Zimmerman on Zimmerman
Sonnets for Bob Dylan by Thomas Zimmerman
Copyright © 2018 Thomas Zimmerman Author’s Notes About the Title Zimmerman on Zimmerman plays on the title of one of Dylan’s greatest albums, Blonde on Blonde, and on the fact that Dylan’s birthname was Robert Allen Zimmerman: same surname as mine. The poems aren’t exactly about Dylan, but he threads through them, much like his music and, to a lesser extent, his persona have threaded through my life. About the Poems I wrote them during 2009-2015, years when most of my poems were sonnets: 14-lined, end-rhymed but heavily enjambed, and pretty strictly iambic pentameter. The final poem in this book, “Found Sonnets for Bob Dylan,” cuts and pastes selected Dylan lyrics into structures of 3 haiku and 1 tanka (3 lines + 3 lines + 3 lines + 5 lines = 14 lines) to make fragment sonnets. I don’t write much in end rhyme anymore, so I feel that this book is a kind of mile marker, a dot on the scatterplot of my poetry output. About the Drawings They’re doodles from journals I’ve been keeping over the years. Acknowledgments My thanks to the following publications, where the poems in this book first appeared, sometimes in different versions: The Apple Tree; Carcinogenic Poetry; The Corner Club Press; The Flea; Honk If You Love Weirdos: A WCC Poetry Club Anthology; Poetry Pacific; The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society; Rasputin: A Poetry Thread; and Red Fez. Additional notes on page 15. Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has been active in the small press since 1987 and has authored seven other poetry chapbooks, including In Stereo (Camel Saloon, 2012). Tom's website: https://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/ ❷
Zimmerman on Zimmerman Sonnets for Bob Dylan by Thomas Zimmerman Contents Author’s Notes
3
The Other Zimmerman Pondering Bob Nights Your Wife Is Gone Random Notes To the Absent To Beat Ennui Road Trip Stuck Inside of Louisville with the Dayton Blues Again Nights Your Wife Is Gone (II) Found Sonnets for Bob Dylan
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Additional Notes
15
zetataurus press ann arbor mi usa tzman2012@gmail.com
❸
The Other Zimmerman I’m drinking porter in the kitchen, Blonde on Blonde still playing soft. My wife is gone, the dogs are zonked, and I am trying to create. I sip. There’s bitterness without much body: true with beer or marriage. Dawn lies hours away, and I am lying through my teeth. There’ll be no poem tonight, just doubt that gloms on to my Thomas, sacred bond that chafes yet whets. The music coils and stews: a country band behind Rimbaud, the best thing rock has ever offered. Darkness sifts its richness through the pines, my mind and chest expand, relax. And now my spirit lifts. Sound corny? No more than the singer’s blues.
❹
Pondering Bob After rewatching Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan No envy, fear, or meanness, Dylan says a Clancy taught him in the Village, preFreewheelin’, possibly, the Guinness dark as Oxford Town, as Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” Odetta, Mavis Staples, King the saint in Washington: “Let freedom ring.” No meanness, envy, fear: perhaps, like Bob, I’ll strip myself of Zimmerman, break free of who those others think I am, embark on quests artistic and absurd, appear in any guise, go anywhere, as long as I am someone else. Is it so wrong to be the words I speak, avoid the mob, evolve? To feel no envy, meanness, fear?
❺
Nights Your Wife Is Gone The Comp I essays done, you’re playing Blonde on Blonde, all country-blue and hip, and Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks. . . . You’ve yawned all day, but now, an existential saint, you have a glass of stout in front of you, the music’s loud, and you’re abuzz with now. So good sometimes to be alive. Why do you teach? To live forever, blaze a Tao of Shakespeare, semicolons, service to community? You’re mostly serious. You love Neruda, Bruckner, Coltrane, Bly, and students, colleagues, friends. You’ve learned to woo your muse and think less with your dick. You cuss enough. You’re blessed. Your wife can tell you why.
❻
Random Notes It’s Dylan on the stereo again: “A Simple Twist of Fate” with lukewarm sun, obligatory coffee, and my manufactured thoughts. The dogs asleep, and Ann downstairs, I dive inside the music. . . . When will hidden stars align their fires, or one of Hades’ weird sisters lift her skirt to tease me with the answer that I know conceals an undertow of human woe? My learning’s only half-digested. Hurt and anger, existential dread entwine with motorcycles, basement tapes, and love affairs. An idiot knows more. Above the trees, a crow tries random notes. They’re mine.
❼
To the Absent That big blue spruce that’s flailing in the breeze is like a shaggy bear, like me drunk at a wedding dance: the singer’s voice is flat, the band is shot, and I’m down on my knees to grab my glasses, which have fallen off. Still learning how to write these poems alone. Last song, when Dylan said the heat pipes cough, I did believe him. Now I hear the groan of water trying to boil. I’m making tea for someone sick who’d rather have a beer. And night is falling fast, no stars to see in all this overcast, so bedtime’s near. The book I’m reading, though, is dull and lined with mirrors. Please come back. I loathe my mind.
❽
To Beat Ennui If all else fails, I list some things I love: my life, my wife, and Highway 61 Revisited; Baudelaire’s faux infamy when iron-maidened into sonnet form; the bravest Shostakovich symphony: 11? 8?; the battered heart of Donne; to watch in safety any kind of storm; to feel my brain-buoyed spirit rise above my childhood’s God; John Coltrane playing live; The Waste Land; Heaney’s Station Island; Lear; Macbeth; Walt Whitman, Paz, Neruda, Frost— most often when I plumb their darkness, dear as the sublimity I thought I’d lost, as seas that beckon me to drown or dive.
❾
Road Trip The interstate’s alive with whining tires tonight. The sun’s chugged back to Santa Fe, there’s Tom Waits on the stereo, and choirs of crickets mating in the grass. To stay in place is negligence. Chicago’s five fast hours away, the Mississippi less than eight. So hook your bra, zip up your dress: we’re heading west, as far as we can drive on vodka, coffee, chewing gum, and rest-stop sex. We’re not too young to gnaw the rind of weird old America, to test the strength of self-mythology, to find what Whitman, Kerouac, and Dylan blessed, a dreamscape horny, mad, poetic, kind.
❿
Stuck Inside of Louisville with the Dayton Blues Again Fairfield Inn and Suites, 12:15 a.m. The floor-lamp’s fizzy, spinning molecules and atoms into orbitals as wild as bourbon in the throat, as King Lear’s fool’s bons mots, which Brian and I, half-drunk, self-styled Shakespeareans, ingested at the bar: the Seelbach Hilton, Scott Fitzgerald’s muse for part of Gatsby. Three Dog Night, the star attraction down on Fourth Street, sang a bluesinflected pop we didn’t hear. Game Two was on the television: Cardinals and Red Sox. I will botch the poems I read tomorrow at the conference. But need I care? My mind is singing madrigals in Dayton, strippers’ voices dark and true.
⓫
Nights Your Wife Is Gone (II) Neruda’s lying facedown on the desk: Cien sonetos de amor, and Getz— Sweet Rain—is on the stereo. Now let’s just take a breath before a Dylanesque montage kicks in. A Guinness draft’s in front of you; the pasta’s on the boil. And here’s to Robert Bly: Don’t comb your hair. The seer’s gone blind. Don’t call your mother; she’ll just stunt your growth. Get torn to pieces; paint till dawn. Don’t sweep the floor; don’t take the bottles back. Plead guilty; you’ll be sentenced to a thousand years of joy. Leave scraps for hellhounds on your trail. Relax. The king’s in check. Attack. The only thing you really know is now.
⓬
Found Sonnets for Bob Dylan 1 Like a rolling stone, you lean your head out far: “Am I here all alone?” Famous long ago, you’re tired of yourself, with no direction home. You go watch the geek, Ma Rainey, and Beethoven. You don't have to speak. Pencil in your hand, you see somebody naked: melody so plain started out on burgundy, died in battle or in vain. 2 Silver saxophones, country music, must get stoned: consciousness explodes. The neon madmen, dancing child you said you knew: friends. I believed you. Undertaker sighs when you're playing your guitar. Hope you’re satisfied.
⓭
Poison headache, but here I sit so patiently. See, you’re just like me: saviors who are fast asleep. Can this really be the end? 3 Gaze upon the chimes, empty-handed painter: times sit and wonder why. Strength is not to fight smoke rings of the mind: be one more person crying. Howling at the moon when you whispered in my ear: “Hungry women there.” Forget the dead you've left, too serious to fool. Busy being born, sure your thoughts are not with me, gather flowers constantly.
⓮
Additional Notes My essential Dylan albums, in chronological order: 1. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) 2. Bringing It All Back Home (1965) 3. Highway 61 Revisited (1965) 4. Blonde on Blonde (1966) 5. John Wesley Harding (1967) 6. Nashville Skyline (1969) 7. Blood on the Tracks (1975) 8. The Basement Tapes (with The Band) (1975) 9. Slow Train Coming (1979) 10. Time Out of Mind (1997) 11. “Love and Theft” (2001) 12. Modern Times (2006) Half the list consists of albums Dylan made the ’60s, which, to my ears, still sound like his freshest work. However, Blood on the Tracks, from the mid-’70s, might be my favorite. I’ve chosen one album from the gospel phase—the beautifully produced Slow Train Coming—but nothing from the ’80s, a tough decade for Dylan (and for some other rootsy favorites: Van Morrison and Neil Young come to mind). The last three albums on the list are good examples of Dylan’s reincarnation as craggy bluesman/poet. I’ve included nothing from the recent batch admirable-but-dull standards albums. Here are three great compilations, especially valuable for their previously unreleased tracks: 1. Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume II (1971) 2. Biograph (1985) 3. The Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3 [Rare and Unreleased 1961-1991] (1991) I’ve seen Dylan play live three times: 1. Bismarck, North Dakota, 1990. Best of the three. Dylan with a hard and fast power trio led by G.E. Smith. 2. Ypsilanti, Michigan, 2007. Worst of the three. Too-smooth band, a frail Dylan propped up behind a keyboard. 3. Detroit, 2017. A better Bob. Same smooth band, but the voice stronger and on top of the sound mix. —TZ Ann Arbor, MI July 2018 ⓯
zetataurus press ann arbor mi usa tzman2012@gmail.com