Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Jonathan Wells

Introduction copyright © 2007 by Bono

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ISBN-10: 1-4165-3952-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3952-0

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Dedication

THANKS TO THE PEOPLE who contributed in one way or another: Chris Merrill, Marie Ponsot, Paul Muldoon, David St. John, Poets House, Bill Flanagan, Mike Corbett, Judy McGrath, Reuben Napkine, Kurt Brown, Matthew Zapruder, Michael Zilkha, Paul McGuinness, Karen Glenn, Susan Hunter, Jacob Hoye, Lollion Chong, and Jennifer Heddle.

To Jane for her love and patience and Alexander, Juliet, Delilah, and Gabriel for their good questions.

Contents

Foreword By Bono

Introduction By Jonathan Wells

Busking, Kevin Young

Guns N’ Roses, Campbell McGrath

An Elegy for Bob Marley, William Matthews

The Musician Talks About Process, Rita Dove

Interlude: Still Still, Robin Behn

Decrescendo, Larry Levis

Cheers, Billy Collins

Truncated Elegy, Mark Bibbins

Kissing and Telling, Paul Muldoon

Listening to Jefferson Airplane, Thom Gunn

The Hallelujah Jam, Victoria Redel

The Reef, David St. John

The Wailers in Estadio Nacional, Idra Novey

At the Fillmore, Philip Levine

Days of 1968, Edward Hirsch

Dream Job, Matthew Zapruder

Alas, They Sighed, You Were Not Like Us, Sarah Manguso

If Poetry Were Not Morality, Tess Gallagher

Portrait of a Lady, Alan Jenkins

A Repertoire, Michael Donaghy

A Genesis Text for Larry Levis, Who Died Alone, Norman Dubie

Sun-Saddled, Coke-Copping, Bad-Boozing Blues, Charles Wright

Golden Oldie, Rita Dove

Endless Sleep, Kurt Brown

Household Gods, Jim Elledge

Phantom, Stephen Dunn

Love Potion No. 9, Robert Long

Parkersburg, Mark Halliday

Elvis’s Twin Sister, Carol Ann Duffy

Elvis Presley, Thom Gunn

The Wine Talks, James Tate

The Sun Sessions, Lavinia Greenlaw

Shore Leave, Lynda Hull

Cher, Dorianne Laux

Chiffon, Lynda Hull

Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin

The Assassination of John Lennon as Depicted by the Madame Tussaud Wax Museum, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 1987, David Wojahn

Yeah Yeah Yeah, Roddy Lumsden

From Me to You, Robyn Fialkow

Bed Music, Charles Simic

Rock Music, Derek Mahon

North(west)ern, Patience Agbabi

Some Crazy Dancing, Victoria Redel

Disco Elegy, Daniel Tobin

I Like the Music That Shakes, Jonathan Wells

Delivering Eggs to the Girls’ Dorm, B. H. Fairchild

An Englishman Abroad, August Kleinzahler

Hanoi Hannah, Yusef Komunyakaa

Ooly Poop a Cow, David Huddle

Sleep, After Ray Charles Show And Hurricane Report, Heather McHugh

Sleeve Notes, Paul Muldoon

The Burning of the Midnight Lamp, Edward Hirsch

Electric Church, William Olsen

All Along the Watchtower, Tony Hoagland

Between Takes, Paul Muldoon

Watching Young Couples with an Old Girlfriend on Sunday Morning, August Kleinzahler

Montage: MTV, Yusef Komunyakaa

The Victim, Thom Gunn

Punk Rock You’re My Big Crybaby, Allen Ginsberg

Rock Music, Les Murray

What’s So Funny ’Bout Peace, Love and Understanding, Robert Long

Manhattan Diptych, David St. John

Lucifer In Starlight, David St. John

C Train Home: Lou Reed After the Wake of Delmore Schwartz, July 1966, David Wojahn

7-Minute Song, Mark Bibbins

The Prophet’s Song, Daniel Nester

The Prophecy, Robert Wrigley

Bohemian Rhapsody, Daniel Nester

Vince Neil Meets Josh in a Chinese Restaurant in Malibu (After Exra Pound), Josh Bell

Variation on a Theme by Whitesnake, Dan Hoy

The Secret History of Rock & Roll, Charles Harper Webb

Mostly Mick Jagger, Catie Rosemurgy

Necromancy: The Last Days of Brian Jones, 1968, David Wojahn

Gimme Shelter, Bill Knott

The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives, William Matthews

You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball And Chain, Alice Fulton

Pearl, Dorianne Laux

Berkeley 1971, Karen Glenn

Blue Lonely Dreams, Marc Cohen

Comebacks, Charles Harper Webb

Birthday, Franz Wright

Poet Biographies

Credits

Foreword

by Bono

THE POETS WHO FILL the pews here have come to testify, to bear witness to the mysterious power of Rock and Roll. Their lives have at some point been upended by guitar, bass, and drum. They are evangelists and hopeless addicts…drunks in Leonard Cohen’s midnight choir, gate-crashers at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, whispering in high spirits. These men and women are rowdy but around the corner from tears.

Rock and Roll is truly a broad church, but each lights a candle to their vision of what it is. Some write of their first love, some are still in love with their first love (I am one of those). It’s an unexplainable feeling like, Faith…It occupies a place that the less we visit, the less alive we feel. It is not about youth but the evidence of life.

All the writers in Jonathan Wells’s Third Rail march to the tattoo best explained by Bob Dylan, …he not busy being born is busy dying. They know that demise starts with your record collection.

Introduction

by Jonathan Wells

SAY YOU ARE WAITING at a traffic light on a city street at ten o’clock on a humid summer night. The air-conditioning in your car doesn’t work so the windows are rolled down. Another car pulls up next to you and the radio is playing Jimi Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower. Loud. You listen to part of a verse then the light turns green and the car takes off in a blur. You are left behind mouthing some of the lyrics, There must be some kind of way out of here / Said the joker to the thief…

Or your telephone company puts you on hold as you are waiting to pay the bill. A soundtrack comes on that has borrowed John Lennon’s Imagine without lyrics. You think to yourself how schmaltzy it sounds and supply the words yourself.

A variety of everyday situations offers music you have heard before, with or without lyrics, slightly rearranged to sell something, to flesh out a film or television character, to tell you your phone is ringing, or to hold your patience. The music and lyrics float into your mind and just as easily drift off. This is not deep listening and yet it is ubiquitous, subliminal, and impossible to ignore.

In many of these poems music and lyrics do the same. They enter suddenly, gracefully, and then vanish just as quickly. In Thom Gunn’s poem Listening to Jefferson Airplane the music arrives on the wind and departs the same way. In Stephen Dunn’s poem Phantom Bob Dylan races out of the radio and then fades away. This does not mean the song or singer is peripheral to the poem. Its appearance is as important as any other of its features.

In some poems, the song is an instrument that delivers a memory back from a forgotten time of a person, place, or event. Although the poem is carefully staged these are not considered moments but are just as unavoidable as the ones that come from the car next door or being put on a brief hold. But they offer a more full-bodied experience. In Rita Dove’s poem The Musician Talks About Process the narrator remembers his grandfather playing spoons and how he played them and where and then describes how he plays them himself, which leads to his surprising conclusion. The poem follows a longer trail into the woods.

Other poems are meditations on a song or a singer, descriptive or analytical. The subject is confronted and taken apart before being reassembled, as in Alice Fulton’s poem for Janis Joplin You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain. Fulton’s choices of language don’t just describe the voice and the singer, but evoke it and place it in Fulton’s context. In Campbell McGrath’s apocalyptic poem Guns N’ Roses only three minutes of a song are enough to make him remember the details of a specific time, with its distinctions, distortions, and oddities.

Many of the poems ask or answer the question, What is music? Where does it come from? For William Matthews, music calls us together. In Interlude: Still Still by Robin Behn a boy looks for it inside a guitar sound hole where he had dropped a quarter as if it had been a jukebox. Outside Larry Levis’s window, the music ends, the needle on the phonograph / Scrapes like someone raking leaves, briefly, across / A sidewalk, & no one alone is, particularly, special. / That is what musicians are for, to remind us of this. And finally Franz Wright affirms what is beyond discussion, Everyone agrees. / The dead singers have the best voices.

These poems display the range of music and an attention to it from acute listening to random moments as music appears and disappears around us. The lines of some of these poems may stay with you for an hour or a day. Hopefully, some of them will remain as long as the lyrics of songs that return without being summoned.

Busking

The day folds up like money

if you’re lucky. Mostly

sun a cold coin

drumming into the blue

of a guitar case. Close

up & head home.

Half-hundred times I wanted

to hock these six strings

or hack, if I could, my axe

into firewood. That blaze

never lasts.

I’ve begged myself hoarse

sung streetcorner

& subway over a train’s blast

through stale air & trash.

You’ve seen me, brushed past—

my strings screech

& light up like a third rail—

mornings, I am fed by flies,

strangers, sunrise.

KEVIN YOUNG

Guns N’Roses

I.M. TIM DWIGHT, 1958–1994

Not a mea culpa, not an apology, but an admission:

there are three minutes in the middle of Sweet Child o’ Mine

that still, for all the chopped cotton of the passing years,

for all the muddled victories and defeats of a lifetime,

for all the grief and madness and idiocy of our days,

slay me, just slay me. They sound like how it felt to be alive

at that instant, how it was to walk the streets of Manhattan

in that era of caviar and kill-hungry feedback,

the Big Apple so candy-coated with moral slush and easy money

even the corporate heavyweights could fashion no defense

against decay, all the homeless encamped over cold coffee

at Dunkin’ Donuts on upper Broadway, even McDonald’s

become a refugee camp for victims of the unacknowledged war

fought beneath the giddy banners of corporatization

as the decade spun down its drain of self-delusion. Where do we go, where do we go, where do we go

now?What a glorious passage, a shimmering bridge