Talkin’ poetry, music, & ambition

In her memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo emphasizes the young Bob Dylan’s “fever to learn”: making pilgrimages to hear legends, hanging around his peers to pick up their songs and arrangements, occasionally using said arrangements on his own records before said peers got the chance. According to another source, Dylan at least once absconded with a friend’s rare vinyl because he needed it. In The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Dave Van Ronk honors Dylan’s seriousness and talent but is very funny about Dylan’s constant storytelling and persona-building: “I mean, one night he spent something like an hour showing a bunch of us how to talk in Indian sign language, which I’m pretty sure he was making up as he went along, but he did it marvelously” (ouch). In short, from the beginning Dylan was driven, quick in every way, and a bit of a trickster. (The featured image, by the way, is the oldest of him on Wikimedia, credit to By Rowland Scherman).

A year and a half ago I was asked to contribute a short essay to a Dylan-focused anthology full of fancy-pants poetry scholars writing about one song each–and my piece is due soon. I chose “Talkin’ New York” for a number of reasons: it made an impression on me when I first heard it in my early 20s at my mother-in-law’s house in Pittsburgh; I saw that no one else had selected a song from his first album, which is, after all, mostly covers; and I hoped that by picking an early, less famous piece, I’d have less Dylanology to master. Ha! Precarious piles of seven-hundred-page tomes now teeter on my home and work desks. Researching and writing this essay is a bigger and harder task than I imagined, but I’ve enjoyed my own fever to learn. On the hagiography, hard pass: I think Dylan’s brilliant and important, but some of his work is misogynistic in a way that dampened my interest decades ago. Sexism pervades 20th century art of all kinds, but some has an especially mean edge, and I try not to spend much time with books, music, or visual art that makes me feel worse about this stupid world [insert imaginary protest song here–I’ll spare you my blues about US politics]. Yet the biography and some of the criticism is fascinating. I was grateful for an essay from Daphne Brooks and Gayle Wald, for instance, about women artists who cover Dylan’s songs, as in Nina Simone’s transformation of the problematic “Just Like a Woman.” Reading Dylan’s own memoir and some of the many books about him, I stopped every few paragraphs to listen to something I’d forgotten or never knew about: Chris Bouchillon (who first recorded a song in this form, the talking blues); Maybelle Carter, as I got my bearings in the Piedmont blues; Lead Belly (“In the Pines” gives me the chills); Odetta; and much more. It’s not the worst way to spend the hottest weeks of the year.

I’ve been following an old pattern, too, of breaking up prose labor with poetry-time, drafting new work based on recent travels and on my Dylan reading–you can’t not ponder ambition and what it takes to make it, reading about Dylan’s pilgrimage from Minnesota to Greenwich Village, and that’s a chronic poetic subject of mine. He arrived in New York with zero bigshot connections, a problem he’d soon remedy. Dylan absolutely had the talent and did the work, but he was also intensely image-conscious, partially funded by his parents, and a straight white guy, which made him freer than others. I guess he’d go to Brooklyn now.

My own po-biz activities: not much in sleepy midsummer, but I’m grateful to have two pieces in a new mag, Hood of Bone Review. Both sprang from a grieving time, “Mother Tree” from the months before my mother’s death and “The Facilities” from a dream-encounter with her after. I also just received a copy of a poem in Cimarron Review, pictured below: “Counterphobic” draws from an intensive period of writing spell-poems, in this case pondering curses etched in metal and thrown into wells to petition a local god’s help, of the kind you see in Bath, England. [Insert spell for better US politics here, tossed into the well of blogdom.]

Health keeps being a mixed bag. I had a bad mammogram then some follow-up tests that proved it a false alarm, but I’ve now been told I’m high risk and would benefit from genetic testing. I’m a person who will generally choose knowledge over blissful ignorance, so I’ll likely do it. I live in a rural place so medical appointments mean a lot of highway time. Overall, I’ve been feeling tender, easily overwhelmed by small worries and by noise (I’ve come to think that one reason I’m so interested in poetic sound is a never-diagnosed sensory processing disorder). In short, one goal of this summer is a slower pace to take care of myself after a stressful year.

Not that I’m letting myself entirely off the hook, because I was asked to speak at Confluence in Pittsburgh on the 27th–my in-laws are there so it’s a trip I would have made anyway, and I’m looking forward to my 12 hours at an sff con. More learning!–which is one of the activities that makes me happiest. I’m moderating a panel called “Making Magic Real” and participating in another on “Speculative Poetry.” Otherwise, I’m mostly hiding at home, enjoying and making writerly use of the several quiet weeks left before the academic year begins with its usual meetings and mayhem.