Tag: Poetry

The Hopeless, Hungry Side of Town.


“In 1968, legendary badass Johnny Cash reportedly visited Nickajack Cave in his native Tennessee, with the intention of killing himself. Instead, he had something of a spiritual experience in that cave…This macabre personal narrative is visually represented in a new music video for the once and always Man In Black, one which begins by taking viewers right into the maw of that cave, and ends with our exit.”

“I’m no slave to whistle, clock, or bell, not weak-eyed prisoner of Wall Street. Let me be easy on the man that’s down. Let me be square and generous with all. And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead that stretches upward toward the Great Divide.” Via Fast Company‘s Joe Berkowitz, John Hillcoat of The Proposition and The Road has fashioned an evocative posthumous video for Johnny Cash’s “She Used to Love Me a Lot.” The lines above, which begin this clip, are from Badger Clark’s “A Cowboy’s Prayer.

So Sweet and So Cold.

“Will, you are a d**k. You’re godd**n right I was saving those plums for breakfast. Fine, it’s not like they’re my favorite food in the world, but I mean, they’re a seasonal fruit, you scumbag. Buy your own food for a change. All you do is sit around the house all day writing about red wheelbarrows and junk.“

Two recent columns that brought the chuckle somethin’ fierce: McSweeney’s “This is Just to Say That I’m Tired of Sharing an Apartment With William Carlos Williams,” and The Onion’s “Kid Ready To Start Playdating Again.” “‘I’m not looking to get into anything serious right away,’ Gallagher said. ‘I’m not necessarily ready to open up about my dreams of becoming a fireman or someday owning a trampoline, but it’ll be nice not to be alone anymore.’“

An Affirming Flame.

“All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority, whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State, and no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police. We must love one another or die.” W.H. Auden‘s “September 1, 1939” turns 70.

Via BDL, and seen where “ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages,” a.k.a. Twitter.

Songs of Love and Hate.

“Cohen has explored the theme of love as an all-consuming flame, both destructive and creative, from the outset of his career — a painting of St. Bernadette in flames appears on the back cover of his first album — and that tortured ambiguity flickered throughout the evening. ‘If he was fire, then she must be wood,’ Cohen sang in ‘Joan of Arc,’ but the old ladies’ man himself has always been dry wood, burning up, consumed by the same flame, dying endlessly. Cohen is a battered philosopher of eros, and the beauty and horror of much of his poetry derives from his alternately exhausted and triumphant response to the demigod of sex.“

Rumors of the Death of a Ladies’ Man have been greatly exaggerated: From the bookmarks, and based on the current tour that’s recently been immortalized on the very listenable Live in London, Salon‘s Gary Kamiya sings the praises of one of his idols, Leonard Cohen. “‘Looks like freedom but it feels like death/ It’s something in between, I guess,’ Cohen sings in ‘Closing Time.’ That knife edge, that balancing act between the intolerable and the redemptive, is where Cohen lives, both in his work and in his performances. He is a fearless explorer of darknesses of all kinds, mostly erotic and romantic, but also, and increasingly, political and spiritual. For Cohen, without darkness there is no light — a credo summed up in his song ‘Anthem,’ with its exquisite chorus ‘Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.’“

The Monster and its Critic.

“Zemeckis took the oldest and most important text of our ur-language, and turned it into a 3-D Disneyland ride so cheesy he should have called it ‘Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean.’…But the ‘Beowulf’ travesty is especially glaring, because of the obvious contrast with another work that mined the same ancient field: J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings.’” Taking issue with the “plastic entertainment‘ that is Zemeckis’ Beowulf much more than I did, Salon‘s Gary Kamiya movingly explains what Tolkien understood about the poem, and how it informed his own work. “Tolkien’s brilliant essay can be seen as a ringing defense not just of ‘Beowulf,’ but of the work he was soon to embark on, another great tower composed of ancient stones. And the themes of lateness, of heroic loss, being caught between one age and another (his world is not called ‘Middle-earth’ for nothing), are the deepest and most sublime parts of his own epic.“

Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!

“Ginsberg once called the poem ‘an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified.’ So it has been.” Slate‘s Stephen Burt ruminates on the fiftieth anniversary of Allan Ginsberg’s Howl.

Senryu in the City.

“How can we fix us? The fights, the silence . . . I know! Let’s get a puppy!” A hearty congrats to Joel Derfner, who’s both a friend from college and the brother/roommate of a good friend here at Columbia, on the publication of his recent book, Gay Haiku (a project which originated on his blog…assuredly a better way to make this hobby pay than the Kottke route.)

Self-Ordained Professors’ Tongues.

An event of note last night here at Columbia’s Miller Theater: Music critic Greil Marcus, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, and Oxford poetry scholar Christopher Ricks came together to contemplate Dylania old and new. Marcus began by speaking on the many lives of “Masters of War,” including Dylan’s Gulf War I Grammy performance and the recent “Coalition of the Willing” episode at a Boulder, Colorado high school. Wilentz followed by discussing Dylan’s debts of gratitude (and debt to history) in the recent Chronicles. And Ricks punned his way through a priceless disquisition on Blonde on Blonde and the differences among poetry, prose, and song, finishing his remarks with a defense of “Just Like a Woman,” which apparently has been deemed misogynistic in certain academic corners. (I asked the panel about the mixed reception to Masked & Anonymous, and Wilentz & Marcus in particular praised it as an underrated film…I’ll probably have to see it again at some point.)

All in all, it was quite an interesting evening of Dylanology, although I must admit, I was a bit put off by some of Ricks’ comments in the Q&A session — He called “Masters of War” (and, for that matter, “The Death of Emmett Till“) self-absorbed and overly tendentious songs, which I think there’s a good deal of truth to, but then proceeded to castigate the audience for indulging its generally anti-Bush sentiment (via some mild chuckling) during Marcus’ Coalition of the Willing anecdote. Ricks began by deploring knee-jerk political responses in either direction as a typically American (and occasionally Dylanian) vice…ok, fine, that’s a criticism we’ve all heard before. “Fist fighting is here to stay,
It’s just the old American way.” But Ricks then went on to bemoan the tribulations faced by his poor right-wing friends in Massachusetts, who thought — correctly, in Ricks’ view — that “John Kerry didn’t deserve the presidency.” (As you might expect, this gave the smattering of right-leaning folk amid the audience a chance to clap vociferously and to indulge anew the currently-popular fallacy that they’re an oppressed minority.)

Yes, unfortunately, the decline of civility in debate and the “MacNeill-Lehrerization” of every issue into two opposite and irreconcilable poles are lamentable repercussions of the way politics is practiced today, as Jon Stewart famously noted on Crossfire several months ago. (Or, as Bob once put it, “Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull…Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.“) But that doesn’t mean that Americans’ opinions of the war in Iraq aren’t well-thought out and hard-won. Ricks treated the issue as basically six-one, half-dozen-the-other, that to voice an opinion about the Iraq War is somehow irresponsible and — worse — uncouth. (Whatsmore, I had no idea what anybody’s politics were until Ricks began complaining about the presumed incivility in the room, at which point the audience immediately bifurcated into lefties and righties.) In sum, incivility is a serious problem, sure. But, for that matter, so is war.

The Q&A aside, though, the evening made for an eloquent appreciation of the many gifts of Bob Dylan, gifts further illuminated by the warmth and regard with which Marcus, Wilentz and Ricks held these songs to the light and uncovered some of their fragile tendrils of meaning and allusion. And if nothing else, the conference made for an excellent excuse to go home and delve into Bob’s back pages for the remainder of the evening, and listen to old songs with new ears.