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  • Phonography, and: Forward Sestina (Dylanesque)
  • Sharon Dolin (bio)

Phonography

The first time, early morning, he asked to hear—no, to see, really—how the phonograph worked: how the arm with the needle moved across the turntable then down onto the huge spinning licorice disc. I pulled out the three-album recording from Woodstock, slid out the middle record, then put down the side where Jefferson Airplane sings, always half-intelligibly to me: Look what’s happening out in thestreets: Got a revolution. Got to Revolution. With Grace Slick I did the monkey there in my bedroom at 8:30 in the morning in the early days of 2005 nearly thirty-six years later, as my six-year-old looked on. What could he understand from that time—too young to realize we were there all over again: the young men, and women this time, dying in ambush in the desert instead of the jungle, the massacres, the tortures, and we still needing some music to magnify our passion? Why does that moment with him looking on have a shimmer, even an aura around it, so years from now as years from back then, when I was thirteen and just slightly too young to have been there, still I was there even as I physically wasn’t—was caught in Brooklyn, not yet smoking marijuana? Why is that yearning still palpable— that moment all these years later, whatever there was to remember I still remember: the deceit in high places, our need for a revolution so that in twelve years my own son won’t have to dodge the draft with his long hair and his wild ideas he’ll be sure I can’t conceive of, but will contain echoes of something I have nearly lived. [End Page 91]

Forward Sestina (Dylanesque)

I Want You So Bad Honey

Honey I’m Bad to Want So much of You

You are not my Honey So what can I do but Want to be Bad

Bad I am with or without You who Wants only Honey and that’s what I am would give you So so so tongue-tied am I

So lip-stitched so Bad at say-signaling I would do for to with You who are nothing but Honey, and how I Want to oh how I [End Page 92]

Want So . . . (Honey, Coney) Bad You and I

Sharon Dolin

Sharon Dolin’s fourth book of poems, Burn and Dodge, won the 2007 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and was recently published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. New poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Barrow Street tenth anniversary issue, New American Writing, 5 AM, Laurel Review, Guernica, and Court Green.

“As a late Boomer (I was just 13 when Woodstock happened; 3 years older, I would have been there), I always feel like I’m a voyeur when it comes to the cultural moment, standing outside of it or else belatedly coming upon its highlights. I first encountered ‘I Want You’ and other Dylan songs from Blonde on Blonde (released in 1966) when I was in high school in the early 70s. I still have my collection of buttons from the era, including the iconic Peace sign buttons and the Woodstock Peace & Music button with the dove perched on the neck of a guitar. Nothing since has equaled the color, the intensity, the music, and the sense of being part of a movement of the Sixties and Seventies.”

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