When Poetry Shifted in the 1960s

 When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, nobody was less surprised than I was.  Arguably the greatest musical poet of all time, Dylan raised the bar on storytelling in lyrical form.  Many of his songs are Shakespearean in quality, for their memorable characters, zany verses, and mind-expanding narratives.  Talent is one thing, but representing a shift in the arts is another. 

It was easy to see how lyricism in pop music had supplanted poetry in the 1960s.  How many popular poets can you name that were famous after that decade?  Not many, I'd imagine.  Now, how many songwriters can you name?  Hundreds I would think.  A mere shift in popularity meant that the 1960s had witnessed a major revolution in the fusion of music with literature.  In fact, no other generation in history has been exposed to that much poetry.  Bob Dylan played an enormous part in that cultural shift, if not the greatest.  It shouldn't be surprising that this happened, once you realize much of the poetry written in the past was meant to be sung.  Poets wouldn't have tried to rhyme their lines otherwise.  The flow to the words creates a movement in their oral delivery, one that can only lead it in a musical direction.  In that context, poetry is to music what ink is to a pen; without it, there is no verbal expression. 

At its fullest extent, the shift reached the realm of rap music in the 1980s, when artists started "bustin' rhymes" like there was no tomorrow.  Despite the profane content of much rap music, many of the most talented writers in music sprung from this phase of the revolution.  Marshall Mathers, better known as Eminem, is a phenomenal lyrical talent, no matter what you may think of him.  When you read his songs on paper, rather than listen to them, you may find it easier to connect with his writing and be moved by it.  Like Dylan, he is rough around the edges, and doesn't have the best singing voice by any stretch of the imagination.  But what these two writers have is something that will last for centuries.  They have the ability to crank out poetry on deeply personal levels, that a high number of people can identify with, and transform it into short little pieces of art that we can hear, so it's easier to digest.  They are the modern Homers, the Walt Whitmans, the T.S. Eliots, etc.  Those who prefer to read their poetry on the page, without any obnoxious sounds distracting them, they'll just have to deal with it, for the times they are a changin'. 

Transition to Clean Energy

The clean energy revolution promised by treaties like the Kyoto Protocol isn't coming fast enough.  One of the ways the Kyoto Protocol sought to reduce greenhouse emissions was by having countries offer incentives to produce affordable, environmentally friendly vehicles.  Companies like Tesla in the U.S. are making a lot of electric cars, but they are still too expensive for the average middle-class person to buy.  They are getting cheaper; it’s just happening too slowly to see much improvement. 

To speed things up, a paradigm shift in society is in order.  Thanks to the Internet, business is easier than it's ever been, and many of our services can be done at home.  Most office jobs could theoretically be done at home with viable connections.  I can think of no better alternative to reduce greenhouse emissions than a radical transition in moving work and school from institutions to home-based operations, at least among metropolitan cities.  Companies need to be given more incentives by governments to let their employees work from home.  Likewise, there should be more online teaching programs at all grade levels to cut back on all the mass transit required for educational purposes.  These two strategies would save tremendous time and energy by eliminating commutes and cutting down on fossil fuel emissions.  While true that it would only apply to office jobs in the non-manufacturing sector, it would still make a big difference.  The rush hours in big cities would entirely disappear without all the sedans, buses and SUVS clogging up the roadways.  A further benefit is that it would make school cancellations due to inclement weather obsolete. 

An unfortunate side effect would be the further devaluation of social activity, something we’ve already seen with the mass shift to computer and cell phone use.  Parents would have to find new ways to get their children involved in the community.  Some younger students would also need to be cared for at home, or at a babysitter’s, leading to a meaningless allocation of transit from school to daycare.  However, I believe this relatively small allocation would still help reduce pollution and save time for the average person. 

Conversion

After your conversion you took me to church, 
When I was uncomfortable with institutional order, 
Displeased that you had taken the easy way out. 
Yet what you showed me may have been the best 
In a long series of ventures we choreographed. 
 
Sermons of curious meaning graced my thoughts, 
Stained-glass windows of the Story roused my eyes, 
Rhythmic spirituals from a choir danced in my ears, 
Spiraling unity shifted my perspective on religion, 
All these sensations unfamiliar to me, a crazed boy 
Recovering from falling in the bog of adolescence. 
 
I came, I saw the light, I left, never to return, 
For truth be told, it was the greatest of times, 
Right as my spirit was unfurling, coming out of 
The cocoon I'd spent a whole year escaping from. 
I could not spoil that special feeling by pretending 
I was one of you, holding hands in a caravan of bliss. 
 
Now I wonder how far you took it, whether the military 
Drowned your dogma or made it stronger, paradoxically, 
The way country farmers laud the schemes of city slickers. 
Where have you gone, old friend, what life have you lead, 
Did you let that passion pollute you, or purify your breath, 
How many children have you had, are you already dead? 

Cryptopoetry: My Cocoon Tightens- Colors Tease

 My latest adventure in literature is reading the collected works of Emily Dickinson at breakneck speed.  Probably not the best idea, because these poems beg to be digested slowly.  Many stanzas in the same poem seem unrelated to each other, yet the reader knows they are connected in the subtlest ways possible.  Her poems aren't the most fluent however, so I find myself only scanning them for nuggets of beauty and not giving them the attention they fully deserve.  Part of the reason is that she is so difficult to interpret that an ugly poem on the surface doesn't seem worthy of being given the attention required.  Though if you analyze her poetry as a whole, one of the main themes she's exploring is the ability to look past appearances and see the true meaning of things. 

That is the main theme of poem 1099: My Cocoon Tightens- Colors Tease- in my opinion, one of her best.  Rarely does a poet explicitly confront what they are trying to do in their poetry, but Dickinson does so here: 

 

 

My Cocoon tightens — Colors tease — 

I'm feeling for the Air — 

A dim capacity for Wings 

Demeans the Dress I wear — 

 

A power of Butterfly must be — 

The Aptitude to fly 

Meadows of Majesty implies 

And easy Sweeps of Sky — 

 

So I must baffle at the Hint 

And cipher at the Sign 

And make much blunder, if at last 

I take the clue divine — 

 

It's clear to me that the first two stanzas are about transformation, about seeing past the original appearances of color that a caterpillar would see, then seeing a whole new world once the butterfly it becomes is able to fly.  But like many of her other poems, this one is open to interpretation.  In the third stanza, I think she is lighting on the fact she knows her poetry is cryptic, using the butterfly symbolically to reveal the poet she's matured into.  Baffling at the hints, ciphering at the signs, making blunders [in writing], all point to her awareness of hiding meaning between the lines of her poetry, not explicitly conjuring them up in the words.  The clue divine is the ultimate message she is trying to reveal with her words, angelically placed in a sort of "heaven" between the words, a higher realm we can't quite see.  Perhaps she's expressing how the appearance of her poetry only runs skin deep, that the real beauty it exudes lies beneath the surface, like her physical appearance and the fact that she is a woman writing it, which at the time was considered a man's profession. 

This poem is Dickinson at her cryptic best, teasing us with confounding imagery, oddly placing dashes that interrupt our train of thought, catching us off guard in the last stanza, which is so unlike the first that no coherence can be seen at first.  More importantly, it's about her general appeal as a poet.  She's a thinker's poet, not a romantic.  The Romantics were too busy musing on nature and emotions to confront a darker wisdom in the text, which is ultimately the "divine" purpose her poem seeks to find.