Your editor asked Wallace Stevens’ biographer, Paul Mariani, to comment on Bob Dylan’s new song “Key West”…
As for Bob Dylan’s “Key West”; I’ve been mulling it over and over, and am convinced now that I hear echoes of Stevens in there, for whom Key West was central for nearly twenty years. And of course there’s Dylan’s acknowledgment of modernist poets’ influence on his work–though I don’t know if he’d admit that it’s here as well (I remember Christopher Ricks’ writing on Bob Dylan, and then how Dylan shrugged it all off, as is his wont. A fascinating man for sure.)
My sense is that it’s about following Kerouac and Ginsberg and Corso and the great Jazz tradition (Dylan visited Kerouac’s grave with Ginsberg back in 1976 and walked among the Stations of the Cross with Allen)—and Dylan’s reading of the misuse of power, focusing on the present, on Donald Trump, the first president since JFK to visit Key West, if only for two hours back in April 2018. Kennedy visited the military bases at Key West on November 26, 1962, a year almost to the day before he too was assassinated. This was in relation to the Cuban missile crisis. JFK was the last president to visit Key West until Donald Trump, who was applauded, but also heavily booed by the people. It’s fascinating to compare the motorcades of JFK and Trump to see what’s happened in those 55 years. What to make of all of this? Then there’s that subtle reference to King Belshazzar in Chapter 5 of the Book of Daniel, who is terrified to see that, even at one of his great feasts, death itself is written on the wall and needs only the prophet to point this out.
Clearly the president as public voice is here, for the poem opens with the slow death of McKinley after being shot twice in the stomach by a Polish anarchist and then goes on to mention Harry Truman’s little white house in Key West, mingled with the gothic horror stories you can hear during a 90-minute evening tour there. Then too there’s the talk about being on the left and swinging a little to the right. And perhaps there’s something of Trump’s intimate life in that lad who married a prostitute. But over it all, there’s the poet/singer who listens as the woman on the beach sings beyond the genius of the sea, a way of getting beyond it all, what with land’s end and the distant horizon and the encroachment at 79 of death itself:
“Fly around my Pretty Little Miss
I don’t love nobody – gimme a kiss”
Sound familiar, Mr. President? And Dylan: Get me outta that Key West horror show and into one more like Stevens’.
In the end, what better place to find immortality than there in Key West, where land itself ends and there on the distant horizon, one might find what Stevens recalled in his last poem before he drifted off at 75: “the palm at the end of the mind.”