Bob Dylan Haiku

He's a poet and he knows it.

Haiku defined
A form of Japanese poetry. A haiku expresses a single feeling or impression and contains three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively.

The perfect form of poetry for accountants, as it requires counting.

Ballad of a Thin Man
Something's happenin'
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones!

Yeah, left out the because and the here because it would have been too many syllables with them included. That's what makes them kinda' hard and why ya' always gotta' be counting.

One Dylan fanatic has spent many hours counting, as he embarked upon the task of explaining every Dylan song with a haiku. So he's not only a Dylan fanatic, but a completist as well, the biggest curse of being struck by the Dylan passion. He gathered them up in a book, but couldn't find a publisher. Hmmmm, didn't know that was possible, he must have been looking in all the wrong places.

Some are good, some are bad, and everything in between. Sadly, he went back to his day job, while promising to revise and repeat, even appealing for some help here, here and here. As you can see, he is also an archivist, not just a writer and completist.

Watch out if you start perusing his poetry. Find one good one and you are egged on to find another, like eating buttered popcorn. And then you'll want to see what he did for your favorite song. Now you discover that Blogger is not the ideal platform for such an endeavor. He needs a website with an alphabetical table of contents by song title, not a blog, sorted by date. In the beginning he posted them as he wrote them, a haphazard series of snapshots. Then he made an effort to post them alphabetically from December 2010 through July 2012. And in January and February 2015 it appears he has started over with the A's through D's. Remember, I warned you. Get out NOW, while you can.

Brownsville Girl
Gregory Peck films
Haunt man who yearns for a girl
And dates another.

All the Tired Horses
The horses are tired.
How can we ride them? PS:
The horses are tired.

Did he cheat on that syllable count?

Big Yellow Taxi
They chopped down the trees,
Destroyed the environment.
Nobody noticed.

Joni was wise to use more than seventeen syllables in her zinger line, wasn't she!

Sometimes his revisions are better.

Bad Watchtower
Joker can't take life.
Thief says, "It is what it is...
Let others suffer."

Better Watchtower
The joker can’t cope.
Chill, says the thief, life’s a joke.
Princess waits, wind howls.

Some of them made me laugh out loud, a lot!

Baby Stop Cryin'
Some asshole hurt you.
Bob will love you. Go to him,
But please be quiet.

Okay, that's all I'm gonna spoon feed to you. Find your own, from now on. But certainly our Mr. MacMillan has clearly demonstrated that art can be appreciated in many ways and great art can inspire work by many others. Still, one can't help to wonder why a writer with a name like that could fail to find a publisher. Maybe he grew up being told that he should never rely on nepotism.

Another example of how art can be appreciated and analysed by others.

CODA

One morning, one came to me as I was waking, so I thought I better publish it, a form of exorcism.

The more I like it,
The more I want to do it,
But I don't know how.

Text (not RM's haiku) & banner image :copyright: 2014-15 by Ron Chester
27 March 2015

WAIT, WAIT! There is more.

I decided to spend an hour compiling an example of a Table of Contents, just for the A-D section of the alphabet that RM posted in 2015. An example of service by EDLIS extended to those who have already labored so long and hard over Dylan's art. Here it is.

You're welcome.