A "poem i love": Evan Kennedy's "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I Go Mine"

Sometimes other concerns get in the way of poetry for a little while and the break is refreshing. The solutions to all the poems I'm trying to write seem to have arrived during the hiatus, so that the reunion with my notebook is intense. Other times--and this is hard to admit--the break leaves me sluggish and unmotivated. I feel frustrated by poetry's small audience and dubious about the importance of art at all in a world full of so much injustice, in need of so much direct action. I even begin to doubt that anything about my life is really that different just because I didn't write any new poems.

For these occasions I have a Word file on my desktop titled "poems i love." And that's just what it is. If I read a literary magazine, or a new collection, or an anthology, and a poem sticks with me or compels me to read more than once, I'll type it into this document. Then, when I begin to question why I would want to spend so much time writing poetry, I scroll through the poems I've collected, randomly stopping and reading.

I found myself needing to visit "poems i love" this morning. And there I found Evan Kennedy's "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I Go Mine." It appeared in The Captain's Tower anthology --published in honor of Bob Dylan's 70th birthday--that I was lucky enough to place a poem in earlier this year. "Most Likely You Go . . ." was immediately my favorite poem in the anthology. I like it because it is about Bob Dylan, of course, and I like it for a hundred little reasons that might only make sense to other Dylan obsessives--the perfect rendering of the Chaplinesqueness of the character "Bob Dylan" in the poem, for instance. But the main reason I like it, the main reason it is among the poems I turn to for reassurance as a poet, is the playfulness. It reminds me that writing a poem can be a hell of a lot of fun.

I don't know anything about Evan Kennedy, but I'm pretty sure he must have had a hell of a lot of fun writing this one.

I'm never sure what's appropriate to excerpt from a single poem, but since Kennedy's is a long one--it contains five sections--and since excerpting it is in the spirit of promoting his work, I don't think the following is too much.

4

Bob Dylan pulls up a chair at the only bar
he has never been to

Its lamps please Bob Dylan’s eyes
so much he is prepared to comment
until he realizes his thoughts of the lamps
in another bar
a bar he frequents quite a bit
are influencing his current impressions

So much for the lamps he thinks
The bartender mistakes Bob Dylan
for Reggie Jackson
greatest New York Yankee
ever to play right field

What’s your poison Mr. October he says
though it is clear to the patrons of this bar
that this man is not Reggie Jackson
but rather Emma Goldman
greatest American anarchist
ever to play right field

Bob Dylan does not correct him
but instead asks for a bowl of grapes
to which the bartender replies
that this is not a fruit stand
but a bar and that no grapes can be sold

Thinking he was not understood
that perhaps the bartender is new
Bob Dylan requests a second time
the bowl of grapes
to which the bartender replies that if
there is a third request for the grapes
he will nail Bob Dylan’s beak to the bar floor
and roast him
The bartender is clearly mistaking this patron
for a duck that waddled in

Bob Dylan waddles out of the bar
only to return the next night and request
from the bartender surely the same bartender
a bowl of grapes

Yankee or not
the bartender replies
this is not the establishment
to serve you a bowl of grapes
as he reaches into a dark cabinet
a cabinet good for storing a hammer and nails
to which Bob Dylan gets off the barstool
and leaves
not quite offended