be solid and robust. I've had the good fortune to meet some Beats --Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti--and what became evident as they indulged my pesky questions was that these writers spoke to one another, and what they talked about was literally everything that came to mind. Each poet's works inform the work of the others, and all of them were quick to acknowledge the influences their friends had on the respective bodies of work. My particular gripe to the side--that too much of the first-thought-best-thought stuff found its way between book covers--this is a fellowship to be admired. On the Road is a book one ought to read, I think, to know something of a part of a generation responding to the post- WWll experience, and with any luck, one does not stop there, thinking they've read the definitive book of the time. Other Beat writings are more crucial, especially Howl by Allen Ginsberg, one of the great American poems of the 20th century; inline, rhythm, imagery, and the contrasting and clashing elements of rage, despair, and eureka! Quality laughs, Ginsberg's poem supersedes the best of Kerouac's prose and is a compelling evocation of the deadened conformity of 50s culture that agitated and motivated him and his fellow writers.

 I do acknowledge that Kerouac did have a native genius for language that, I think, was, tragically, obscured by the writer's urge to embrace experience rushing. In a hurry he was, influenced by both the elusive notion of zen to be presently (or better, be the moment) and the zipping virtuosity of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell's jazz improvisations. Up-tempo, crazy fast, instant configurations of genius adding up to a pulsing , nerve rattling kind of genius, these elements inspired Kerouac, but even at these speeds his heroes, both musicians, writers, and even zen masters, were required to take their time and learn the dictates of their disciplines; Parker's or Coltrane's or James' fluidity and near perfection of instant creation are the result of endless hours of practice and learning to go beyond one's habit of relying on easy conclusions, tired tropes or fussy, pretentious, hyperventilated phrase making and considering the sound, the effect, the expressiveness of the words their putting together. One learns, hopefully, to be elegant, poetic, and original with alacrity. Jack Kerouac could indeed be moving and genuinely beautiful in what he wrote, but these moments are exceptions--there is such a need in virtually all his work to make experience more vivid, more real with overwriting that his adventures through life seemed more strained than naturally forthcoming.

The jazz rotating in my CD player right now is---

The Stranger's Hand --  Jerry Goodman (violin), Howard Levy (harmonica, piano) , Steve Smith (drums, percussion), Oteil Burbridge (bass)

Very credible jazz fusion here, with ex-Mahavishnu violinist Goodman slicing and swirling through his improvisations with a natural swing and brick-tossing sense of rock that continues to advance the instrument in non-classical areas. But the real show here is Levy, whose harmonica playing is revolutionary--the ability to produce a chromatic scale from a diatonic instrument is hard enough, and the ease with which Levy performs makes the sounds--folksy and blues tinged by turns, with sudden flights of real register jumping complexity--makes his solos terrific. Those not enamored of the jazz rock of old won't be convinced that this disk advances anything, but this is easily the strongest fusion effort since the Dixie Dregs at their peak. Smith on drums and Burbridge on bass are wondrous as well.

Ju Ju -- Wayne Shorter (Blue Note)

Wayne Shorter -- tenor sax / McCoy Tyner -- piano / Reggie Workman -- bass / Elvin Jones -- drums

A 1964 session, sweetness and light meets fire and deep seated anxiety in seeming alternating breaths. Shorter is thoughtful, probing the moods of his ingeniously laid-out material with finesse that hints at more expressionistic playing to come--his tone always struck me as inner-directed--while the band delivers everything their names promise. Elvin Jones continues to convince that he is the greatest drummer in jazz history.

USQ --The Uptown String Quartet (Blue Moon)

Saw these four women on CBS Sunday Morning a year or so ago, and their bringing their classical training to bear on jazz was a quirky notion that works genuinely well. Name it and the style is here, Kansas City blues to some very "out" moments, and some blues to spare, with the ensemble not seeming to try to preserve the dusty air of the chamber, nor falsely infuse their work with a creaking notion of swing. It swings nicely at that, and a bonus is a left field arrangement of "I Feel Good". It's glorious to hear James Brown in long hair circumstances.

Carry the Day --Henry Threadgill (Columbia)

Produced by Bill Laswell, with all compositions by Threadgill, this is one of those albums that make you glad there is such a word as "eclectic" in the dictionary. His multi-reed playing is sure through out the sessions, and here organizes his players in a way that make this creepily seamless, that is to say unnervingly groovy. Brandon Ross supplies some truly edgy jazz-rock guitar work--damn, this style is still exciting in the hands of the right fret man--and this features some of the freshest horn charts I've heard in years. Varied, serious, fun, exciting, arty, and yes, very well done.

The Heart of Things --John McLaughlin (Verve)

McLaughlin--guitars / Gary Thomas -- reeds, flute / Jim Beard -- keyboards, synths / Matthew Garrison --bass / Dennis Chambers --drums

Good players wasted on thin grooves--McLaughlin , like the late Tony Williams, writes riffy little tunes , with occasional "fancy" changes, that barely support the technical expertise of the musicians, who tend to over play their hands to shore things up. Despite an odd good moment here where things click, everyone sounds muscle-bound : thick, dense, slow witted. It needn't have been the case.

Getting There --John Abercrombie (ECM)

w/Abercrombie -- electric and acoustic guitars / Marc Johnson -- bass / Peter Erskine -- drums / Michael Brecker (special guest)-- tenor sax.

Sprawling , icy fusion, informed with Euro-detachment that has it's frequent moments of genuine passion and swelling originality. Aberbrombie's plays in terse note clusters, infrequently favoring the long lins over the diffuse rhythms, but he has a nice phased , electronically grafted tone whose colors add densisty where other wise there would be none. Good , probing jazz rock. Brecker's contributions could have been phoned in, though.

.

One of A Kind --Bill Bruford

w/Bruford--drums and percussion/ Allan Holdsworth--guitar / Dave Stewart --keyboards / Jeff Berlin-- bass

The King Crimson and sometime Yes drummer had occasional jazz-fusion sessions when he wasn't furnishing beats behind abstruse angst fantasies, and surprisingly, the music holds up well. There is not an amphetamine strain fuzz tone anywhere to be heard. What helps are good tunes, most by Bruford, that mix up funk, Zappa, and Prog-rock stylistics under unmannered conditions, allowing the instrumental work to mesh, mess around, and burn as needed. Holdsworth offers some impressive ultra legato lines, and Jeff Berlin is singular on the bass. Bruford, hardly a Cobhamesque fusion monster, lacks some the swing you might like, or even the blunt Bonham-oid pow! to make this rock harder, but he's an able timekeeper who keeps the session forging ahead.

Nothin' But the Swing--Black Note

Mark Shelby--bass/Willie Jones 111--drums/James Mahone--alto sax/Ark Sano--piano/Gilbert Castellanos, Nicholas Payton--trumpet/Teodross Avery--tenor and soprano sax

Cool jazz, in the style of the classic Miles quartets, though lacking a Coltrane or a Shorter to sear the ground with. No matter, though, as the ensemble sound is glowing and warm, with a spring to the swing, and some thoughtful solo work. Mahone has a warm alto sound, and rounded feel to this lines, and Gilbert Castellanos provides a sufficiently icy rim to this phrases: a sullen trumpeter, this man.

BOB DYLAN IS NOT A POET

 1.

An old peeve, this: Bob Dylan is not a poet. He is a songwriter. What he does is significantly different than what a poet does. In any relevant sense, the best of what poetry offers is read off the page, sans melody from accompanying guitar or piano and a convincingly evocative voice. The poet's musical sense, rhythmic properties, and other euphonious qualities are derived from the words and clever, ingenious combinations alone. A reader may appreciate the words, the rhymes, the cadences, the melodious resonance, and dissonance, as the case may be, but all this comes from the language of the poem alone, on the page, without music. When addressing such rich and soul-stirring sounds of nouns and adjectives conjoined, the musicality we speak of has everything to with the poet extending the limits of everyday speech. You can read Shakespeare to full literary potential, I think, because his verse, in the guise of dialogue, still satisfies as writing, with metaphors, rhythms, cadences swirling and ringing to a heightened sense of what the complexity of human emotion can sound like if there were words, allusions, similes, and metaphors that could give life and texture for what are, in his plays, inchoate feelings brewing at some base level of the personality before the mind can provide them with an articulate if flawed rationale.

photograph by Jim Marshall

It was the task of Shakespeare, the poet, and the playwright combined, to give vocal music to what were speeches that made private thoughts, half-plotted schemes, inarticulate resentments, paranoia, the whole conflicting brew of insecurity, self-doubt, and malevolence into something that was the equivalent of music, a sweet, and stirring sound that bypasses the censoring and sense-making intellect and which makes even the foulest of schemes seem just and only natural. The writing, that is to say approximates music from the page and provides for a more complicated task when considering our responses to a provocative set of stanzas. Dylan is a songwriter, a distinct art form, and his words are lyrics, which cannot be experienced to their fullest without the music that accompanies them. One may hum the melodies while pouring over the lyrics and mentally reconstruct listening to an album's songs, but this proves the point. Of themselves, Dylan's lyrics pale poorly compared to page poets. With his music, the lyrics come alive and artful, at their best. They are lyrics, inseparable from their melodies, and not poems, which have another kind of life altogether.

The lyrics are flat and unremarkable save for their strangeness, which is not especially interesting in verbal terms. With music, voila! Transformation. This is a condition that makes what Dylan does songwriting, not the writing of poetry. These are distinct art forms with features and rules of composition that are crucial and non-negotiable. Cohen is an interesting case since he inhabits several writing mediums, IE, novels, poetry, plays music. He's not incredibly prolific in any of these areas--over the forty-plus years that he's been on my radar, his output has been meager, albeit high quality--but it occurs to me that he's more of an actual writer than Dylan is. They are different sorts of geniuses. Cohen, of course, is a novelist overall—"Beautiful Losers," "The Favorite Game"--and a poet, someone wholly committed to making the words from their music, rhythm, and power so that the sort of splendid, soul-racked suffering he specializes in, that deliciously wrought agony that's midway between spiritual experience and sexual release, is fully conveyed to the reader and made as felt as possible.

Cohen tends the words he uses more than Dylan does; his language is strange and abstruse at times, but beyond the oddity of the existences he sets upon his canvas, there exist an element that is persuasive, alluring, masterfully wrought with writing, from the page alone, that blends all the attendant aspects of Cohen's stressed worldliness-- sexuality, religious ecstasy, the burden of his whiteness-- into a whole, subtly argued, minutely detailed, expertly layered with just so many fine, exacting touches of language. His songs, which I find the finest of the late 20th century in English--only Dylan, Costello, Mitchell, and Paul Simon have comparable bodies of work--we find more attention given to the effect of every word and phrase applied to his themes, his storylines. In many ways, I would say Cohen is a better lyricist than Dylan because he's a better writer overall. Unlike Dylan, who has been indiscriminate for the last thirty years about the quality of work he's released, there is scarcely anything in Cohen's songbook you would characterize as a cast-off. 

Cohen takes more care in words he selects to tell his tales. He creates his moods as he provides a sense of location, tone, and philosophical underpinning while subtly suggesting the opposite of whatever mood he might be getting at. Cohen is simply more careful than Dylan. In word selection, more discriminating; the architecture of literary influence is on display in the disciplined rhymes of Cohen's parable-themed lyrics, elegantly so. It is, to be sure, a matter of choice how a writer manages their word flow. Cohen's writing has a sense of someone who labors hard to make the image work, to have that image compliment and make enticingly evocative a scenario that starts off simple and then arrives instantly of fatalistic surrender to powers greater than oneself, both sensual and spiritual. I feel for Dylan's method because he is an admirer of what Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac regarded as Spontaneous Bop Prosody, a zen-like approach to an expression where it was believed that the first thought was the best thought one could have on a subject.

Good poets, great poets, are writers when it gets down to what it is they do, and it's my feeling that Cohen's experience as a novelist, short story writer, and playwright has given him a well-honed instinct for keeping the verbiage to a minimum.  Cohen isn't a chintzy minimalist like Raymond Carver. And fewer words in a piece are not, by default, superior to more extended word counts. Cohen just has a better sense of when it's time to stop and develop a  lyric further.

Dylan's genius is closer to the kind of brilliance we see in Miles Davis, where the influences of unlike styles of music and other elements-- traditional folk, rock, and roll, protest songs, blues, country, French Symbolism, Beat poets--were mixed in ways that created a new kind of music, and required a new critical language to discuss what it was he had done with the influences he'd assimilated, and the range of his power. It is possible to look at aspects of Dylan's art. Fine individual strands wanting--his lyrics may be unfocused or strange for their own sake, his melodies are either borrowed or lack sophistication, his singing is nasal and grating--but taken together, music, words, voice, instrumentation fused, one experiences catharsis, power and galvanizing mysticism in the best recorded moments. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is a flat, curious scribble of a lyric read by itself. Still, with the minor critical intonations of Al Kooper's keyboard and Mike Bloomfield's interned guitar, coupled with Dylan's leering, a snarling dramatization of the lyric, we have an art that is riveting n terms that are purely musical; yes, one might go on at length and create a cosmology of what Dylan's lyrical creations make of the experience, but the emphasis needs to remain on the whole.

"It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) "is a terrific, innovative song lyric, and as a lyric does not have the same power as a well-written poem has on the page when that lyric hasn't the music to give it momentum. The power of the lyric has a sustained "oh wow" element, one line after another summarizing the sad state of the Perfect Union, the Idealized world in harsh, ironic terms, each image and beat of the intoned images, critical, lively, surreal in a seamless mash-up of different concepts, are lifted, foisted, tossed to the listener by the steady and firm strums of the simple guitar Dylan maintains. Lyrics have their advantages and can be pretty artful and subtle, but I maintain that they're a different art form; the words are subservient to the song form, where poems of every sort are autonomous, structures made entirely of language. (Unless, of course, you're a Dada poet who just arrived here with a time machine).

"Desolation Row" and "Visions of Johanna," two songs from what I think is the center of Dylan's most significant period as a song-poet, if you will, likewise are not to make their fantastic excursions through Daliesque landscapes alone on the page, as flat print. Dylan's chords, his voice, and his forward-march rhythms are what make these extended lyrics crisp and suggestive of metaphysical chaos under a thin the thin guise of civility and reason. Drums, organs, twangy and tuneless guitars, police sirens, his braying voice bring a dimension to the lyrics that aren't there without it. Dylan's songs especially--more so than Cole Porter, more so than Chuck Berry, more so than a host of his contemporaries--are not self-sufficient as page-poets are with their work. It can be argued that what Dylan has done is more complex, subtler, and requiring a new vocabulary to discuss than what poets have done, and something I would subscribe to on principle. Dylan remains a songwriter foremost and a poet only through loose analogy. In all, Dylan's lyrics serve the musical experience, the concept of a song, which makes Dylan a songwriter of genius, but not a poet. When they are writing poetry and not novels or songs of their own, poets are committed to making language, and language alone, the means through which their ethereal notions will be preserved. Successor failure depends on how well they can write, not strum a guitar or croon a tune.

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2.

 I do admire the work of artists who remain attractive as they get older, but it is a fact that many writers, poets, songwriters do their best, most compelling work in their early years. Dylan is one of these--the most incredible songs, in my view, were those that combined equal elements of Surrealism, Burroughs-inspired language cut-ups, blues and rural south music vernaculars, and heavy doses of French Symbolism by way of Rimbaud and Mallarme. This gave his stanzas a heightened, alienated feeling of sensory overload, making him the principal Lyricist of the bare existential absurdity that life happens to be. No one got to the infuriating heart of the sensation that life had ceased to mean anything after those matters that "mean" the most to us--marriages, friendships, tastes, financial security, spiritual or religious certainty--were changed, destroyed, or simply vanished. Dylan's writing was of the individual suddenly in the choking throes of uncertainty, batting back encroaching gloom with the kind of swinging, poetic wit that reassembles existence. It is a stance, a state, an aesthetic state of being that made it possible for him to fire on all cylinders for a good run of time. Generally, the poetic quality and intensity that Dylan produced in the longs on the list I made are a substantial body of work that perfectly matches the most vigorous work by Eliot, Pound, WC Williams, Burroughs Ginsberg. It is also not the kind of work you can keep doing for a lifetime; like Miles Davis, he had to. His mature work has often hit the mark and offers the long view of experience in an, especially moving way. Just as often, I think he misses the mark and overwrites or is prone to hackneyed phrasing. 

There is much quality to the later songs, but they are not among Dylan's most excellent as a body of lyrics. Dylan is called more often than not a poet because of the unique genius of his best songs; I don't think he's a poet, but a songwriter with an original talent strong enough to change that particular art forever. I do understand, though, why a host of critics through the decades would consider him a poet in the first place. My list is the songs I think that justifies any sort of reputation Dylan has a poetic genius. I like most of the songs mentioned above for various reasons apart from the ones on my initial 35 choices. The Songs there manage an affinity for evoking the ambiguities and sharp perceptions of an acutely aware personality who is using poetic devices to achieve more abstract and suggestive effects and still tend to be wonderfully tuneful. No one else in rock and roll, really, was doing that before Dylan was. On those terms, nothing he's written is entirely at the level of where he was with the songs on my list; this list consists of the body of work that substantiates Dylan's claim to genius. "Just Like a Woman" is one of the most refined character sketches I've ever heard in a song. What's remarkable is the brevity of the whole, how much history is suggested, inferred, insinuated in spare yet arresting imagery. I rather like that Dylan allows the mystery of this character to linger, to not let the fog settle. The ambiguity gives its suggestive power, and there is the whole element of whether the person addressed is a woman at all, but rather a drag queen. It's an open question. It's a brilliant lyric.

"Drifter's Escape "was on twice and is now a single entry. There is a concentration of detail in the lyric, a compression of Biblical cadence and sequence that makes the song telling and vivid not in its piling on of stanzas but in its brevity. He does the same for "All along the Watchtower," which I regard as a condensed "Desolation Row," a commentary, perhaps, from the tour bus just passing through; the tour guide finally tells the driver, "there must be some kinda way outta here." I regard the true "poetry" of Dylan's music in the earlier music, where he is spectacularly original in how he forced his influences to take new shapes and create new perspectives. Post JWH, I just find too much of his lyric writing prolix, and meandering, time-filling rather than revealing; the surreal, fresh, colloquial snap of his language has gone and is replaced with turns of phrase that are trite, hackneyed, ineffective;' they strike my ear as false. Even "Blind Willie McTell," a song that has been persuasively defended by intelligent fans of Dylan's later work, strikes too many false notes for my tastes. Musically, it drags and philosophically seems a victim of convenient thinking,  a PC version of Song of the South; some of the imagery is simply cloying and seems more suitable for Gone with the Wind than a poet of arguable worth.

...See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell...

Really, that is awful, a dreadful presentation of atmospheric detail meant to create historical context and mood, but it trades on so many received ideas of slavery, racism, the south, et al., that the intent no longer matters. It strikes as more minstrel show than tribute. Had anyone submitted this to serious poetry (or lyric) writing workshop, it would have been handed back to us for revision, with the advice that we rid the narrative of the creaky, questionable window dressing? "When I Paint My Masterpiece" works wonderfully because of its lack of any messages about social justice. It works because it is a short, terse, vivid travelogue, vague and evocative in equal measure. The ambiguity and absence of relevance to anything other than Dylan's need to speak offhandedly about an exciting time in the life of a particular character is what makes this song memorable.

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Well, I had a feeling that the general good sense this album conveys is that Dylan wasn't trying too hard to prove he's a genius. The record is straightforward, and the language is remarkably free of affectation, a tendency that has plagued him post-JWH. I especially like "Sign in the Window"; it has the sincerity and actual and momentary acceptance of where one happens to be in a specific part of life and offers a new set of expectations. The perfectly natural language here, excellent and unexpected rhymes, telling use of local detail that give us color and history without sagging qualifiers to make it more "authentic." The lyrics are a recollection of a trip, places visited, perspectives changing, a nice string of incidents in a language that sounds like a natural voice telling real things, with genuine bemusement.