One More Cup of Bobby: The Bob Dylan Series

The year was 2017, and I was sitting in a semi-circular classroom lush with April sunlight. We were prepared to discuss Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's intimate work Omeros when the professor strides in fashionably late. In a warm, strained voice they remark, "So Bob Dylan just won the Nobel Prize in Literature." And all I knew was that the name existed and that one of his songs was in my uncle's favorite movie. I shrugged, quietly agreeing with the literary history that regarded Homer, Sappho, and Petrarca as inheritors of music and verse alike.

The winter of 2020 saw America wince, rejoice, and fitfully awaken. Similarly, my red eye job forced me to awaken at 11:00pm, begin work by 12:00am more nights than I can remember. And Dylan became my companion in the 14 minutes it took to reach the warehouse. I first was shocked into fascination by his blaring, strident harmonica, his driven riffing, and a voice that was infamously labeled as "like a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire." Systematically, I worked my way through everything he had done, beginning with 1962's eponymous Bob Dylan until I reached 2020's Rough and Rowdy Ways. Lyrics on the page, documentaries, paintings, movies, live performances, studio takes, interviews, to say nothing of the articles highlighting the perceived controversy of a musician winning the Nobel Prize in Literature -- everything I could find regarding him magnetically captured whatever minutes I could wrest. Elusive, playful, steeped in history, he wields a gift that mythically holds America dear and holds it yet to a higher standard. He was, in short, a voice of regeneration and testimony for the country. Whitman thundered with authoritative hope that:

Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most needs poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. Of all mankind the poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.

Whether you believe America has suspended its sense of alarm, of wakefulness, a midnight of sorts is looming ahead. Heaney, Yeats, and Gorman have graced the presidential podium in months past, and the acts of poets concurrent with humanity's forward motion shall be given the laurels of victors. For all that Bob Dylan is and isn't, he is inspirational. He inspires debate, disdain, respect, and the tears requisite in the broad spectrum of human emotion.

In a series of essays I wish to look at the man, the music, the overlapping of circumstances and the significance of Bob Dylan's life which openly, adamantly demands that we each live our own lives. He tells us with sincerity and allusive elegance the things we need to hear, and he's not afraid to throw a round house punch. This is the figure who chimes first in youth:

How many times must a man look up

Before he can see the sky?

Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have

Before he can hear people cry?

Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows

That too many people have died?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind

The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Who huskily pines in senectude:

I’m falling in love with Calliope

She doesn’t belong to anybody - why not give her to me

She’s speaking to me, speaking with her eyes

I’ve grown so tired of chasing lies

Mother of Muses wherever you are

I’ve already outlived my life by far.

And who, according to Joan Baez, remarked at the beginning of his creative career:

You know, a bunch of years from now, all these people, all these assholes are gonna be writing about the shit I write. I don't know where the fuck it comes from. I don't know what the fuck it's about. And they're gonna write about what it's about. Ha-ha.

Sure, I'll try and write about and around Dylan, but hopefully what I say will be full of purpose and meaning. Paul Simon called out Dylan's uncanny ability to doublespeak, to tell us the truth and mock, jab, and undermine with sardonic wit. This he does, and so before you go, I ask you to join me for one more cup of Bobby for the odes and poems he gave to us.

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Image: Bob Dylan, 1961, The Michael Ochs Archives