The Best American Poetry

The Bookstore [by Michael Schiavo]

11 Housatonic Street, Lenox, MA

I’ve worked at The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts since at least last Wednesday.

If you get that joke, then you’ve probably been to The Bookstore where you’ve probably met owner Matthew Tannenbaum. Matt’s been in the book business for a little while now. He recounts the beginning of his career as a bookman in the chapbook-sized My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor (on sale during business hours; come on in). He’s working on a longer memoir, so I won’t, nor for reasons of plausible deniability do I particularly want to, divulge the details—which are wild, heartbreaking, historic—suffice it to say that The Bookstore came into his care during the nation’s bicentennial year and, despite claims to the contrary, he’s been serving the people of Lenox and the greater community ever since.

The Bookstore is a New England City Lights: a thriving counterculture symbol not simply because of Matt’s connection to banned-book champion Steloff nor solely because of his own place in that continuum (e.g. the poster trumpeting Matt’s reading of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, the photo of him shaking hands with Vaclav Havel) but precisely because it’s a shop stocked by a man who knows that reading a book, whether the pulpiest mass market, the most surreal love poetry, or the humblest picture book, can reveal in any person of any age limitless reservoirs of imagination, of wonder, of hope. In the E-Age, selling print books is about as countercultural an activity as you can engage in in these United States.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only, that puts me in my car 2 ½ hours ’round-trip three days a week. On one of those three days, I usually get a compliment on the store’s selection, which has been cultivated by Matt through nearly four decades of his own literary love affairs—but is also the result of a bookman having a deep and ongoing conversation with his community. Because he loves to hear what people love to read, whether they’re old friends or new acquaintances, they in turn allow Matt to suggest books they might not otherwise consider, enlarging their own point of view. It’s buoying to observe and it happens all the time.

If you’ve read Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, you might have seen Matt’s name before. This contemporary epic of motherhood and community was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street in Lenox, down the street and around the corner from The Bookstore. Almost everything in Lenox is down the street and around the corner. Matt appears a couple of times, but the most notable occurs near the end of Part III, on page 53 of the latest New Directions paperback (NDP876). On the preceding page, standing in the health food store, the question comes: “You think something like a book will change the world, don’t you?” The answer, in the next line: “I do, I take pleasure in taking the milk with the most cream”. A few lines later brings us to this wonderful decision:

 

Let’s go in to the bookstore to see Matthew Tannenbaum

The dream figure of the boy-father-mother who turns into

The recalcitrant bookseller as we do

                                                     I look over the shoulder

Of a girl flipping through the pages of a book of women’s faces

All beauties, bigger than life, black and white

                                                                  Scavullo on Beauty

You study poetry and read magazines upstairs

                                                                     Let me tell you

The titles of all the current books:

                                                 The Suicide Cult, The Ends of Power,

The Origin of the Brunists, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

War and Remembrance, The Winds of War, The Dogs of War, Dog Soldiers,

Mommie Dearest, My Moby Dick, My Mother Myself, By Myself, Uncle,

Mortal Friends, Nappy Edges, Tender Miracles,

Song of Solomon, Delta of Venus, The Women’s Room,

Ladies Man, Six Men, The Water-Method Man, Watership Down,

The Night People, Shepherds of the Night, A Dream Journey,

Daniel Martin, Delmore Schwartz, Edith Wharton,

Time and Again, Better Times Than These, Centennial,

The Professor of Desire, The Honorable Schoolboy,

Heart Beat, The Third Mind, Jack’s Book,

Beasts, The Magus, The Flounder, The Fabricator,

Words of Advice, Secrets and Surprises, Dispatches,

Prelude to Terror, Full Disclosure, Final Payments,

The World of Damon Runyon, The Stories of John Cheever,

Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Praxis,

The Annotated Shakespeare, The Last Best Hope

And Chesapeake

 

There are lots of beautiful things about this passage. There is no more “upstairs”—it’s now a slightly elevated section of the store with our children’s books. We don’t sell magazines; you can find a selection at Loeb’s Food Town next door, as well as newspapers. You can, however, still come and study poetry, as we’ve got an entire wall of it in the adjacent Get Lit Wine Bar, where I bartend on Friday nights, sometimes Thursday mornings.

Owner Matthew Tannenbaum behind the bar at Get Lit

It’s also a delightful snapshot of the publishing world in the late 1970s. One title in particular stands out: My Moby Dick by William Humphrey, a romp about a colossal trout and the fanatical angler out to hook him. It’s out of print, and we recently tracked down a used copy for someone. The Lenox connection is significant: Melville wrote Moby-Dick not but a few miles from The Bookstore at Arrowhead, on the Lenox-Pittsfield line. I pass by it every day on the way to work.

In my own decade-long career as a bookman, I’ve worked at various Borders and Barnes & Noble locations. I was the textbook manager at the Yale Bookstore. For a number of years, I was a manager at another great independent, the Northshire Bookstore, in Manchester Center, Vermont. I’ve worked for and with great people who have enriched my literary vocabulary, often in ways I never would’ve predicted. I’ve also worked for and with people who, in the end of the day, could’ve been selling hemorrhoid cream for all they cared, so long as you bought something from them.

The Bookstore is different.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a customer who, rather wistfully, goes on about how great it would be to own a bookstore. I try not to disabuse them. Those reveries of lounging around, talking literature the live-long are quickly erased when you have to deal with the day-to-day operations of unpacking, stocking, ordering, organizing the store. It never ends. But since we’re working with books, it’s a joy, and occasionally, moreso than any other bookstore I’ve worked at, we do get a chance to kick back and talk. About books, yes, but also about life. That is, after all, where the books comes from. It helps when Bookstore friends like Alice Brock, Bill Corbett, Harry Mathews, or Geoff Young stop in to say hello.

Anyone drawn to this blog is probably aware that the publishing industry is in—O clichéd phrase—a state of flux. We talk about this from time to time at The Bookstore. The conclusion we always come to is to keep doing what we’re doing, which is: to stock the best books, new and old, by the best writers from a variety of eras and styles and let great readers come find us. And they do. Every day.

Anyway, it’s too late to stop now. We don’t have every book ever printed available in the store for you to purchase. No one does, not even Amazon. But we do have a lot of great books, and there’s a good chance a few of those great books you’ve never heard of. So, like I said, come on in. I think of The Bookstore as like Ruthie in her honky-tonk lagoon.

We may not always have what you need, but we definitely have what you want.

* We always have lots of readings at The Bookstore, but one that Best American Poetry readers might be interested in is Peter Gizzi and Bernadette Mayer, Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

Bob Dylan's Identity (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Imagination takes precedence over intellect for Bob Dylan. David Dalton tries to trace the career of that remarkable imagination in his book Who Is That Man?: In Search of the Real Bob Dylan (Hyperion) which is being published today. Dalton, a founding editor of Rolling Stone, originally titled his work Bob's Brain. I suppose he did this because he wanted to attempt the impossible: a provide a written MRI of the creator of what some people claim to be the best songs ever written.

Bob Dylan's identity is, to understate the point laughably, elusive, starting with his Jewishness. Karl Shapiro, in his work In Defense of Ignorance, wrote: "The European Jew was always a visitor...But in America everybody is a visitor. In the United States the Jewish writer is free to create his own consciousness." But the Jewish writer has a more complex identity than other American writers. In Ravelstein, Saul Bellow noted that "As a Jew you are also an American, but somehow you are not." That was Dylan's status. He was an outsider as a Jew in America, but doubly so in Hibbing, Minnesota. As a rural Jew, he was, in Dalton's phrase, "an outsider in a community of outsiders."

This status led him to be free to invent a self while simultaneously feeling outside of any genuine self. In one sense he had no identity at all. In 1976 Allen Ginsberg said about Dylan: "I don't know him because I don't think there is any him. I don't think he's got a self."

Dylan rebelled against his birth self in every possible way. He changed his name. He changed where he lived. He believed he had been born into the wrong family. He looked for a direction to his real self and could not find it. Robert Zimmerman had a profound sense of disquiet. And so, when he got to New York, he invented stories to everyone who would listen. He was an orphan, a circus performer, a Native American. He was anybody but a small town son of a Jewish appliance dealer.

But accompanying this all--inclusive self-rejection was an intense belief in himself, a sense that Fate had cleared a path in life for him that would lead to his being the most important singer in America. For me, this juxtaposition provides an approach to Dylan's identity: to look at the rapport and the rancor between his private and public selves. To do this, I think it's useful to consider Dylan as an actor. Lies are the truth for an actor. The world has facts, but for Dylan those facts didn't explain inner turmoil, the ever-moving, ever-changing, often closely-related feelings of desire and loathing, the ways that words and sounds just came to him, often when prompted by a song that moved him. He loved those songs, and then stole them, and then made them his own, inevitably vastly improving them.

Actors are frequently alienated from themselves. (The best book I know about this is Simon Callow's Being An Actor). They often can't find a real self. That was Ginsberg's point about Dylan. To overcome these dreadful feelings, actors have to think the thoughts of others, in their cases the imaginative characters created by dramatists and screenwriters. Dylan absorbed the imaginative characters of American popular music. He was the hobo and the troubadour, the endless traveler and the misunderstood artist. As with actors, he was far more comfortable on stage than off. But unlike actors he didn't have a Shakespeare who had written for him. He tried. He had Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and the whole of American popular music. But eventually he discovered he needed to sing songs that didn't yet exist. Eventually he became his own dramatist and screenwriter and created the songs and then acted them out on stage. He was the writer, the actor, and the director. And, some say, he became his own Shakespeare.

GREIL MARCUS AND DYLAN (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

What is this gold?

This is Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Writings 1968-2010 (PublicAffairs), a just-published treasure trove of the author's indispensable riffs on America's enigmatic musical legend. As the most interesting writer about Bob Dylan, Marcus is brutally honest, often with a trenchant wit, capable of seeing connections invisible to everyone else, and brimming with unpredictable passion. And doesn't that description fit Dylan himself? Maybe that's why Marcus is such a perfect Dylan audience.

The book opens in the summer of 1963 with Marcus in a New Jersey field eager to hear Joan Baez and surprised when she introduces a friend, a "scruffy looking guy with a a guitar" whose name Marcus didn't catch. After the show, Marcus found the young Bob Dylan crouching behind the tent trying to light a cigarette. Marcus tried to offer praise, but Dylan would have none of it. And so it began, Greil Marcus' quest to look at Bob Dylan and see how America was reflected in him and how his reflection changed America. It is a long, dazzling journey. It includes the notorious four word opening line of Marcus' 1970 review of Dylan's album Self Portrait, a review that was a succinct declaration of independence from uncritical Dylan adoration. There's a 1979 review of Slow Train Coming about Dylan's embrace of a version of fundamentalist Christianity Marcus calls "southern Californian suburban." Marcus' brilliant take in the review titled "Amazing Chutzpah" is that this kind of religious conversion seems like one more stop on Dylan's restless journey but that such a conversion can end a quest for answers by seeming, falsely, to settle every question. Over and over in this book, Marcus looks at Dylan and uses the singer to offer bulletins from the front lines of American culture. There are great essays on "the myth of the open road," the location of Desolation Row, and much else. I particularly liked Marcus' recounting his visit to Hibbing High School and Dylan's famed English teacher, the late and wonderful B.J. Rolfzen. And then there's "High Water Everywhere," Marcus' response to the September 11th attacks. The "article" is a jarring collection of quotations that, taken together, provides a penetrating look into the American soul. The book concludes on election night 2008 in Minneapolis.

It is difficult to convey the energy of Marcus writing style. I think of it as linguistic pointillism, with Marcus' precise and daring dots of Dylan's career ultimately forming a larger image, a picture of a very strange landscape called America. Whatever Marcus' style is called, it is riveting. Readers won't always agree with him. Indeed, that's the fun. He's so engaging you want to enter the debate.

Greil Marcus is justifiably noted for a string of terrific books, especially about American music. This anthology, vital for every Dylan fan and for those who wish to understand the last forty years of American culture, provides powerful support to those arguing for Marcus' place as the preeminent cultural critic of the country.

The Bob Dylan Mask (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

There are those artists who never have an unuttered thought. They feel compelled to reveal their most intimate feelings, their nastiest habits, and the messiest clutter of their personal lives. The caution light in their brain has gone out.

And then there's Bob Dylan. He hid behind an adopted name and contradictory, phony biographies until some of his real past was discovered. His brilliant songs seem simultaneously confessional and mysteries beyond our reach, meaning they fail to let us see him. His interviews are notorious jousts with journalists as he reveals, hints at, hides, lies, and attacks. Here he is, having just turned sixty-nine, and we know all about him except that part that is significant and revelatory.

When he was very young discovering what it meant to be a songwriter and singer and charting his future, Bob Dylan created a persona, a character, someone unlettered and untutored with a reflexive, natural grasp of language and a jukebox for a mind. He developed a singing voice that growled. He play-acted at being Woody Guthrie. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, well-off middle class Jewish kid from, of all places, Hibbing, Minnesota. No, he was Bob Dylan, a man of the people who sprang spontaneously from nowhere, a traveling troubadour for the downtrodden.

The persona was very useful to him in many ways as he began his career. He could in his new identity feel part of the folk. Bob Dylan was a hobo, a rambler and a gambler, someone who knew hard times. Of course, Robert Zimmerman had no experience with such a life. But Bob Dylan, well he was different.

The Dylan who couldn't put two grammatically correct sentences together, who seemed on unfriendly terms with proper English, fooled some people who thought he was a simple rustic. That perception gave him an advantage over those who misjudged him.

His Bob Dylan mask allowed him to gauge people according to how they reacted to him as someone (seemingly) poor and uneducated. Later he could use the mask in anger to assert that people didn't understand him. The mask was a useful device to keep people at a distance.

The folk audiences he originally played for desperately sought authenticity. They wanted a young Woody Guthrie, an heir to Pete Seeger. And here was this young rebel whose vague origins and odd behavior and ever-present song allowed them to fill him in as they wished. They pictured the person they wanted behind the mask without ever being allowed to look at who was really there.

Dylan's persona let him keep the most precious part of himself private, behind the front of a kid on the run, abandoned by parents and society, someone who blew in with the wind. He wasn't Robert Zimmerman, college dropout. He was Bob Dylan, master folksinger, the man who knew, like Woody, that guitars don't lie, who knew words placed just right could lead people over pain, who burned with a fiery drive to sing truth to power.

Dylan's keeping part of himself permanently private has, to understate, worked for him. It's hard to imagine that he will change. Of course, his ongoing march toward an ever-closer eternity may cause some re-thinking. Does he want to be understood or does he want to go out a mystery?

For now, the Bob Dylan mask remains firmly in place.

Bob Dylan and Israel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

It is possible to select carefully chosen materials from Bob Dylan's life and songs to reflect your own beliefs. So it is with some hesitation that I describe Dylan's relationship with Israel. I will present all the material, sparse as it is.

In May 1971 Dylan and his then wife Sara went to Israel without their children in hopes of escaping the media frenzy in America, having a bit of a second honeymoon, and exploring Jewish roots, a subject Dylan became increasingly interested in after his father's death on June 5, 1968. On May 24th, Dylan's 30th birthday, a photographer got a shot of him praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem while wearing a kippah, the traditional Jewish head covering.The photo ended any possible privacy. At some point in late May or early June, the Dylans visited Givat Haim, a kibbutz, to explore the possibility of staying there for a while. Eve Brandstein, a member of the kibbutz, told Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin that Dylan wanted to stay in a guest house but not work on the kibbutz. The kibbutz members did not want to accept his conditions for living there and were scared their home would be a magnet for the curious.

From April 11th to May 17th 1983 Dylan spent 19 recording sessions producing his album Infidels. On April 19th he sang six versions of a new song, "Neighborhood Bully," and on May 17th, at the very last session recording the very last song, he did another take of the song, which, to me at least, indicates he wanted to get it right. "Neighborhood Bully" is a sarcastic, unvarnished full-throated defense of Israel. The Israelis, ironically called the bully of the neighborhood, have "got no place to escape to, no place to run." They are "criticized and condemned for being alive." There's no subtlety here, no nuanced view of Middle Eastern history. The persecuted Jews are in the right and are simply defending their lives. Dylan invokes the Jewish people's tragic history as a way of defending Israel:

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,
He's wandered the earth an exiled man.
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
He's always on trial for just being born.

The album wasn't released until November 1, 1983, but in September that year Jesse Dylan, Bob's then seventeen year old son, had a late bar mitzvah in Israel, and his father flew over for the event. He was again photographed wearing Jewish religious items.

Dylan played his first concerts in Israel on September 5th and 7th 1987. (Probably by coincidence, his very next concert was in Basle, Switzerland, the site of the First Zionist Congress in 1897). Dylan played three concerts in Israel on June 17th, 19th, and 20th in 1993. Symbolically or not, he ended the latter two concerts with "It Ain't Me Babe," about a relationship in which he rejects the expectations placed upon him.

Those are the principal facts. There may be much more we do not know. Additionally, there was a persistent rumor that Dylan would be playing in Israel next month, but if he is the concert is not listed on his official website. He will be in the area around his 69th birthday. He's giving a concert in Greece on May 29th and Turkey on May 31st.

If Dylan seems conflicted about Jewish religious beliefs, he connects emotionally to a Jewish history punctuated by persecution. He grasps the longing for a Jewish homeland. Dylan's silence about Israel may reflect some ambivalence. Or he may just wish to keep his views private. It is significant that there are no negative songs about Israel, no comments hostile to the Zionist enterprise, no initial embrace and later abandonment of the Jewish people's heroic return to national history.

Dylan will be 70 in 2011. It's a symbolic year for him, a biblical lifespan, a time of profound reflection. Perhaps it will be a good moment to pause in his never-ending tour.

I wonder what he will find as he examines himself at 70. I wonder if after all his wandering, his endless searches, his constant need for shedding skins and acquiring identities, he finally needs a place to land, a place connected to his understanding of God, a place where history and geography can't be separated, a place where outcasts have found a haven, a place where his ancestors originated. I wonder if Israel will turn out to be his direction home.

Busy Being Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

One of the charms and one of the dangers of listening to Bob Dylan is that you begin to substitute his language for your own. Sometimes an image is so startling that you attach it to your own perception of the world. Certain songs are chains of such images, as in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" or "Mr. Tambourine Man." Sometimes one of his cries from the heart serves as a perfect expression of our own anguish. Think of "Oh, Mama, can this really be the end/to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again."

For whatever reason, my mind tends to retain Dylan's aphorisms. He compresses what had been either an intuitively understood but unarticulated truth in the listener's mind or a novel observation into memorable, poetic language often containing alliteration and rhyme.

Dylan's aphorisms evolved. They started out as fierce statements about the political world, as in "For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled." This aphorism is a warning, a species of "finger-pointing," as Dylan called his protest songs. These aphorisms were aimed at altering the world. Dylan later created aphorisms aimed at transforming the individual, both Dylan himself and his listeners.

Sometimes the aphorisms Dylan produced were like proverbs or maxims, a type of wisdom literature. "Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you" is an uncompromising call for an independent spirit, a warning that if you see your path you've got to be willing to follow it alone. It's a cruel maxim, in part, calling people who don't go the way you do the "dead." But the cruelty is meant to provide the listener with emotional backbone, a determination to escape from the territory of the normal.

Dylan provides life lessons in these aphorisms. "Take what you have gathered from coincidence" teaches that events appearing as accidental can form a pattern. Dylan calls for self-awareness followed by self-examination followed by self-construction. Without a pattern there is anarchy in our lives; we simply step from one experience to the next without absorbing appropriate lessons.

Many of Dylan's most memorable aphorisms included an irony in them. Often these provided life lessons as well, such as "He not busy being born is busy dying." This is vintage Dylan, imploring us to keep moving forward, to try constant re-creation, not to back off from the novel because it's frightening. It is a call for courage to test ourselves against life's limits. It is a call to drive through when our mind signals caution.

Consider another lesson: "To live outside the law you must be honest." This is a call for morality. Some people are moral, Dylan asserts, because they are scared of breaking the law. Rather, we should realize that whatever standards we live by we must be good.

Dylan famously annoyed some fans at each stage by going to a new place and then abandoning it. The annoyance is misplaced. There are times I thought Dylan was leading me astray, exploring a path that was not right for me. I didn't follow him down those paths.

But that's the point. That's the great lesson I learned from Dylan's aphorisms. The independence he championed, the emancipating proclamation of the self's right to be free, meant at the end that the real understanding of Dylan precisely meant not following him, but rather finding my own language.

For information about my book, Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan, see http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk

I've started a new blog called Jewish Observations. The first post is titled "The Meaning of Judaism." The URL is: http://jewishobservations.blogspot.com

Rhymes With Bob Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Bob Dylan structures his songs through rhymes. Given his skills, the results can be comforting, jarring, or rousing. But why do Dylan's rhymes work so well? Why are rhymes in any song often so enchanting?

Rhymes are pleasing to the ear. They are also pleasing to the brain because in a rhyme the second word becomes more familiar to us than if there had been no first word to rhyme with. Our brains like what's easy to think about and don't like what's difficult to think about. (Psychologists call this "cognitive fluency." Songwriters don't.)  Beyond the attractions of repetitive sounds, a rhyme offers the mystery of an unexpected affinity between two or more words that are seemingly different.

The coincidence of two or more words that rhyme suggests a linguistic order missing from the chaos of ordinary life. Rhymes hint at an alluring land of English, a place of beauty and design. But there's a danger to rhymes as well. Rhymes are mysterious and inexplicable. We have to confront mirror images and doubles, worlds that complicate the simplicity that the rhyme seemed to bring.

For songwriters, rhymes make it easier for audiences to memorize the material. It's no accident that nearly every popular song is written using rhymes. But rhymes can be traps, forcing songwriters to write words they don't want to all for the sake of having to rhyme.

Rhymes are often associated with simple, childlike feelings. Yet they can be a form of attack, a battering ram of words pounding away at the listener. That's why the rhymes in Dylan's protest songs work so well. They keep hitting us with their power, and the repetition forces us to confront what is being protested. The rhymes all through "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" reinforce Brown's growing despair and retrospectively explain his final, desperate action. Consider the concluding verse of the song:

There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm.
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born.

Anyone can hear obvious rhymes. It's the great lyricist who can hear what the rest of us can't. Dylan can hear that "farm" sounds like "born," and "born is the the perfect word, not only standing in contrast to the people Hollis Brown has killed but also in providing hope (for new people have replaced the dead) and a warning (don't let what happened to the Brown family happen to these newborns).

Similarly, rhyme as a form of attack works well in angry love songs. In "Idiot Wind," Dylan writes:

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth.
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

Or take another pair of lines from the song:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.

The rhyme is more exact but is still unexpected. Additionally, it magnifies the subject of the song from beyond the angry subject to the singer himself and then to Washington. It's a neat shift of ascribing idiocy from an external partner to the internal self to the political.

The battering ram effect can also be seen in poignant love songs such as "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" and attack songs about so-called friends, such as "Positively 4th Street" with lines like:

I know the reason
That you talk behind my back.
I used to be among the crowd
You're in with.

Do you take me for such a fool
To think I'd make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don't know to begin with?

Here Dylan uses what is technically known as "feminine rhyme" in which the rhyme comes from the penultimate words (or syllables), in this case "in with" and "begin with." That is, Dylan's rhymes are far from simple. He doesn't just use traditional end rhymes. Additionally, he uses alliteration (repeating consonant sounds) and assonance (repeating vowel sounds creating internal rhymes in a line.) Here are some beautiful lines from "Mr. Tambourine Man":

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.

The assonance of "fate" and "waves" and "deep" and "beneath" and the many examples of alliteration add to the rhymes and startling images to create the attractive world the tambourine man offers.

And that's why nobody rhymes with Bob Dylan.

For information about my new book Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan, visit my web page here.

Bob Dylan as Rebel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Subtlety is a threat to minds manacled by ideology. That is why Bob Dylan so angered those people who were determined to slap a label on him. Anthemic folk singer, protest poet, folk-rock hipster. It didn't matter. They were all traps. He had to escape. Bob Dylan was a rebel.

That is to say, he was a Romantic artist. He was unrestrained by the normal inhibitions that stop most people. His caution gene had been amputated. He went where others dared not go. He was a defiant descendant of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Like them, he filtered experience through the self. His feelings were the surest path to knowledge. If those who were angry that Dylan had abandoned his finger-pointing songs had examined his Romantic roots, they would have discovered that such an emphasis on personal emotions created a profound skepticism that a society could progress and a despair at any foolish effort to believe it could. The Romantics' artistry, in contrast, came out in their poems and in sculpting their own biographies.

The European brand of Romantic poetry Dylan inherited went through the Symbolists to T.S. Eliot to Dylan. The Symbolists searched their selves for symbols of emotional reactions to their lives. Their poems were carefully created collections of those personal symbols. Their poems were not subject to normal poetic analysis because they had no meaning outside the artist's life. All that mattered was what the poem did. The poem was a raft ride down the rapids of the artist's subconscious. If others recognized the sights and sounds along the way as they listened to Dylan, it was because, in words Terry Eagleton wrote about T.S. Eliot, Dylan "made guerilla raids on the collective unconscious."

The American Romanticism that preceded Dylan started with the Emersonian notion of the self's sufficiency. An individual's consciousness required no external resources. This American Romanticism went through Whitman to Woody Guthrie and the Beats and so on to Dylan.

But Dylan was a true rebel. Dylan rebelled against the rebels. He searched within himself and discovered a moral temperament that had dominion over the artistic temperament. Art, he concluded, was not immune from moral measure. Like the Biblical prophets, he stood in opposition, but also like them his fire and fury came from an understanding of his God-given mission. The Romantics sought spiritual reality, but in nature or Eastern religions, and, later, hallucinogenic drugs. Dylan eventually found his own way to the spiritual. God was the true north on Dylan's artistic compass. He was Abraham, not Adam. He reached toward Heaven instead of believing he could find the words to name all that is in the world.

But, like many honest, unfrightened believers before him, Dylan discovered that belief carries its own confusions. Inner peace could not be cheaply bought. He had to fight himself to discover who was this God and what did this god want of a poor singer from Minnesota. The twists and turns of his understanding of God--Jewish, Christian, a combination, an entity embracing all--has been shared with different hints at different times. Dylan had to struggle. Was he the political radical, the Romantic artist, or the believer? The radical and the artist had to rebel; the believer had to obey. Evidently, he chose to obey God's call to keep singing to as many audiences as he could, to pass on the astounding musical heritage he had absorbed, and to add more songs to his unmatched and utterly remarkable body of work.

Those tasks are the ones from which even a restless Bob Dylan has not rebelled.

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For information about my book on political folk music through Dylan, see http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk

Writing About Dylan and Folk Music (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Woody Guthrie's sister answered the phone. I told her my name, explained that I was writing a book about folk singers, and asked if I could speak with her. After three minutes, Mary Jo Guthrie Edgmon invited me over for lunch. I was in New York and she was in Oklahoma, but her humor and hospitality evaporated the miles. She told me stories of Woody's childhood, stories that I had never heard, stories that I could write about.

I've always thought of writing as a passport to a new world. Interviewing and researching let me explore that world, chart its logical and emotional geography, wander its landscape, listen carefully to its stories, rumors, and secrets. I sought out people who knew more than I did. They were shockingly abundant.

The book started out because of my interest in investigating some of Bob Dylan's principal musical and political roots. I spoke, for example, with two of Dylan's high school teachers. B.J. Rolfzen talked movingly about his memories of a young Robert Zimmerman. Rolfzen still uses the formal first name. Rolfzen and I exchanged life stories, and he sent me a privately printed memoir of his youth.

A book on folk music meant I got a chance to speak with Pete Seeger. For an audience of one, he sang a bunch of songs including one he had learned while spending a few hours in jail during his run-in with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Peter, Paul, and Mary were all extraordinarily gracious. I spoke with Mary Travers about eighteen months before her death, and I was pleasantly amazed at her honesty and frankness. Tom Paxton had wonderful memories of Greenwich Village. I was taken with Izzy Young, the legendary proprietor of the Folklore Center, the man who sponsored Dylan's first concert. I enjoyed Izzy's stories and all the material he sent me.

Slowly the puzzle pieces began to form a picture. I kept talking to singers, writers, scholars, people with connections. The focus became on political folk music. The story I wanted to write was filled with fabulous characters, people like The Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, Joe Hill, Alan Lomax, Lead Belly, and Joan Baez.

And Dylan. What pleased me most was that I in exploring the folk world I could more deeply appreciate the footsteps Dylan Followed and the new paths he forged.

I was unsurprised to conclude that, finally, Dylan's greatness was beyond my critical reach. Here was a man who corners the language, captures it, and sings it for the rest of us but also a man who needs to keep a sacred corner of his own mind off limits. I was satisfied, though. Seeing Dylan in context was seeing him in a new way.

I wrote the book because I thought I had a story worth telling, and I wanted to share it.

For more information about my book on political folk music, see http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk.

Bob Dylan's Voice (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Mark Twain, in a characteristically wry observation, once noted that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." A comparable comment can be made about Bob Dylan's voice, or, more accurately, his voices. Anyone who, without warning, first listened to Nashville Skyline and thought the vocals were the result of studio engineering knows that like the man himself Dylan's voice shifts identity. Dylan's nasal Midwestern twang lately sounds like a weathered voice that has spoken and sung and battled its way down many miles of sorrow and found, from time to time, some refuges of hope along the way.

I'm writing about Dylan's classic voice, the voice on Freewheelin' through Blonde on Blonde, the voice that made Hibbing famous. It's fair to note that it was Dylan's lyrics that captured the age. But those arresting words would not have had same impact they had if Dylan had not sung them the way he did. I always thought he sang his songs better than all the covers.

Dylan's voice had many elements. The vocal qualities that so shocked Mitch Miller and almost everyone else at CBS Records were Dylan's successful effort to inhabit Woody Guthrie's voice box. The very untutored rawness of the voice with its inherent affront to the sweet, packaged conformity of the 1950s made it the right voice to attack those who made profits from war or wanted to block the way of a new generation.

The vocal elements, though, were only part of the overall voice. The reason so many Dylan covers fail is that the singers mouth the words but lack the ability to transmit their emotional power. George Burns once noted that, "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made." I want to believe Dylan was sincere as he sang his songs. I believe he was, despite the fact that he sometimes dismissed this idea. But sincere or not he acted as though he was sincere. He was a great actor, that is, either because he believed in the line and could control his voice to make listeners believe he believed, or he could simply mimic and fake passion perfectly.

Beyond the vocal elements and the emotions, Dylan's voice was helped by his phrasing. Particular syllables were emphasized and forced the listener to focus on them. Sometimes the phrases were virtually spoken in a rhythm, like beat poetry or talking blues. Talking blues was developed by Chris Bouchillon who recorded "Talking Blues" in April 1926. The recording director noted that Bouchillon's pleasant voice sounded better when he talked than when he sang, and so the director suggested that Bouchillon talk while he played the guitar. Woody Guthrie made the style popular. In Woody's case, he used talking blues to de-emphasize any beauty in the songs so that listeners could focus on the social and political importance of the words.

Dylan sometimes altered normal word accents. In poetry, such an alteration of the normal word accent is called a wrenched accent. It was common in the folk ballads that made up Dylan's informal education.

Putting vocals, emotion, and phrasing together with incomparable lyrics made Bob Dylan's voice unique in musical history.

NOTE TO READERS:  My book Political Folk Music in America From Its Origins to Bob Dylan will be published on March 16th. For further information see: http://lawrencejepstein.com/folk