Dylan Rolls a Blank Stone, poem by Ira Lightman (Celebrity Free Verse Poetry Series)

DYLAN ROLLS A BLANK STONE
by Ira Lightman

Tempest was like the rest of them. The songs
just fall. It’s not the album mind. To make
religious takes a concentration – to pull
that off 10 times, a record sense . . .  the Time

beginning playing ages… people hear
to play for Mind weren’t meant for work.
There enters scene unnoticed on and on.
Forever through the centuries. Trick

connecting Sixties Fifties, Woodstock War.
The Book of Acts, the town to roam was woods
and sky and rivers, streams, and summer, spring,
the culture circuses, preachers, bands

and malls and all the rest. You know, you grow,
it stays in you. I left, which was, I guess,
I saw and felt of who I am, I guess.
Those days were cruel and other stuff to me.

I saw the death of what I love and life.
Performer doesn’t feel at all in this.
Rephrase your questions, think of new ones. No,
I got it here, was hauling ass from back

of pack on side of road, to town for help.
I’m not like you. I’m not like him, real proof
I write the songs I sing and Dylan’s here!
Go to the grave site. Jerry blew my mind.

For long grow tall, leaves fall, and die. Things change
a gold watch out of steam to learn to do.
Your soul redeemed, a high, a low, but few
are chosen, people, never find the real.

A lot of people don’t. Habitual
for propaganda purposes. And Ford.
from both the North and South, the Southern states,
all kinds of stuff like that, the shot was fired.

It was on streets? John came from hinterlands.
We heard the same things growing up. Our paths
had faced adversity. We grew his aunt
was fenced off Britain, there’s history heads

if you’re a Brit. Don’t worry, Mum, to hang
about. How could you not? It’s endless stuff
I thought was close to lives of hardship blues.
Tempest is what I went with, written songs.

It’s sad – it is. It’s sad for me, for them.
Oh, yeah, in folk and jazz. That certainly
is true, for me and Henry Timrod. Rot.
And Wussies, pussies. See ’em in their graves.

SOURCE: Bob Dylan interview, Rolling Stone (Sept. 27,2012).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I love Dylan but I’m also a plagiarism sleuth, and I find this the most chicken interview. I misread a friend who was sending round the call [for submissions from Silver Birch Press, and thought] that it had to be in blank verse. So I combed the interview for iambic pentameter possibilities.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ira Lightman is a poet. His double column poems are in Trancelated at www.ubu.com/ubu. He makes public art, organizing a community’s poems into visual art. He broadcasts on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb.

Dylan on Dylan, poem by Daniel McGinn (Celebrity Free Verse Poetry Series)

DYLAN ON DYLAN
by Daniel McGinn

I know at least a dozen women who tell me
they were the Queen of Sheba. And I know
a few Napoleons and two Joan of Arcs
and one Einstein. I mean, who’s a person anymore,
everything’s done for media. Everything’s a business.
Love, truth, beauty. Conversation is a business.

I needed to forget about things, myself included,
and I’d get so far away, and turn on the radio,
and there I am, but it’s not me.

My-life-is-an-open-book sort of thing
and I choose to be involved with the people
I’m involved with. They don’t choose me.

A lot of guys say stuff like:
Well he changed our lives before,
how come he can’t do it now?
Their expectations are so high,
nobody can fulfill them.
I don’t mind being put down,
but intense personal hatred is another thing.

A lot of times it’s you talking to you.
The I, like in: I in I, also changes.
It could be I or it could be the I who created me.
It could be another person who’s saying I.
When I say I right now, I don’t know who
I’m talking about.

The you in my songs is me talking to me.
Other times I can be talking to someone else.
If I’m talking to me in a song I’m not going
to drop everything and say, alright,
now I’m talking to you.

I began writing because I was singing.
Things were changing and a certain song
needed to be written. I started writing
because I wanted to sing them.
If they had been written I wouldn’t have
started to write them. I stumbled into it,
it was nothing I had prepared myself for,
but I did sing a lot of songs before
I wrote my own. I think that’s important.

I can try to answer these questions.
I’m supposed to be somebody
who knows something about writing
but I don’t know much about it.

The best songs are songs you don’t know
anything about. Put yourself in a place
where all you can do is imagine
something you haven’t experienced.
Someone else has, and will identify
with it. Like: Here I am stuck in the job
and I can’t get out of it. I’m working
as a civil servant, what am I going
to do next? I hate this existence.

Why do I want somebody
thinking about what I’m thinking about,
especially if it’s not to their benefit.

My life takes priority over people
dealing with my life. I don’t have
any answers to questions they would print.
You know, like: How come you don’t eat fish?

A lot of people from the press want to talk to me,
but they never do. It really has nothing to do
with me, personally. When I think of mystery,
I don’t think about myself. I stay out of sight, if I can.

SOURCE: Scott Cohen interview with Bob Dylan (Rolling Stone, December 1985).

IMAGE: Self-Portrait by Bob Dylan (1970).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Daniel McGinn‘s work has appeared numerous anthologies and publications, his full length collection of poems, 1000 Black Umbrellas was released by Write Bloody Press. He recently earned an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He and his wife, poet Lori McGinn, are natives of Southern California. They have 3 children, 6 grandchildren, two parakeets and a very good dog.

Nina Simone Sings “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” by Bob Dylan

“When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Eastertime, too…”

When You’re Lost in Juarez, in the Rain, and It’s Eastertime Too, poem by Charles Wright

When You’re Lost in Juarez, in the Rain, and It’s Eastertime Too
by Charles Wright

Like a grain of sand added to time,
Like an inch of air added to space,
or a half-inch,
We scribble our little sentences.
Some of them sound okay and some of them sound not so okay.

A grain and an inch, a grain and an inch and a half.

Sad word wands, desperate alphabet.
Still, there’s been no alternative
Since language fell from the sky.
Though mystics have always said that communication is
languageless.
And maybe they’re right
the soul speaks and the soul receives.
Small room for rebuttal there.

Over the Blue Ridge, late March late light annunciatory
and visitational.

Tonight the comet Hale-Bopp
will ghost up on the dark page of the sky
By its secret juice and design from the full moon’s heat.

Tonight some miracle will happen,
it always does.
Good Friday’s a hard rain that won’t fall.
Wild onion and clump grass, green on green.

Our mouths are incapable, white violets cover the earth.

SOURCE: “When You’re Lost in Juarez…” appears in Charles Wright’s collection Appalachia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), available at Amazon.com.

LISTEN: Hear Charles Wright read the poem at poets.org.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Charles Wright began to read and write poetry while stationed in Italy during his four years of service in the U.S. Army, and published his first collection of poems, The Grave of the Right Hand (Wesleyan University Press), in 1970. His second and third collections, Hard Freight (1973) and Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1983), were both nominated for National Book Awards; the latter received the prize. Since then, Wright has published numerous collections of poems, most recently Outtakes (Sarabande, 2010); Sestets: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009); Littlefoot: A Poem (2008); Scar Tissue (2007), the international winner for the Griffin Poetry Prize; The Wrong End of the Rainbow (Sarabande, 2005); Buffalo Yoga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004); Negative Blue (2000); Appalachia (1998); Black Zodiac (1997), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Chickamauga (1995), awarded the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990 (1990); and Zone Journals (1988). His many honors include the 2013 Bollingen Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Author photo by Yusef El-Amin

Note: The title of the poem is taken from a line from Bob Dylan‘s song “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues.”

When I Paint My Masterpiece, song lyrics by Bob Dylan

 I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE
lyrics by Bob Dylan

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wastin’ time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly
stand to see ’em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb
Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

I left Rome and landed in Brussels
On a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried
Clergymen in uniform and young girls pullin’ muscles
Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside
Newspapermen eating candy
Had to be held down by big police
Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent
When I paint my masterpiece

CREDIT: Copyright © 1971 by Big Sky Music; renewed 1999 by Big Sky Music. Visit the author’s website: bobdylan.com.

PAINTING by Bob Dylan, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Driving West in 1970, poem by Robert Bly

DRIVING WEST IN 1970
by Robert Bly

My dear children, do you remember the morning
When we climbed into the old Plymouth
And drove west straight toward the Pacific?
We were all the people there were.
We followed Dylan’s songs all the way west.
It was Seventy; the war was over, almost;
And we were driving to the sea.
We had closed the farm, tucked in
The flap, and were eating the honey
Of distance and the word “there.”
Oh whee, we’re gonna fly
Down into the easy chair. We sang that
Over and over. That’s what the early
Seventies were like. We weren’t afraid.
And a hole had opened in the world.
We laughed at Las Vegas.
There was enough gaiety
For all of us, and ahead of us was
The ocean. Tomorrow’s
The day my bride’s gonna come.
And the war was over, almost.

Note: “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” is the Bob Dylan song referred to in “Driving West in 1970.” Listen to a 1968 version by the Byrds here. Find it on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume II at Amazon.com.

I’ll Keep It With Mine, song by Bob Dylan sung by PS22 Chorus

Bob Dylan composed the ballad “I’ll Keep It with Mine” for Judy Collins in 1964. Collins released a beautiful version as a single in 1965, and the song was subsequently covered by a range of artists — including Nico, Fairport Convention, Marianne Faithfull, and the composer himself. Listen to New York City’s amazing PS22 Chorus sing “I’ll Keep It with Mine” here. 

When I Paint My Masterpiece, song by Bob Dylan

WHEN I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE (Excerpt)
by Bob Dylan

Oh, the hours that I spent inside the Coloseum,
Dodging lions and wasting time.
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle 
I could hardly stand to see ‘em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb
Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese.
Some day everything is going to sound like a rhapsody
When I pain my masterpiece. 

Listen to The Band (with Levon Helm — RIP — singing) perform the song on YouTube.

Photo: Coliseum, Roma, by Jolove55

Christmas in the Heart, album by Bob Dylan

When Christmas in the Heart — an album of Christmas tunes sung by Bob Dylan — was released in 2009, I played samples of the songs from Amazon.com over the phone to my mother. She summed up Dylan’s effort, saying, “All the songs sound alike.” (I have to agree.)

As a mega Dylan fan, I enjoy Christmas in the Heart — mainly because I think it’s so funny. With a traditional choir backing him, Dylan sounds…well, the sound is indescribable.

In honor of Silver Birch Press, I’ve chosen “Silver Bells” as the musical selection — listen to a sample here.

The 15-song album also includes: 

Hark the Herald Angels Sing
Little Drummer Boy
O Come All Ye Faithful
The First Noel
O Little Town of Bethlehem

Christmas in the Heart is available at Amazon.com, where you can listen to samples of all the songs.

Note: Bob Dylan donates his royalties from Christmas in the Heart  to several charities, including Feeding America.

Driving West in 1970, poem by Robert Bly

DRIVING WEST IN 1970
by Robert Bly

My dear children, do you remember the morning
When we climbed into the old Plymouth
And drove west straight toward the Pacific?
We were all the people there were.
We followed Dylan’s songs all the way west.
It was Seventy; the war was over, almost;
And we were driving to the sea.
We had closed the farm, tucked in
The flap, and were eating the honey
Of distance and the word “there.”
Oh whee, we’re gonna fly
Down into the easy chair. We sang that
Over and over. That’s what the early
Seventies were like. We weren’t afraid.
And a hole had opened in the world.
We laughed at Las Vegas.
There was enough gaiety
For all of us, and ahead of us was
The ocean. Tomorrow’s
The day my bride’s gonna come.
And the war was over, almost.

Note: “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” is the Bob Dylan song referred to in “Driving West in 1970.” Listen to a 1968 version by the Byrds here. Find it on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Volume II at Amazon.com.

Photo: 1960 Plymouth Fury. When “Driving West in 1970” mentions “old Plymouth,” I figured the car was at least 10 years old (though the vehicle in the above photo looks grand). From what I’ve gathered, while other car models were moving away from fins, the fins on the 1960 Plymouth Fury were bigger than ever. I like to think of these Plymouth fins helping the Bly family fly and swim all the way to the ocean during this 1970 journey.