Do You Mr Jones? by Neil Corcoran

Author:Neil Corcoran
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446413326
Publisher: Random House

Othello told Desdemona, ‘I’m cold, cover me with a blanket.

By the way, what happened to that poison wine?’

She said, ‘I gave it to you, you drank it.’

In addition to his economy with mimicry, some lines are packed with hidden narratives that burst from their confines like jacks-in-the-box. ‘I moved in with two girls from South Dakota in a two-room apartment for two nights,’ the unrecorded ‘poem,’ ‘My Life in a Stolen Moment,’42 goes. ‘Rita May, Rita May, You got your body in the way,’ he sings on the flip side of the single ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.’43

His verbal play finds antecedents in other kinds of popular song. The verbal pyrotechnics of Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin haunt passages like this one from ‘Tiny Montgomery’:

Scratch your dad

Do that bird

Suck that pig

And bring it on home

Pick that drip

And bake that dough

Tell ’em all

That Tiny says hello44

Compare this with a passage from ‘Here Come the Drum Majorettes!’ by another poet drawing on musical theater, James Fenton:

Gleb meet Glubb.

Glubb meet Glob.

God that’s glum, that glib Glob dig.

‘Dig that bog!’

‘Frag that frog.’

‘Stap that chap, he snuck that sig.’45

In ‘Tiny Montgomery,’ the lightness inherent in a two-beat line and the vowel-rhyming fashion a minstrel’s performance, much as the giants of musical theater drew on their own apprehensions of black popular song. But both Dylan’s and Fenton’s lyrics turn the elegant, urbane phrasing of Gershwin or Fry on its head, resulting in the disruption of the standard form. Charles Bernstein describes this operation as:

acting out … the insincerity of form as much as content. Such poetic play does not open into a neat opposition of dry high irony and wet lyric expressiveness but, in contrast, collapses into a more destabilizing field of pathos, the ludicrous, shtick, sarcasm; a multidimensional textual field that is congenitally unable to maintain an evenness of surface tension or a flatness of affect …46

Historically, the tradition of the ‘Talking Blues’ mixes the kit and the kaboodle: the ‘ludicrous, shtick, sarcasm,’ but also the tall tale of Rourke’s backwoodsman, and her Yank’s fables. In Woody Guthrie’s ‘Talking Dust Bowl,’ the slapstick and the tall tale depend upon the timing.

Way up yonder on a mountain road,

I had a hot motor and a heavy load.

I was going pretty fast, I wasn’t even stopping,

A-bouncing up and down like a popcorn popping.

Had a breakdown, a sort of nervous bustdown of some kind.

There was a fellow there, a mechanic fellow, said it was engine trouble.47

The unrhymed, halting speech of the last run-on line uses understatement to anchor the hyperbole of that speedy, hyperbolic ‘like popcorn popping.’ The misnamed intensifies, ‘pretty’ and ‘even,’ keep the assertions from being wholly fixed, wholly final. (The lack of American words’ finality is a distinction of the American vernacular, according to Christopher Ricks in his essay, ‘American English and the Inherently Transitory,’ in which he discusses Dylan in the context of Ed Dorn’s assertion that ‘No particular word is apt to be final.’48) The speaker in ‘Talking Dust Bowl’ gives

… that rolling Ford a shove,

And I was going to coast as far as I could.

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