Steve Mentz

Here’s a rough outline of plans for the seminar at #shax2020 in Jacksonville, FL, this coming April 2020.

October: All of the members of the seminar have introduced themselves & their projects to the seminar by email.

1 November: I circulated to the seminar some shared work by our two invited non-Shakespearean guests. From Molly Warsh, Associate Professor of History at Pitt, I circulated the intro and first chapter (on pearl harvesting) from her brilliant book, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (UNC Press, 2018). From Sid Dobrin, I circulated his chapter on global fishing, “Protein Economies,” from Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative (Routledge 2021), plus his Jacksonville-centric chapter, “An American Beach,” from the book  Florida. Ed. Jeff Rice. Parlor Press. 2015. 212-229.

late November: Molly, Sid, and I will record a Zoom-conversation about these works and how they might be helpful in shaping our shared conversation at the conference. I’ll record that Zoom, and circulate the recording.

1 December: All seminar paper-writers should submit provisional titles and short (250 word) abstracts to me. These can of course be revised in the New Year, but once they are finalized I will compile them and circulate copies at our seminar for auditors.

14 February: Final Deadline for completed papers (~2500 words). This is a firm SAA deadline so that each of you can be listed in the final SAA program.

1 March: I will divide the eight papers into two groups of four. Each group will have a designated respondent from our two invited respondents, Caro Pirri and Dan Brayton. We will circulate written responses to each paper within each group, as well as designating time during our seminar in April.

1 April: Deadline for written responses (ie, before anyone gets on a plane to FL!). We’ll also try to generate some shared questions for the full seminar by this point.

6-9 April: Our seminar will meet for two hours at a time and place tbd!

Further information about a trip to a clam shack, a 16th-century French fort, and/or a beach will be forthcoming closer to the date.

Here’s the link to these three Corona Sonnets, published on August 7, 2021.

And here are the poems themselves. Thanks to the Sonnet Corona Project for support and inspiration!

April 2020

Not our call, boy. Pronounce your own sentence,
And let its cold raw taste linger, bitter –
A stench of unform’d words and off syntax,
Sour milk fingers just now refresh Twitter.
And what about their words, that last longest?
Dead again today, pinned between covers,
Hot, in quarantine that lasts through August,
Verses of voyages, expiring brothers.
The Friar’s letter never was delivered.
The searchers of the town locked him in.
Slant-rhymes fish-like were silvered,
And burn hot in my throat like old man’s gin.
It is a mad thing to read on a book.
Outside’s a place not to touch but to look.

May 2020 

Is here again and I cannot hold them both --
Or “is” or storm: two choices only. All night 
The surge splatters my house. Third month
Of quarantine splashes disorder tight.
To shore curls a wave, delicate, reveal-
ing wind’s ruffle over ocean’s taut skin.
It traps dry feet on narrow shore, conceal-
ing routes beyond the seas they underpin.
Soliton waves don’t last forever,
Though they outpace horse and rider, pinch high
Through the narrows, vanish behind heather,
A twist in time’s river, bubbling, terrify --
Waves never break without shoreward going.
In my neighbor’s yard an ark is growing.

May 2020

I don't really know, but at least they're home.
That’s what I mouth to hollow pre-dawn air,
In vacant hours of teenage sleep syndrome.
My black coffee, meditation, despair
Hold me still in don’t-wake-them quiet -- nowhere
Or watching a poet’s pot that never boils
Because the burner’s in need of repair
Or the back garden’s full of gargoyles
That lure me to combat – I bring my oils –
With thump and thwack and splash and grab and screech 
Until the monsters’ heads hide ‘neath subsoils.
Conquering Dad-hero my task I preach: 
Hunker down or hightail to the highlands:
I cleave these two from so many thousands --

Steve Mentz is a writer who lives on the Connecticut Shoreline and teaches in Queens. His poems have appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books, Underwater New York, Blood and Bourbon, and in the book Oceanic New York. His most recent book is Ocean, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.

Every so often a book leaps to your attention like the strike of a fish on the end of your line: a sudden jerk, the hook sets itself, and you’re on for the duration. I’m not sure how the metaphor really works — am I the fish or the fisherman? — but in reading this book, I kept being reminded of the feeling every fisher know, that sudden tug from beneath the water. Yep, I’m hooked.

I first saw a pre-pub notice for the book sometime during the timelessness of 2020. I’m pretty sure I ordered it months in advance. Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative dives into the “ocean deficit” it diagnoses in twenty-first century ecocriticism and cultural studies. Along the way it explores the symbolism of the color blue, the ocean as hyperobject (in Tim Morton’s sense), protein economies, Object-Oriented Ontologies and the new materialism, Ocean as Object, writing studies and ecocomposition, and much more. What Dobrin calls the project of “unearthing ecocriticism” turns out to be a great ride.

Much of the material, for a blue humanities obsessive like me, is somewhat familiar, but the emphasis is sharp and, if I may repurpose one of Dobrin’s phrases about the ocean, compellingly adjacent to my watery work. Dobrin writes wonderfully about contemporary water cultures, including sport fishing in his companion volume Fishing, Gone? His writing on Google Earth (Google Ocean?), about OOO and the theoretical modes that engage with eco-ideas, and about the origins of the idea of a “world ocean” are all insightful.

Dobrin engages with many of my favorite blue humanities thinkers, especially Stacy Alaimo, Melody Jue, and Dan Brayton. He quotes me too, mostly my long-ago thoughts in At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean and “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies,” both of which appeared in 2009. He nudges me a bit on the question of how narrowly to focus on Shakespeare and on literature as such. I very much agree with the wider goals he sets for blue thinking — “Blue ecocriticism requires a more voluminous, heterogeneous trajectory beyond the sea of ink” (25). Exactly!

I’ve been noodling just a bit about whether there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the “blue humanities,” which is mostly the term I use these days, and what Dobrin calls “blue ecocriticism.” I’m not sure the differences are that great. Maybe there’s a way that “humanities” carries some all-too-human baggage, which might ask us to follow ecological ideas into post-human directions, or into alliances with nonhuman creatures and environments? I also think one of the values of the “humanities” broadly speaking is its reflexive habit of questioning what “the human” really is. I very much align with and recognize myself in “blue ecocriticism” in Dobrin’s description, perhaps especially because we draw on slightly different archives and methods.

One of the joys of this book, for me, has been finding a blue fellow traveler who also combines oceanic recreations with academic writing. Dobrin’s professional work comes out of the world of composition studies, which I admire and have learned much from but is not my academic home. I wonder, though — maybe time and tide will enable an eco-Shakespearean and an eco-compositionist to grab a beer later this summer, perhaps on a humid August afternoon in Florida when I’m visiting my parents? An afternoon casting for the elusive tarpon or body surfing might be even more fun, but all of us, even blue thinkers, remained bound by circumstances and time. Stay tuned!

One truth of these late-Covid days, around 18 months since the arrival of the pandemic to American shores, is that I’m really looking forward to the return of live theater. But in the meantime I loved streaming this one-woman show by Mohegan playwright and performer Madeline Sayet. And I did catch a snippet of her speaking live, in conversation on the New Haven Green, courtesy of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, my local favorite Arts festival that is soldiering on through partial quarentine conditions.

Her autobiographical play, Where We Belong, carries Sayet from her roots in Eastern Connecticut as the daughter of Mohegans to England where, as she explains a few different times to UK customs officials at the border, she travels to study the works of William Shakespeare. The play explores the tensions between Sayet’s Mohegan identity and Shakespeare’s imperial reach. In conversation last night, she said the play combines three stories:

• Her own journey from wolf (which is what the word mohegan means) to bird (which is what her own Mohegan names means)
• The intellectual and spiritual journey of an Indigenous woman to England, the home of the colonizers who decimated her people during First Contact, which was not incidentally close in time to Shakespeare’s own day.
• The relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and colonialism/imperialism, which was the subject of her academic work in England

To me, the most compelling moments came in her lyrical meditations on flight and identity, the way repeated air travel loosened her felt connection with the earth of her people, at least temporarily, and the way Shakespeare studies, in its self-conscious efforts to become “global,” amounts to a view from the stratosphere that fails to know the land.

Her observation, repeated in last night’s public talk in New Haven, that Shakespeare’s writing, now cherished by so many people all around the world, was composed when the Mohegan people “still had all our words” was striking and powerful. The loss of native speakers of Mohegan and many other Indigenous languages is one of many horrors of conquest and settler colonialism, and it’s compelling to emphasize the contrast between words an English playwright invented and the words that a Native American people lost.

The Shakespearean refrain of her performance comes from Caliban: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse” (Tempest 1.2). My sense is that she has backed slightly off of her early claim that Shakespeare is an “anti-colonial” artist — I agree with her that the truth is more ambiguous, though certainly there can be and are many anti-colonial responses to Shakespeare — but she does an excellent job show how the poet’s language raises and complicates questions of identity and geography.

Since like Sayet, I own The Tempest as my “favorite play,” despite its patriarchal and imperialist baggage, I couldn’t help but think about the difference between quick airborne connections between North America and England, like those made by Sayet in the play and by me during non-pandemic years, and the longer and more uncertain sea voyages made by the Mohegan ambassadors whose grave markers she visited in Southwark and the colonizers who arrived in North America from Europe in the early modern period. What has the shift from sea travel as the primary driver of early modern “wet globalization” to the faster and less environmentally-connected practice of airline flights done to human geographical experience? Have airplanes broken something?

That’s a question I’ll keep puzzling, including through engaging with past and future work by Madeline Sayet!

Enjoy the live-stream of the play, which is available through July 11!

Would you rather steer a technological assemblage across alien seas? Or plunge your body into salt water, using repeated movements of your arms and legs to keep you up and propel you forward?

That’s the question I’ll be posing very early local time next Monday, as I lead a Critical-Creative workshop for registered students of NTU’s weeklong Creative-Critical Summer School. The program, hosted by the International Critical Poetics Research Group, will last from 25 June – 3 July, with a mix of public (free via YouTube) and private events. It’s an amazing line-up, and I am looking forward to catching as many of the public events as time zones allow.

My workshop will fit itself in between a “breakfast” poetry reading (9 am in the UK is 4 am locally for me, and I think the night before in Hawai’i) by Craig Santos Perez and a public talk on cetaceans and stranding by Astrida Neimanis. Our shared title for the day’s triple-header is “Care in the Anthropocene.” We’re all thinking about how climate change is changing everything.

Here’s my description of the workshop:

Living in the Anthropocene means immersing oneself in a hostile environment. In our era of rising seas and temperatures, are you a sailor or a swimmer? All participants will choose a team for the two hours traffic of our workshop. Sailors use technological prosthetics to engage their environments. Wooden sailboats are the icons, but the technologies could include anything from the alphabet to a MacBook. Swimmers, by contrast, use only their own bodies and formal patterns of movement as resources for survival. We will write as sailors or swimmers and discuss our writing both within our teams and in dialogue with a member of the opposite group. We will discuss what these two modes represent and how operate historically and today. Suggested readings include a poem by Craig Santos Perez and short essays by Astrida Neimanis (with collaborators) and Steve Mentz.

And here are the the three short suggested readings that I hope the group will have a chance to read:

• Susanne Pratt, Camila Marambio, Killian Quigley, Sarah Hamylton, Leah Gibbs, Adrianna Vergés, Michael Adams, Ruth Barcan, and Astrida Neimanis, “Fathom,” Environmental Humanities 12:1 (May 2020) 173-78.
• Craig Santos Perez, “Praise Song for Oceania” Habitat Threshold (Oakland: Omnidawn Publishing 2020) 66-72.
  • If you prefer the video for Craig’s poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6fmeBerLZc
• Steve Mentz, “Swimming in the Anthropocene,” Public Books (December 2020): http://www.publicbooks.org/swimming-in-the-anthropocene/#_=_.

Looking forward to this event, including Astrida’s public lecture later at 1900 UK time Monday!

Some time during pandemic winter, it’s hard to remember exactly when, I was on Zoom listening to some St. John’s students reading their original poetry. One student, whose name I didn’t recognize because he started the PhD program during the year of social distancing & hadn’t taken a class with me yet, said that he had a book of poems coming out in 2021, and that he normally writes about the ocean, fatherhood, and ideas of orientation in a maritime context.

I thought for a minute he was introducing me. I don’t have a book of poems coming out, but — oceans, fatherhood, orientation? Really? I mean, I’ve heard of people who are interested in such things. I see their faces every morning in the bathroom mirror.

Earlier this week I received a copy of Celestial Navigation, Peter’s new book from Finishing Line Press. A few differences helped clarify the question of identity — he has four kids while I only have two, he served in the US Navy from 1999-2003 when I was finishing grad school, he lives on the southern side of Long Island Sound while I live on the north. He has an MFA; I have an MA and a PhD. He’s a bit free-er than I am with line length and positioning, but that may also be that I’ve been writing dozens upon dozens of pretty regular sonnets during these pandemic months. Blessed rage for order, as somebody says.

My favorite poem in this lovely little book is “Scattered White Horses,” a sixteen-line mini-epic about fathers and sons and the sea and a “proof of mythology” that gets passed down, or maybe doesn’t, or doesn’t need to be, because the objects that assume meanings cohere by themselves —

The strange thing is that mythology requires such few proofs

seagulls crying over my father’s house

my grandfather’s bent finger, a knife in my pocket —

& that these made the other side of the world less strange to me

There are gorgeous partly-found poems built out of Navy documents and manuals, moving poems about families and distance, poems about sea storms and breezes — the “scattered white horses” show up in another poem as whitecaps on the water — and on war and the Beaufort Wind Scale.

A lovely and moving book of poems that everyone should read!

Where’s the world, I murmur as cold water

Clasps pale thighs. It’s true, I’m no Achilles,

But the sloppy ancient sea’s my author

And guide, enfolds me wet, smells like lilies –

The festering kind, you know the ones. Worse

Than multitudes. And now in, in, endless

And still now, around me, cold, the world’s hearse,

Earth’s caul and blanket, silent and friendless –

For who dares friend the sea’s hungry limbs?

Like an old man’s weak arms around the knees

Of the sea-goddess’ boy death-child I swim.

I splash multitudes, the past, the faint breeze

That is history soaking flesh. Wet now

I embark. Tales of power to unknow.

My sourdough has been writing poems. Over the 400+ days of pandemic mostly-isolation out of which we’re just now emerging, I’ve neither learned to bake bread nor, despite downloading an app, to identify the songs of my local birds. But I have written somewhere north of 200 new poems.

This week I’ve had the a trio of those poems published in the Toronto-based literary magazine Blood & Bourbon. I’m especially pleased because when I submitted I didn’t mention my half-shelf of academic and para-academic books, but instead described myself as a writer who lives on the Connecticut Shoreline. Will I develop a new literary persona as coastal poet? Hard to say – the poems are about swimming, living with the nonhuman, and environmental connections. I’m not sure it’s all that different from my other writing! Fewer footnotes, I suppose.

But it’s fun to have a new creative outlet and to practice something creative on an almost-daily basis. I hope, over time, try to publish some more of these many poems, or maybe new ones, or maybe I’ll figure out a new way to cross-involve my critical and poetic voices.

Thanks to Raya Morrison, the editor of Blood & Bourbon, and to the members of the Sonnet Corona group on Facebook, especially Shannon Garner , Art Zilleruelo, and Maureen Daniels, for the encouragement.

The three poems in the current issue of Blood & Bourbon are “Of Thirteen Minds,” about swimming past a flght of cormorants sunning themselves on Whale Rock last summer; “Sea Music,” about an especially noisy corner of the surf in Negril, Jamaica; and “Soiled Poem,” which is mostly about the garden and my back yard. Here’s a image of the last one. You should buy a copy of the issue!

A busy day in Zoomlandia on 27 May. From Sheffield to Seoul, all from my office in Short Beach!

I plugged in around sunrise and caught the last few words of Killian Quigley’s presentation on the first of two sessions on Blue Extinction, hosted by ASLE UK and the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. Hats off to the organizers, Veronica Fibisan and Rachel Murray for excellent hosting! It’s entirely my own fault that, a few hours later, I failed to share my images via Blackboard Connect, so the assembled Zoomies were forced just to look at my face as I talked about whales, extinction, empathy, violence, Melville, beach strandings, and at the close a crazy-intense description of imaginative incorporation in whaleflesh in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift. ‘Twas a wild ride!

One of the best things about this event was variety of modes across the six presentations (OK, only five that I heard) in the two sessions. My own archive was my usual literary / historical / experiential poetics sort of thing, with generous helpings from Moby-Dick and a chance encounter I had with a stranded whale’s body in an Oregon beach in 1985. In the morning session, Tom Bristow of James Cook U in Queensland, Australia, presented via a short film, of which I heard most of the audio and only interrupted snatches of the video, as I shuffled through early morning puppy care and coffee prep. Third of the morning group was Maria Beger‘s exploration of “tropicalisation,” a process through which coral and fish from tropical warm water reefs are moving into higher latitudes with ocean warming — i.e., they’re moving away from the existing geographical tropics, south in Australia and north in Japan. Perhaps it’s better to say that the tropics are expanding.

The afternoon session opened with me failing to share my slides properly, but I plowed through different visions of whales and humans, vai Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a 1658 pamphlet about a whale that swam up the Thames to Greenwich (where it was horrifically murdered), Melville, Philip Hoare, and eventually Bergvall. Next was a great paper by Dolly Jorgensen about the Caribbean monk seal, which was declared extinct in the twentieth century, but of which a few taxidermied specimens exist in modern museums. The question of what research does to its subjects and how the act of learning a about a thing might change or even injure that thing was powerfully present, especially since one of the images Dolly presented included a dead seal being dragged out of the surf by scientists. Last of our trio was Tom Webb, a biologist at Sheffield, who gave an overview of documented extinctions in land and sea. I was especially struck by his comment about animal species that are not extinct but whose populations have been massively reduced, including oysters, north Atlantic codfish, and many species of cetaceans. At massively depleted levels, these animals no longer perform the same ecosystemic functions they did before anthropogenic reductions, mostly in the 19-20c. I wonder — is extinction the thing we need to understand, or is it depletion? How do those things relate?

A lively Q&A followed, which featured our Australian panelists Killian and Tom B. hanging in late at night to ask searching questions about how we try to know things we can’t really know about marine life. I was left thinking about that urge all of us, scientists and humanists, have to understand, to categorize, and to manage — in many cases that urge can be a good thing, and I very much concur with Tom W.’s ambivalently hopeful prognosis about the viability of managed fisheries (if we can successfully manage them). But I can’t help coming back to knowing-through-violence, as with Dolly’s monk seals or Melville’s whales. Does knowing about an alien thing require or invite a kind of violence on it? Can we unlearn that kind of knowledge acquisition? Or to some extent disavow it?

Update: The quick circulation of a recording enabled me to listen to Killian’s talk out of order but on the same day. (Thanks, Vera!) As I expected, it was a wonderfully generative talk, exploring visions of a future ocean dominated by slime and jellyfish, as described by marine biologists such as Daniel Pauly and Jeremy Jackson, and considering these dystopias through an aesthetic lens. The slime ocean, Killian notes, echoes the “radically unaesthetic” vistas of the pre-modern sea described by Alain Corbin in The Lure of the Sea, a book about the transformation of Western ideas of the maritime that was deeply influential on me when I first read it in the 2000s. Killian didn’t push the point too hard, but I wondered if premodern ideas about the ugly or disorderly sea might have something to say about the jellyfish aesthetic in which we may all be swimming soon. Corbin, like others including W.H. Auden, overstaes the extent to which the seaside gets “discovered” by modernity. But the idea that the less pleasing and more abrasive seas of pre-modernity might be returning seems very interesting, especially to a pre-modernist like me!

Just after listening to Killian’s talk I took my first open water swim of the season, on a gorgeous spring day in water that has just nipped over 60 degrees F (15 C). It’s still a bit chilly for me, so I wore my shortie wetsuit, but it was glorious to be back offshore, watching sea birds from a wave’s eye view, and bobbing up and down with the standing waves that reflect off the sea wall at high tide. After Killian’s talk, I was thinking about jellyfish, but fortunately didn’t encounter any — though they are there in my local waters, usually more common when everything warms up in midsummer. Ever year I plunge my unseeing arm through a few jelly colonies. It’s not my favorite thing about sea-swimming, but I wonder — is there a jellyfish aesthetic waiting to be discovered? To be imagined? To be engaged?

The last stop on the Zoom-train started at 9 pm local time, which was10 am Friday morning in Seoul. I gave an introduction to the blue humanities talk to John Eperjesi students at Kyung Hee University in South Korea, which also gave me a chance to think through my own sense of the changes of the discourse for the dozen or so years the terms has been in circulation.

In the last few Zoom-talks I’ve given, I’ve been fingered as the “coiner” (a strange, oddly state-power-ish term) or once the “dean” (an administrative term?) of the blue humanities. It’s flattering to think that people value my work, and I do remember — as I told the group in Seoul — dreaming up the phrase while walking my dog back in the summer of 2008. But I also, as I said last night, on a core level don’t like claims of ownership or mastery. Lots of people all over the world use the term “blue humanities” these days. It’s in special issues of journals, conference titles, twitter hashtags, even a “lab”-style classroom in Australia. Some of those people connect to my work, but many don’t, and many see other people as key figures in the discourse. That’s all just as it should be. No ownership of ideas on the high seas!

The frame of the Zoom-talk to Kyung Hee traced the pathways of blue humanities scholarship from my earlier work on Shakespeare and early modern English literature, esp in the article “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies” (2009) and the book At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009), to my current interest in global and Pacific literatures, as represented by the poem “Praise Song for Oceania” by Craig Santos Perez. It wasn’t a cage match, and I am happy to report that both The Tempest and “Praise Song” came out undestroyed. But it was fun to think through the paths my work and the blue humanities have taken since the end of the 2000s. As a special treat, which was a surprise, Craig himself Zoomed in from Hawaii for the talk — which was fun for me, and for the students, who had read “Praise Song” earlier this semester.

A few terms from the talk —

• “Offshore Capacity” — thinking through Perez and Shakespeare about oceanic vectors and dynamism
• “Beyond My Atlantic” — tracing my personal history from the New Jersey Shores out toward all the world’s oceans
• “Trajectories of the Blue Humanities” — “wet globalization” “salt aesthetics” “blue ecocriticism” “shipwreck modernity”
• “Shakespeare as Crisis and Limit” — maybe here I am mostly thinking about my own work?
• “Blue Humanities as Collaboration / Conversation / Immersion / Connection” — trying here to foreground the creative and public impulses of this scholarship, the way it sometimes gather academics together in wetsuits in the surf, as well as behind lecterns and Zoom screens

The students from Kyung Hee had great questions and thoughts that were only sometimes inhibited by troubles with my wifi. I hope I answered all the questions — though I also think that the best questions are the ones that we can’t answer, and instead have to sit with, or work toward. How should we save and serve and preserve the ocean and our relationships with it? That’s a tough one!

Final thoughts on this long transoceanic day had me imagining the Ocean as collaborator and co-creator. It doesn’t speak or make requests. It’s not (just) a symbol or source of all the best metaphors. But it’s out there, moved by moon and winds, holding heat and structuring history. We’re writing to it and with it, as best we can.

The rhymester hits eighty years today, still growling out truths and fantasies, still crooning a soundtrack to American madness. The pandemic album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, came out last June. It’s searing, brilliant, whimsical stuff. To celebrate 80 years I’ve sketched out some thoughts about My Own Version of You, the Frankenstein-remash that was my first favorite song when the album came out last spring. More recently I’ve also been loving Key West and Goodbye Jimmy Reed — both those are for another birthday, maybe.

Here’s me on My Own Version —

It’s about creation, not originality. That’s the secret. It’s about the making of new life, not the particulars of its design. Sometimes there’s a plan, your plan or someone else’s, but that’s not the main thing. “My Own Version of You,” from the 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, shows what Bob’s looking for:

I’ll bring someone to life…

It’s not hard to spot the model he’s copying. He’s along for the ride with Mary Shelley’s famous monster story, dreamed into life during a summer when the young bride shared a villa on Lake Geneva with her husband the poet and the notorious Lord Byron. Poets and creatures and imagination, all together during bad weather:

All through the summers, into January
I’ve been visiting mosques and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts…

When our boy Bob sings the summer in January, it’s a clue that we’re with Mary, Percy, and Byron back in 1816, “the year without a summer,” when skies all over the world were darkened by ash released by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the most powerful volcanic activity in over a millennium. That’s the weather that surrounds us as we’re getting the materials together. That was Frankenstein weather. It was Covid-19 and wildfire weather in 2020, too.

Limbs are for moving, brains for speculation, hearts supply all the love – and livers, well, they’re for living, obviously, and also, in Galenic medicine, they make the blood move as the “the principle instrument of sanguification.” Blood and bile, toxins and time: that’s where all these things go, that’s what takes them away.

“I wanna do things for the benefit of all mankind,” croon-warbles Bob. What benefits burst out from inside “the creature that I create”? We’re used to how his songs hodge-podge everything together, all piled up in lists and swerves and sharp turns. Is Bob the monster-king Richard III, in “the winter of my discontent”? Is he really a scholar of Sanskrit and Arabic? St. Peter or Jerome? Liberace? Maybe he’s sad-boy Hamlet, who asks “to be or not to be,” or maybe the antic Dane who “stick[s] in the knife” by accident into the old man hiding in his mother’s closet? “You know what I mean,” he says. We don’t, really. Not all the time. “You know exactly what I mean.”

But maybe the whole thing is not a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe we should follow the movement, not chase down the names. Creation: that’s what it’s about. Four times the word creature or creation appears in the song. The first one introduces the title: “I wanna create my own version of you.” The next two times he uses the word, he loop-enlists the creature into his own rescue, “saved by the creature that I create.” It’s hard to separate the maker from the making, and that’s the point. The word comes back one last time at the end, “Gonna jump-start my creation to life.” It’s the making, the eruption into being, not the order. It’s not about meanings or fixes. Always be creating!

Here and elsewhere in Rough and Rowdy Ways, I find myself thinking about plagiarism, about what Bob takes and what he gives. What is he creating, and what is he just grabbing? For a while in the career, his magpie practice seemed oblique enough that he might have been trying to conceal his borrowings. But the practice has become more obvious in the twenty-first century. He swiped some lyrics from the Confederate poet Henry Timrod in Modern Times in 2006. He pinched some lines from Junichi Saga’s Japanese gangster memoir Confessions of a Yakuza in Chronicles, Vol 1 in 2004. A closer look inside Chronicles shows it to be chock-full of stolen nuggets from places as varied as Time magazine and Jack London’s White Fang. But when Bob cribbed the SparkNotes plot summary of Moby-Dick in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (!) in 2017, the jig seemed up.

Does he do it on purpose? Is he a premeditated plagiarist? I was in the audience for a Father’s Day show in June 2017, a few days after the public kerfluffle over the SparkNotes revelation in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The first song of the night was, “[I used to care but] Things Have Changed.” Second song: “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” He knows what he knows. I don’t think he cares.

In “My Own Version of You,” I spy an oblique semi-resolution to the plagiarism fight, in this latest “version.” The word version, like its cognate verses, flows out of the Latin word vertere, to turn. When Bob creates something new, he turns it, takes it, re-directs, assembles, and re-makes it. Turning is creation. It’s not making something from nothing – remember, this is the guy who fingers God as murderer in “Highway 61 Revisited” – but creation instead is a sideways practice that turns old things new, while still showing their age. That’s his own version, of you, of me, of himself and American music.

The animating spirit of these turning versions isn’t the sleek propagandist and order-maker Augustus, under whose reign the time of universal peace arrives. Instead, Bob’s Caesar splits open old unities, finding partial meanings somewhere “between a-one and two,” as he’s asking himself, “What would Julius Caesar do?” With his version and creation, he crosses the Rubicon into fragments that only partially cohere.

In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature discovers his own violent power when he strangles a young boy. “I too can create desolation,” the creature laments over the murdered corpse. Creation in the monster-myth includes destruction. Shelley like Dylan glosses the world of Julius Caesar the world-breaker, rather than pale nephew Augustus the order-maker. That’s the version Bob’s after – not an imperial unity but an assemblage of parts, soldered together by “one strike of lightning” and a sufferer’s feel for history and change.

“I’m gon’ bring somone to life,” he insists. “Someone I’ve never seen.”

You know exactly what he means.

Here are the lyrics, highlighted to match the lines I’ve been wrestling with —

All through the summers and into January
I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

I want to bring someone to life – is what I want to do
I want to create my own version of you

It must be the winter of my discontent
I wish you’d taken me with you wherever you went
They talk all night – they talk all day
Not for a second do I believe what they say

I want to bring someone to life – someone I’ve never seen
You know what I mean – you know exactly what I mean

I’ll take Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando

Mix ‘em up in a tank and get a robot commando
If I do it upright and put the head on straight
I’ll be saved by the creature that I create
I get blood from a cactus – make gunpowder from ice
I don’t gamble with cards and I don’t shoot no dice
Can you look in my face with your sightless eye
Can you cross your heart and hope to die

I’ll bring someone to life – someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel

I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind
I want to do things for the benefit of all mankind
I say to the willow tree – don’t weep for me
I’m saying the hell with all things that used to be
I get into trouble and I hit the wall
No place to turn – no place at all
I pick a number between one and two
And I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do

I’ll bring someone to life – in more ways than one
Don’t matter how long it takes – it’ll be done when it’s done

I’m gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell
Like Liberace – like St. John the Apostle
Play every number that I can play
I’ll see you baby on Judgement Day
After midnight if you still want to meet
I’ll be at the Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street
Two doors down not that far to walk
I’ll hear your footsteps – you won’t have to knock

I’ll bring someone to life – balance the scales
I’m not gonna get involved in any insignificant details

You can bring it to St. Peter – you can bring it to Jerome
You can move it on over – bring it all the way home
Bring it to the corner where the children play
You can bring it to me on a silver tray

I’ll bring someone to life – spare no expense
Do it with decency and common sense

Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be
You won’t get away with fooling me
Can you help me walk that moonlight mile
Can you give me the blessings of your smile

I want to bring someone to life – use all my powers
Do it in the dark in the wee small hours

I can see the history of the whole human race
It’s all right there – its carved into your face
Should I break it all down – should I fall on my knees
Is there light at the end of the tunnel – can you tell me please
Stand over there by the Cypress tree
Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery
Long ago before the First Crusade
Way back before England or America were made
Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best known enemies of mankind dwell
Mister Freud with his dreams and Mister Marx with his axe
See the raw hide lash rip the skin off their backs
You got the right spirit – you can feel it you can hear it
You got what they call the immortal spirit
You can feel it all night you can feel it in the morn
Creeps into your body the day you are born
One strike of lightning is all that I need
And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed
Show me your ribs – I’ll stick in the knife
I’m gonna jump start my creation to life

I want to bring someone to life – turn back the years
Do it with laughter – do it with tears

Happy birthday, Bob!