Jen’s Den of Iniquity » Well, I’m livin’ in a foreign country but I’m bound to cross the line/Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine

exciting, informative, snarky, and very likely fabricated tales of life as an american expat in london

Well, I’m livin’ in a foreign country but I’m bound to cross the line/Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine

by Jen at 11:48 pm on 4.03.2007Comments Off
filed under: mundane mayhem

i’ve been mulling poetry lately. returning to an old love, which at various times in my life has sustained me in ways i could not, would not, begin to circumscribe with the fences that words create. i have read poetry which got me through the darkness of a never-ending night and shadows too big to fight. and i have read poetry that filled my heart with such pure, oxygenated, exquisite beauty, i thought it might pop in a last breath of exuberance. and i’ve written both good and bad poetry, fingers flying with the intense immediacy of the need to purge or perish. i’ve wandered away from poetry in happier, busier times… but once you’ve had poetry stir your soul to light, carry you on its wave from hope to despair and back to hope again – after that, you will never truly leave it.

and, not coincidentally, i’ve recently found myself returning to the faithful old lyrics of bobby zimmerman. i’ve written before about the threads of folk music that run through my life, and the colour he plays in that skein. the refrain of guitar and plaintive voice that keen in perfect pitch with the pain of generations – the timeless anguish and shattered hope that each age feels as sharply, as poignantly as the first ever did. and over the years, the academics have debated whether bob dylan is more poet than musician, more lyricist than artist, more bard than guitarist. they’ve written books and treatises, propounding criteria both for and against classification – trying to circumscribe with fences of words the ineffable themes and deep harmonies bound together with the perfect turn of phrase or chord that make a bob dylan song more than just a poem set to music. and they invariably say things like:

The problem many critics have with calling song lyrics poetry is that songs are only fully realized in performance. It takes the lyrics, music, and voice working in tandem to unpack the power of a song, whereas a poem ideally stands up by itself, on the page, controlling its own timing and internal music. Dylan’s lyrics, and most especially his creative rhyme-making, may only work, as critic Ian Hamilton has written, with “Bob’s barbed-wire tonsils in support.”

and in that sort of analysis, i cannot help but feel they miss the forest for the trees. that bob dylan’s poems are set to music, that they cannot be dissected, parsed without the context of voice and instrument and rhythm makes them, to my mind some of the most complex poems written. the words, rather than being laid bare and sacrified to the elements, are nestled in layer upon layer of lovingly spun emotion. the lyrics are inextricably intertwined with elements of a melodic pulse far older and more evocative than any written alphabet. and that makes them *more* than poetry, not less.

it’s impossible to listen and not believe that bob dylan is one of the great poets of our time. so in returning to poetry, i am also returning to dylan – and in returning to dylan, i find once again the kind of poetry that lifts me, fills me, bears me along when it’s too much to bear. the love of a life, for a lifetime.

it’s good to be back.

Bob Dylan – Shelter from the storm