One More Cup of Bobby #3: The Early Bob Dylan on Poetry

Bob Dylan, prolific songster that he is, distinguishes himself by virtue of the breadth and formal exploration of his writing. In the words of the Nobel Committee in 2016, he is lauded, "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." This distinction is one instance of confronting music's relationship to poetry, and Dylan is only one of a throng of worthy people to elicit the comparison. With genuine candor and wry humility, he addressed that committee (and his committee of fans), beginning:

When I received the Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.

He doesn't really deny that there is a relationship, but with knowing wisdom he suggests that the laurels that wreath his brow wreathe his instrument primarily. But it is not my intention here to deep dive into songs per se, but rather to look a number of incidents, comments, and poems that lead us to understand how Dylan understood poetry during the first years of exciting debut decade, from 1961-1964. Like many, I am drawn to this dynamic period that watched a baby-faced, aspiring folkie compose the verses that twisted the wind and rattled the walls.

In this widely acclaimed period of performance, Dylan churned out album after album, played show after show in a tempest of zest and zeal. Unsurprisingly, he also got involved in reading and writing poetry that flashed perceptibly in his song lyrics. Unlike the period from 1965 onward, early on Bob Dylan was fairly forthright about his attitudes towards poetry assuming he got along with whomever he spoke to. His stances were as multifarious as they were frustrating or, if you're of a light temperament, amusing. No doubt he turned to poetry as worthy in its own right, but also to shore up his songwriting and fortify his spirit for the coming rat race of crotchety fans, unwitting reporters, and rapacious music businessmen that would descend upon him. It was during the Blonde on Blonde era that the full flower of Dylan's defiant iconoclasm and tortured surrealism would show in his attitudes to poetry, as when he said, "Man, poetry is just bullshit." But Dylan's early association with the silent, written page has not garnered overly much attention and, even when it is noted upon, gets written off or pushed aside in favor of the more musical. I am of the conviction that looking at Dylan's interactions with poetry as a reader, as a writer, and as a critic is a fruitful endeavor that helps to understand, if faintly so, some things that ringed his mind.

Before even getting billed up on a poster by the name "Bob Dylan," Robert Allen Zimmerman appeared to decide to settle on a pseudonym. He'd been Elston Gunn in the Midwest as well as pretending to be friend and fellow musician Bobby Vee, but his entrance into the New York scene required another banner. The name we know him by invites poetic association with and apart from Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet known for "Do not go gentle into that good night". Several sources, including Dylan himself and others, present a zigzagging narrative:

Interview between Joseph Haas and Bob Dylan, Chicago Daily News, (November 27, 1965):

Haas: What about the story that you changed your name from Bob Zimmerman to Bob Dylan because you admired the poetry of Dylan Thomas?

Dylan: No, God no. I took the Dylan because I have an uncle named Dillon. I changed the spelling but only because it looked better. I've read some of Dylan Thomas' stuff, and it's not the same as mine. We're different.

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2004):

[ca. early 1961] What I was just going to do was call myself Robert Allen. As far as I was concerned, that was who I was -- that's what my parents named me... What kind of confused me later was seeing an article in a Downbeat magazine with a story about a West Coast saxophone player named David Allyn. I had suspected that the musician had changed the spelling of Allen to Allyn... Instead of Robert Allen it would be Robert Allyn. Then sometime later, unexpectedly, I'd seen some poems by Dylan Thomas. Dylan and Allyn sounded similar.

Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home (2005):

Clancy: There was a young man who was inspired to change his name to Dylan because of the poet Dylan Thomas.

Dylan: Why it became that particular name I really can't say. The name just popped into my head one day, but it didn't really happen any of the ways that I've read about it. I mean, I just don't feel like I had a past and, you know, and I couldn't relate to anything other than what I was doing at the present time. Didn't matter to me what I said, you know. It still doesn't really.

Noted Dylan historian Clinton Heylin seems to have cleared up the story better when he finds that Dylan visited boyhood friend, Larry Kegan, at the University of Minnesota Medical Center with a book of Dylan Thomas poems and confessed to another friend, John Bucklen, that he did take up the name after reading Dylan Thomas. Bob's effort to become Dylan proves a certain headstrong desire for individuality and a pained connection to a friend's injury, the name of a noted but derelict poet. Ultimately, the matter is like trying to settle out the "real" name of Don Quixote de la Mancha who, by the time he had battled many cats and traipsed the winding roads, has become something entirely larger than the initial question. At his debut, Dylan was already grooming a myth upon the structure of a poetic name, and his relationship with poetry and its idols would develop thusly in the years to come.

Folk, blues, country, western, rock n' roll -- Dylan involved himself wholeheartedly with the emulation and imitation of the musical giants defining these genres. Their inflections, subtleties, the way they each articulated a line of lyrics -- he dove fully into the intricacies, and everyone around him attests to the same. He confesses about Hank Williams in Chronicles: Volume One:

In time, I became aware that in Hank's recorded songs were the archetype of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there. Even his words -- all of his syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense. You can learn a lot about the structure of songwriting by listening to his records, and I listened to them a lot and had them internalized.

Bob Dylan, from the 2000's onward, regularly describes his process as one of "internalizing" different media, about learning their "vernaculars." This first decade was the apprenticeship period wherein he exposed himself to a multitude of vernaculars, be they popular and musical or textual and "canonical." An avid listener-practitioner, it's no surprise that people also called out his zeal for reading. Dylan himself admitted that he's a slow reader in an interview with John Cohen and Happy Traum for Sing Out! magazine in 1968, but that doesn't preclude the clear fact that when he did read, he did so with intention. He writes earlier in Chronicles: Volume One that in 1961:

I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down. I read all of Lord Byron's Don Juan, and concentrated fully from start to finish. Also, Coleridge's Kubla Khan. I began cramming my brain with all kind of deep poems. It seemed like I'd been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the black pasture. I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me, didn't affect me anymore. I wasn't too concerned about people, their motives. I didn't feel the need to examine every stranger that approached.

No doubt Dylan found out what anyone interested in creative arts would tell you: the dignity and scope of a song like Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" is absolutely comparable to Walt Whitman's catalogue of ekphrastic poetry on the American landscape. The imaginary line in the sand between "high" and "low" culture is, in other words, an arbitrary barrier and, at its worst, a pretext for divisiveness. Byron sat at the table with Odetta. A cool, accepting sheen of Stoicism is what Dylan wants to project, the calm synthesis of relatable songwriting and seemingly arcane Literature. The desire to offer the directness of song and the allusiveness of verse is a hallmark of early songs like "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "With God on Our Side," and "One Too Many Mornings." (1963-1964). Understandably, it was after his first album of original material, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) that people began accosting him as a poet and asking what poetry and songwriting are.

Nat Hentoff of the New Yorker interviewed Dylan in 1964, just after the release of the album Another Side of Bob Dylan, an album which officially began ruffling feathers and raising eyebrows. Dylan was still imbued with a folksy twang and played the acoustic guitar (an important note: according to fans and fellow musicians he was a Judas figure when he switched to electric guitar and had a backing band, The Hawks [later the band aptly named exactly that: The Band]). As far as poetry goes, the album highlights a motion away from the translucence of his youthful writing and thrives in the alliterative opacity of lines like "I been wond'rin' all about me/ Ever since I seen you there/ On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I'm riding/ I know I'm 'round you but I don't know where" ("Spanish Harlem Incident"). Dylan then asks a friend if they understood the song. The friend replied yes, and Dylan himself offered:

Well I didn't... It's hard being free in a song -- getting it all in. Songs are so confining. Woody Guthrie told me once that songs don't have to rhyme -- that they don't have to do anything like that. But it's not true. A song has to have some kind of form to fit into the music. You can bend the words and the meter, but it still has to fit somehow. I've been getting freer in the songs I write, but I still feel confined. That's why I write a lot of poetry -- if that's the word. Poetry can make its own form.

In a rare twist, Dylan is candid about the constraints that he sees in the forms that he works within. By this point, the liner notes to The Times They Are A-Changin' (January 1964) and Another Side of Bob Dylan (August 1964) contain poems, 11 Outlined Epitaphs and Some other kinds of songs... respectively. The columns of words in 11 Outlined Epitaphs are slender, composed of lines with often less than seven words, and yet Some other kinds of songs... displays markedly less in a far more contracted, stream-of-consciousness style. In a section from 11 Outlined Epitaphs, Dylan recounts a back-and-forth discussion between himself and his manager Albert Grossman's wife, Sally. She claims that Dylan can't be happy because his songs are "depressin," to which he replies:

"I'm happy enough now"

"why?"

"cause I'm calmly lookin outside

an watchin

the night unwind"

"what'd yuh mean 'unwind'?"

"I mean somethin like there's

no end t it

an it's so big

that everytime I see it it's like seein

for the first time"

"so what?"

"so anything that ain't got no end's

just gotta be poetry in one

way or another"

"yeah but"

"an poetry makes me feel good"

"but..."

"an it makes me feel happy"

"ok but..."

"for the lack of a better word"

"but what about the songs you

sing on stage?"

"they're nothin but the unwindin of

my happiness"

Conversational, crisp, sincere, and somber. In the same way that the endless night "unwinds," Dylan hopes his songs do too in some ceaseless way. Surely there's the underlying dream of all artists that their art is worthy enough to persist, but the night ebbs and flows, fades in and out of the world; in Shakespearean terms, this is where Juliet tells Romeo, "O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,/ That monthly changes in her circled orb" (Act II, scene 2). But poetry makes Dylan's happy in a cyclical manner that relates his singing directly to his poetry.

And whereas the lyrics to the songs of The Times They Are A-Changin' favor directness in rhyme and meaning like much of 11 Outlined Epitaphs, the poetry of Some other kinds of songs... lays out a more surrealistic set of images and a more flexible style. There is a wistful tinge to the poems and the album's songs that trace the dissolution of his love with Suze Rotolo who walks snuggled up to Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Interestingly, Dylan writes a six-line poem that stands out not only for its lengthier lines but its clear attempt at a strong rhyme scheme:

michelangelo would've wept

if he saw but once where charlie slept

(whoa, charlie, i'm afraid you've stepped

beyond the borders of being kept)

what price what price what price disgrace

for sleepin on a cherub's face?

Possible echoes of T.S. Eliot's own Michelangelo couplet from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo." What's worth noting is that rarely, in previous songs and in previous poems, did Dylan attempt such a long chain of true rhymes. It is the technical feat (and the technical feet) of lines like this that find full expression in songs yet to be written like "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and the near rhymes and internal rhymes that populate "Like a Rolling Stone." Yes, tucked away in the folds of Another Side of Bob Dylan are the cathartic revelations of a youth who's hungry to express. As preludes to the masterpieces, the poems and his exploration within them are valuable. But they also hold value in their own right as poems.

Dylan's collaboration with photographer Barry Feinstein for Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric showcases such poetry in direct conversation with the former's photos of the same era, 1960-1964. By many standards, the poems rank alongside other poetic works praised for their enjambment, spatial appeal on the page, and descriptive ability. On a page simply titled "A Conversation with Bob Dylan," we read the following :

When did Barry approach you about writing the text?

I don't think he ever approached me about writing anything. I think it was something that sort of happened spontaneously.

Do you consider these poems?

You'd probably have to ask some academician about that.

But what about you?

But what about me? Well I would have to refer to the academicians too. If they are poems or they are not poems... does it really matter? And who would it matter to?

Naturally, he wants us to conclude it would matter to academicians. But the photos are marvelous and Dylan certainly accentuates them well with his verse, inviting anyone curious to see a long-forgotten world. And despite eschewing the bonds of collegiate education in favor of rockin' n' rollin', Dylan still imagines the heady joys of poetry in the academy when he sings:

Now they asked me to read a poem

At the sorority sisters’ home

I got knocked down and my head was swimmin’

I wound up with the Dean of Women

Yippee! I’m a poet, and I know it

Hope I don’t blow it

("I Shall Be Free No. 10," Another Side of Bob Dylan)

Dylan is already settling into the kind of cool confidence that borders on brashness, as is seen between his lyrics, poems, and interviews. It is impossible to make sense of the young, evolving Dylan without accounting for the poetry that he both pecked out, sought solace in, and translated into his primary art of songwriting. In total, he cautions us to be better listeners, to be better readers and better humans despite an overriding sense that any final moralism is a waste and, come what may, he's going to keep making his slow march to Parnassus come hell or high water. Hell aplenty would come in the years to follow when Dylan donned stygian sunglasses and sang like a man possessed, showed the far ends of pathos with his scathing repudiation of poetry and his meek gentility in the face of a fan who mawkishly handed up a bulging envelope of poems. With rhymes that spill into the human collective unconscious and gave the English language many modern quips, we're only left to fill ourselves out and get another cup of Bobby.

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Image: Bob Dylan smoking at typewriter, 161 W. 4th St., NYC; Ted Russell, Steven Kasher Gallery