And Consequently Meant for Publication

Back in 1921, Dorothy Parker was reviewing Broadway plays.  She panned a musical called The Right Girl, for (among other offenses) featuring "a song which exploits the rhyme:

I wouldn't give five cents
For a marriage license."

I'd thought rhymes like this were an innovation of rap; I guess it's worth knowing that they were sung on the legitimate stage a century ago.

Last night I went to a poetry slam at a local venue, mainly because a friend wanted to go, under the impression that it was going to focus on work by LGBTQ youth, which sounded interesting.  It turned out he was wrong -- the youth slam had taken place elsewhere, earlier in the evening -- and he decided not to go anyway.  Though I've been to numerous poetry readings, professional and amateur, I don't think I've ever actually attended a poetry slam before, so I paid the $5 cover.  (The event was a benefit for undocumented youth, so I don't regret the money I spent.)  I don't like the idea of poetry slams, which seem to be an attempt to win an audience for poetry by foregrounding the worst kinds of macho poetasting, combined with competition: poetry reading as pro-wrestling.  That's a doubly toxic cocktail as far as I'm concerned.  I have watched a video of a West Coast semiprofessional slam, which confirmed my bad impression.  But hey, give the kids a chance.

In a way it was reassuring: bad poetry is forever.  (Or as Christ might have said, the bad poets you will always have with you, and they'll be first in line for the open mike.)  First up was an avowed straight white boy who announced that he usually writes depressing stuff, but had decided to give the audience a break by reading something humorous.  He then warned about content, the poem was about sexual objectification, but it was a joke, right?  He was right: it was a bad joke, the content could have come straight from some asshole's Twitter feed, and you don't get a pass for sexist objectification just because you know what you're doing and admit it in advance.  I was depressed; maybe some of what he thought was his "depressing" stuff would actually have been funny.  But, happily, he did only the one.

Next up was another skinny white boy.  He did two rapid-fire raps of no distinction, and wanted to do a third but the MCs called time on him.  (I must give the organizers credit: the event was well-arranged, and it seemed they were not going to allow the great pitfall of many open mikes: the poet who bogarts the mike to read one dreadful screed after another.)   He surrended the stage readily, to his credit.

Next was a young woman in a buzzcut whose poem, she informed us, was about "trans identity."  (I'm referring to her as "she" because she didn't specify a pronoun, and it wasn't clear whether the poem was about herself -- she left that vague.)  The poem was undistinguished, and could have been written by any of the myriad poet-wannabes I've heard at open mikes over the past five decades.  One innovation: she read the text from her phone.

Finally (for me) a "proud bisexual" male poet took the stage.  His contribution was also a collection of cliches; sincere and well-meant, no doubt, and well-done for what it was, but basically it was MFA fodder.  No doubt he'll go far.  Next up after him was an acquaintance of mine, a local politician around 50 whom I've known since he was in college.  That confirmed my feeling that maybe I should have signed up to read myself -- I could have read a poem from my tablet, since I have most of my work on this blog.  But I had other things to do with the evening, and scooted out, freeing my seat for someone else.

I gather there will be another slam in a month, so maybe I'll sign up for that one.  I would not spend any time introducing my poem, as the other readers felt compelled to do.  That's another cliche of poetry readings that is still evidently with us.  (I began that post with an explanation, because the poem included has confused many people over the years.  It's atypical of my poetry posts here.)  One that wasn't in evidence last night was audience members chattering while the poets read: the audience was quiet and attentive, which was gratifying and a nice change from what I've observed in the past.

So, I'm venting.  But on the whole I was relieved to find that the college poetry scene has not changed, that Sturgeon's Law still applies.  I don't think I've succumbed to old-person nostalgia (which as Adrienne Rich said is just amnesia in reverse), since as I say, only the styles of body ornamentation have changed since the 70s.  Maybe if I'd stayed longer someone would have provided the surprise and revelation that you get when a really good poet, something with something of their own to say, takes the stage.  If I go to another of these, I'll stay for the duration and find out.

They Don't Make Cultural Appropriation Like They Used To

A musician friend in his mid-30s linked to this clip on Facebook today, and remarked:

Musicians: Just a reminder. Bob Dylan wrote this when he was TWENTY TWO years old. He didn't have auto-tune, there were no electric tuners, or soundcloud demos to listen to, or web forums to get feedback from about his craft. Not saying those things are bad. But the reason this is one of the greatest tunes ever written is simple: he had something to say.

More and more that seems to be the thing I don't find much of anymore.

If you have something to say, the rest is easy.

I'd have thought that one's thirties would be a bit young to be a clueless curmudgeon, but I guess my friend is just precocious.  Or maybe such people are clueless from birth, and are simply recognized as malignant old farts when they actually become old.  But everything my friend said here is wrong.

Start with "the tune."  It's long been known that Dylan stole the tune of "Blowing in the Wind" from the African-American spiritual "No More Auction Block."  I suppose my friend used "the tune" metonymically to mean "the song," but given the tune's source (which he confirmed he knew), it's an unfortunate choice of words.  If it's "one of the greatest tunes ever written," Dylan can't really take credit for it.

What about the lyrics?  My opinion is that they don't say much.  They are, as one writer put it, "impenetrably ambiguous: either the answer is so obvious it is right in your face, or the answer is as intangible as the wind".  I suppose that's one reason why the song has been so popular: it can mean almost anything to almost anybody.  If it were more specific, it would offend someone.  At that, the Chad Mitchell Trio was the first group to record the song, but "their record company delayed release of the album containing it because the song included the word 'death.'"  But bear in mind, Peter Paul and Mary's version spent "five weeks atop the easy listening chart."

Did Dylan really "have something to say" in "Blowing in the Wind"?  I don't believe so, but if he did, it wasn't the kind of message that can be paraphrased in brief.  Maybe what he wanted to express was a feeling, and surely that is what most people who adopted the song got from it, as witness its frequent use in religious services.  I'm not criticizing, mind you: it's very hard to put an explicit message into a song.  Dylan did it as well as anyone and better than most, but it's notable that his most popular song wasn't one of what he later called his "finger-pointing" songs.

I was annoyed by my friend's diatribe for more general reasons, though.  "If you have something to say, the rest is easy."  As a writer myself (including poems and some songs), my experience is that when I have something to say, the rest isn't easy.  Getting from what I want to say, or what I feel, to singable lyrics that work and a melody that will carry those lyrics, is quite difficult.  It's impossible, more often than not.  And I've read lots of poetry and prose, and heard many songs, where the composer obviously had something to say, something he or she thought important, but couldn't produce an interesting song or poem or story or novel out of it.  If I'm charitable, I can recognize that my friend probably didn't mean something like an explicit message when he mentioned having something to say, but like "the tune," it's why his remarks don't work, and fall into the clueless-curmudgeon category.

As for the stuff about the technology that didn't exist when Dylan wrote "Blowing in the Wind," leave aside the fact that recordings and broadcasts are technology that have had a big effect on the way music is produced and performed and transmitted; leave aside the fact that there were various ways of altering voices and sound in recordings in 1962, such as echo chambers, double-tracking, and tape editing.  In his early career Dylan found his way into a trend that rejected the slick inauthenticity of corporate pop music, one that valued unpolished "reality," though of course he signed with a major label and a few years later enraged some of his erstwhile cohorts by going electric and making rock'n'roll.  But the authenticity valued by the folk movement was dubious.  Authentic black bluesmen like Leadbelly wore suits and ties when they performed for black audiences; for "progressive" white audiences they had to wear bib overalls and work shirts.  (So says the blues musician and writer Elijah Wald in Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.)  Which was more authentic?

Wanting to say something meaningful isn't "having something to say." You don't "have something to say" until you've said it.  That's a core paradox of art-making: you can hone your craft for decades, yet you won't know whether the piece you're working on is good until you've finished it, and maybe not even then.  But contrariwise, there are many people of all ages who sincerely want to give something to the world, yet what they produce is dreadful, forgettable.  Another core paradox of art-making is that one works very hard to produce something that seems spontaneous and effortless, "artless" as it's often called.  What seems natural and authentic is generally the product of dedicated, often exhausting work.  As a musician himself, my friend should know this.

Finally, "More and more that seems to be the thing I don't find much of anymore."  At the most literal level, he wouldn't have found much of it in 1962 either.   Dylan attracted attention because of his presence and air of authority -- even "authenticity," though he was a middle-class Jewish kid from northern Minnesota pretending to be a goyish Okie of the Depression era.  Most of the songs of his contemporaries are forgotten, and deservedly so, not because their writers had nothing to say but because they didn't say it in an interesting or memorable way. "Blowing in the Wind" itself stands alone in his catalog for its popularity.  Against this, I still find plenty of contemporary songs and music that are memorable, and say something to me.  They are probably a minority of the vast flood of material that's released, but that was always true.