Hardhearted Barbara Allen

I’m after the ballad these days, trying to catch its essence. I’m of the opinion there’s something there that’s missing in poetry. For me. It’s not just the music, although that’s a large piece, and part of the reason why meter and rhyme is so attractive to me. Although, after listening to Bob Dylan sing “Barbara Allen” from a bootleg tape recorded at the Gaslight Café on October 1962, I’m thinking free verse could contribute when it comes to that weird stress certain singers, like Bob, will use on syllables in a lyric that turn them into more than mere words but raw emotions. Maybe a combination of meter, free verse, and rhyme is what I’m thinking.

Oh I know it’s not attractive to those fundamentalists out there that love to intellectualize art or tear down Ashbery, Bly, to Zeus knows who, but then again, no one’s ever mistaken me for an intellectual. Heartless, yes. But that’s the part I’m working on.

“The Rose & the Briar” could be therapeutic, if slow, for I intend to read the chapters carefully, but also listen to the songs as carefully. Maybe something will finally sink in. Dave Marsh opens the book with an essay on that song, “Barbara Allen.” It’s filled with heart (and sometimes heartbreaking), both the song and the essay. The ending doesn’t give either away but everything else it offers freely.

What’s amazing is our ability to ignore the lesson that “Barbara Allen” has to teach, which is the peril of denying the complicated mysteries that throb within our hardened hearts and the equal peril of horsing around instead of acknowledging our love for one another. This is not a lesson you can squeeze onto a tombstone, or, for that matter, our current conception of a curriculum, but it is one to carry through this life. (pg. 17)

Denying mysteries. Horsing around instead. Now what poetry has he been reading do you think?