Mike Chasar (ed). The Poetry of Bob Dylan: Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, 240 pp.
Review by Charles O. Hartman, Connecticut College
In the Introduction to The Poetry of Bob Dylan, editor Mike Chasar lays out a mission. Though there is a large and ever-growing body of critical and scholarly work on Dylan, “sustained and nuanced attention to … individual songs” is rarer than we might guess or hope. Chasar recounts: “As a colleague who teaches a first-year seminar on Dylan … once explained to me, ‘What my students and I really need is not another scholarly monograph or more web sites, but a book that goes song by song through Dylan’s catalog explaining how the words of each one work’” (3-4). A version of that book, not confining itself to “the words,” exists: Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track (Black Dog & Leventhal, Expanded Edition 2022) by Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon. Weighing in at over six pounds and 736 pages, it collects technical details, anecdotes about recording sessions, cover versions, and parts of Dylan’s compositional history for every song he has recorded. Dylan’s work encourages completism; Mixing Up the Medicine, a study of manuscript and other materials in the Bob Dylan Archive by curators at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, is another tome, at 608 pages.
The Poetry of Bob Dylan is a different and handier project, as indicated by its subtitle: Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs. This means that the essayists discuss, all told, about 5 per cent of Dylan’s known output. How these writers were selected or recruited is not mentioned. Chasar says only that he “did little more than than ask them to pick a song and explain what they see and hear that people untrained in their academic specialties might not immediately appreciate.” The study of Bob Dylan and his works is by now obviously multidisciplinary, and Chasar lists the authors’ disciplines. Three-quarters of the contributors are Professors of English and/or American Literature; two are Classicists; just two belong to Music departments, plus another who teaches Performance Studies. At first these proportions—ten-to-one words vs music—raise alarms. But the days are surely gone when we had to remind everyone that songs, whether we read them in the various ways we read poems or not, are impossible to respond to fully or think about coherently without attention to the lyrics’ musical settings.
Well, almost gone. The Swedish Academy’s 2016 announcement awarding Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” as Chasar notes, “manages to skirt the old question about whether song lyrics are poetry.” As an example of what happens when we instead stumble into that morass, Chasar quotes Billy Collins saying (no source is given) that if we wanted “to test to see if a song lyric is a poem,” we would remove most aspects of performance, including “the three singers in their sparkly dresses.” Aristotle would not agree; in the Poetics he ends his list of the six “parts” of a poem (by which of course he means a drama), with opsis, spectacle. Most modern commentators attend, often centrally, to what Betsy Bowden in 1978 called Dylan’s Performed Literature; this began with Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man (and its two sequels) and Paul Williams’s Bob Dylan: Performing Artist (and its two sequels). No one involved in The Poetry of Bob Dylan would subscribe to Collins’s implied definition of the lyric as purely its printed words.
Chasar plays with the Academy’s careful phrasing: “poetic expressions” dodges the nouns “poem,” “song,” and “poetry.” And indeed many of these thirty academic specialists are eager to cross borders. Jeremy Yudkin, a Boston University musicologist, explains the interaction of harmony and melody in “She Belongs to Me” in a way that any beginning guitarist could understand, but he starts by analyzing how “She Belongs to Me” stands against “You Belong to Me” as interpersonal discourse—and as the title of a very different song (Patti Page, Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Ringo Starr). Steven Rings, another musicologist and the author of a highly engaging new book, What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan, accounts for several verbal, discursive, and narrative puzzles in “Sign on the Window,” especially its bridge, as plausibly as any lit-department denizen. The Performance Studies scholar, Marit J. MacArthur, provides a graphic accounting of Dylan’s vocal pauses during the epic “Highlands”; we could apply her method to many other songs of various periods.
Equally, some of the English professors supply plenty of precise musicological guidance. William J. Maxwell discusses the harmonic structure of “Hurricane” in a way that connects the chord structure (though he doesn’t mention its similarity to “All Along the Watchtower”) with the vicissitudes of Ruben Carter’s life and Dylan’s intermittent interventions in that history. Adam Bradley treats the late song “My Own Version of You” as, in effect, rap—more interested in rhythm than in melody. Angela Sorby’s excellent essay on the much earlier “Subterranean Homesick Blues” does not explicitly make the same connection, though one view of this song has been as a precursor to rap. Sorby concentrates more on the song’s dialogic assemblage, though she avoids those terms.
That each essayist “pick[ed] a song” implies that the book’s editor exercised little control over which one-song-out-of-every-twenty would be represented in the Table of Contents. It seems unlikely that no song was proposed by two different authors, but there was presumably a simple signal for This Seat Taken. More important for the overall shape and scope of the book is the inverse question: it must have been tempting to suggest some matches, some candidate topics, if only to guarantee that essential songs would receive attention.
But which essential songs? If no one had chosen to write on “Visions of Johanna,” Chasar and we his readers would wonder why. Fortunately the essay we have, by Melissa Girard, is very good, though it may worry too much about the pronouns in the “Little boy lost” stanza. But if “Johanna” is an unthinkable omission, what other songs would we all nominate to the same category? If I urged “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” the next person would counter with “Sad-Eyed Lady,” or “The Times They Are a-Changin,” or “Shelter from the Storm” or, of course, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Probably the most glaring omissions from the book are essays on “Desolation Row” (though it gets five mentions in Chasar’s Index) and “Idiot Wind” (which gets none).
To pick up Chasar’s invocation of pedagogical concerns, what the book best offers is demonstrations of, if not thirty, at least a few different lenses through which a class in one of the academic world’s growing roster of Bob Dylan courses might look at the songs. Some of these critical approaches are identifiable. “Lay, Lady, Lay” (Virginia Jackson, with the most personal essay in the book), and “Like a Rolling Stone” (Linda Kinnahan, who neatly parses what happens to the title’s stereotype when it’s applied to a “Miss Lonely”), and “It Ain’t Me Babe” (Marsha Bryant, who misses a bet by not mentioning Trina Robbins’s 1970 comic book and the women’s cartoonists’ collective that adopted the name), are all persuasively regarded from gender-structure angles which could equally well inform classroom discussions of “Sweetheart Like You” or “Sooner or Later (One of Us Must Know)” or many others. Similarly, while perhaps it’s inevitable that “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” should get the fullest discussion of drugs in Dylan’s work and world, that essayist, Loren Glass, offers leads to “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and other songs from the 60s as well.
The contributors’ selections bear thinking about in terms of distribution across the threescore-plus years of Dylan’s output. The first three albums are each represented by one song, the next three by two each, and then Blonde on Blonde (1966) gets three—all of which seems reasonable. Then both John Wesley Harding (1967) and Self-Portrait (1970) are blanks; we hear nothing about “As I Went Out One Morning” or “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.” Blood on the Tracks (1975), which everyone thinks of as the first of Dylan’s major returns to form, picks up again with two. Many listeners will be glad to leave Empire Burlesque (1985) with no discussion—those 80s synthesizers—though I would differ; but I am more disconcerted by the omission of Modern Times (2006), an album rich in shrewd and startling musical, historical, lyrical, and intertextual decisions. Many will be surprised at the absence of essays on “Love and Theft” (2001), which may be as important to the story of Dylan’s aesthetic and ethical development as anything else he has recorded since 1975. Others might make parallel pleas for Street-Legal (1978) or Together Through Life (2009). Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020) (which I reviewed here in June 2020) elicits two essays—naturally enough, since it is Dylan’s last studio album so far.
One gap that may escape notice is an almost total silence about the albums of folk covers from Down in the Groove (1988) through Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993). In one sense this is natural: this is a book about The Poetry of Bob Dylan, mostly meaning the lyrics and music written by Bob Dylan. But the case is complicated. While it may be best to lay aside questions about what makes a song poetry, it is harder to ignore the narrower puzzle of what makes a song a Dylan song. The one exception to this gap in coverage of the covers is Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega’s essay on “Stack a Lee,” a song which on bobdylan.com is credited as “written by Bob Dylan (arr).” These folk covers raise intricate questions about appropriation—a topic of multifarious interest to Dylan scholars. Ortega explores the song, and its issues, in good historical depth.
The three Christian albums, about 36 songs in total over about three years, solicit only one comment, and that on the minor, jokey game of “Man Gave Names to All the Animals,” whose own commentator calls it “one of Bob Dylan’s worst songs.” Perhaps the religious material still doesn’t appeal to secular academics. Yet it seems a shame to ignore the theological and moral complexities of “Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others),” the bitter fervor of “Gotta Serve Somebody,” and the pure devotion—not simple, and not evasive—of “Saving Grace,” especially in Aaron Neville’s gorgeous version on Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan (2003). But in this book the fascinating but difficult topic of Dylan’s relation to religion is delayed until David Caplan’s piece on “I and I,” which comes from Infidels (1983), the next album after the trio of Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980), and Shot of Love (1981).
Caplan gives us a thoughtful study of Dylan’s approaches to religion. “’I and I’ … does not separate different religious traditions. It moves between and among them” (134). He distinguishes the verses (“middle-aged” and “rueful”) from the “clipped and allusive chorus [which] flashes through religious references.” In the last verse, “‘an eye for an eye’ alludes to the system of justice that Exodus proposes … in which God remains essentially distant from any living person” (136). (Caplan sidesteps the fact that the song does not “propose” exacting “an eye for an eye” but speaks of seeing “an eye for an eye.”) Earlier in the song, and in the choruses, “I and I” is the Rastafarian phrase that, as a scholar of “livity” pointed to by Caplan’s footnote explains, “refers to ‘the inter-dwelling of God and man’” (135). As Caplan says, “The Rastafarian and biblical references feel more juxtaposed than shaped into one coherent idea.” In the end, “Dylan does not refashion these ideas into a coherent theology. In fact, the goal of consistency does not interest him. … ‘I and I’ is religious but restlessly so” (136). Dylan has long been mindful of the duality of Old and New Testament versions of justice, a tension that throughout his life has knotted itself into the righteous indignation of songs like “Hurricane,” not to mention “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “When the Ship Comes In,” and even “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Many of the book’s chapters make us think further into songs we may have known for twenty or sixty years. “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” is one of Dylan’s most moving songs, and Stephanie Burt’s essay accounts unusually seriously for its affective complexity. As Burt says, “the word ‘again’ lets the chorus end: that final satisfaction feels [with its full cadence in the harmony] musically complete but emotionally impossible. Without his love, this man will never sleep … Does anyone, hearing this song for a second time, believe that Dylan will find his lost love, or see her again, on this side of the grave?” (92).
Incidentally, Burt’s essay’s title in the Table of Contents, “’Tomorrow Is a Long Time’ (1971)” presents a puzzle. In every other chapter heading, the date is that of the song’s first release on a Dylan album, underscoring the book’s organization, which is essentially chronological for obvious practical reasons. But as an “Editor’s Note” on Burt’s essay points out, this song is earlier than 1971: not only had Dylan written the song in 1962 (“probably”) and recorded it informally the following year, but we encountered and began responding to it on what was almost the very first album of Dylan covers: Odetta Sings Dylan (1965). The song belongs with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1962), not with New Morning (1970). Perhaps our notional course syllabus could explore questions about how the chronologies of Dylan’s compositions and his recordings do and do not mesh, and therefore about how we should hear the career unfolding on the largest scale.
Chip Tucker’s analysis of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”—along with “Visions of Johanna” perhaps the grandest saga on that first grand album—has a density and precision that accord with the song’s own. Tucker is at pains to specify both the musical structure—the “roughly palindromic symmetry” of the chords of each verse—and the verbal structures of rhyme and prosody that reinforce each other and support the song’s whole arch. “Comparable effects of interplay occur in the quite different poetic registers of diction and grammar,” he says, and he speaks of the dance between “genteel and demotic discourses.”
Tucker points out the song’s dread of repetition. “The most important word in this song is ‘again’.” This can be usefully set beside Stephanie Burt’s different focus on the same word. (In other songs, too, we realize, “twice” signals annoyance: in “She’s Your Lover Now,” the obnoxious fellow “keeps saying everything twice to me,” and even “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” notices the same wistful despair.) Tucker links this metaphysical angst with the medium by which Dylan’s songs are most often conveyed to us: sound mechanically reproduced, endlessly reproducible. The “tape” which “the ladies” kindly furnish is as Tucker notes the recording medium foundational to the whole project. (By the way, we need not think of this “tape” exclusively in the context of the “Nashville studio” which Dylan on Blonde on Blonde was using for the first time; by 1966 home recording machines were common, and a supply of tape at a decent price was worth seeking out.) Tucker makes us realize how this aversion to repetition connects with Dylan’s famous preference for a raw recorded sound, the sound of the moment, least easily repeated. Dylan has also famously spent decades on a Never Ending Tour that puts him before more or less new audiences every night. His set lists vary all the time, so concert-goers guess what familiar or unfamiliar bit of the repertoire may come up next. As bobdylan.com helpfully informs us, recurrences of a particular song in concert happen between zero and well over two thousand times.
Michael Thurston, writing on “Jokerman,” contrasts the song’s verses with its refrain (the lines about “the nightingale’s tune”); he also astutely describes how the changing relation between lyrics and musical setting plays out this larger structural dynamic. “However ‘Jokerman’ might push toward musical resolution”—for example, between Dylan’s “characteristic Sprechstimme“ and the “melisma in the refrain’s last line”—”its lyrics do not, as the chorus and verses stage an ongoing dynamic of solicitation and refutation wherein the refrain continually cancels whatever deep messages the verses’ allusive imagery appears to promise” (128). Thurston summarizes: “If music produces a lot of the pleasure, Dylan’s lyrics and vocal stylings provide the power” (131).
The book gives us examples of how a profoundly informed reading can help us be the hearers that apparently Bob Dylan has made us all want to be. While “Tin Angel” (from Tempest [2012]) is not among my own favorites, it would be foolish not to be grateful for Richard F. Thomas’s study of the song’s double origin in “Gypsy Davy” (Woody Guthrie et al) and the Odyssey. He sets before us a dizzyingly rich texture of textualities. In Dylan Review 2.1, the same author gave us a similarly eye-opening and mind-filling glance into “And I Crossed the Rubicon” from Rough and Rowdy Ways. I suppose it is incidental that Thomas’s Professorship at Harvard is named for the original author of what became the imperishable “One Meat Ball”; but as Dylan says, I can’t be swayed by that.
