A Man on the Street: The "Time Out of Mind" Experience

Whilst I was on my postgraduate degree, as you know, I did not have many friends. That was not due to bullying or malice on someone else’s part towards me but instead it was because I chose to. I chose not to befriend these people because I found them snobby, especially the way they talked about literature and how it ‘was not intelligent’ to read popular novels etc. They were very arrogant about the community of people who like to read things like beach reads, YA and mainstream Sci-Fi and would make jokes about it. They would make jokes about people who were less well-off than them and honestly, it made me feel uncomfortable and sick even though may parents had to pay to send me to school. I still cannot fathom how people can be so nasty. When I was studying poetry, I would like to choose a random Bob Dylan album to inspire me in order to get my mind off other people. The album I chose here was “Time Out of Mind”.

“Time Out of Mind” is an incredibly poetic album and the three songs that I normally concentrate on are:

• Not Dark Yet
• Trying to Get to Heaven
• Cold Irons Bound

When I look at the lyrics to the first two, the first thing I notice is the similarities between the images. We have images of homes and unfamiliarity and then we have bodies of water and places that are not known and new to the narrator. The time that passes in the first verse of “Trying to Get to Heaven” is clear through the use of slow pacing:

“The air is getting hotter

There's a rumbling in the skies

I've been wading through the high muddy water

With the heat rising in my eyes…”

In the song “Not Dark Yet” there is another obvious slow pacing of time through the way in which shadows are used, sleep is referred to and the fact that there is heaviness in the verse as well. All of these things slow down the song:

“Shadows are fallin' and I've been here all day

It's too hot to sleep and time is runnin' away

Feel like my soul has turned into steel

I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal

There's not even room enough to be anywhere

It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there…”

Unlike these songs, “Cold Irons Bound” is a song that has a different take on life. Instead of the slow pacing, we have a more dark and constant beat pacing - as if someone is walking at a very constant pace down the street. I loved listening to this whilst doing my assignments because it kept me focused because of that beat. Every now and again, the beat slightly changes as the chorus kicks in and it makes all the difference to the song because it feels like that person who was walking down the street has stopped to look in a shop window at something they really want but cannot afford yet. These are the kinds of things I think about when listening to song beats, yes. Call me weird but I like to imagine things like that.

I'm beginning to hear voices and there's no one around

Now I'm all used up and I fee so turned-around

I went to church on Sunday and she passed by

And my love for her is taking such a long time to die

God, I'm waist deep, waist deep in the mist

It's almost like, almost like I don't exist

I'm 20 miles out of town, Cold Irons bound

The line “God I’m waist deep…” is the volta of this verse and shows us the image of the person stopping their walk. And when we get to the line “Cold Irons bound…”, the verse returns to the way it was beforehand and so, the person who had stopped walking has now continued on down the street at the same pace they were going before.

Why am I saying this?

This is an image I started with when imagining Bob Dylan’s beats as live things and I started with the person walking and developed it into different people and different images from different songs. This would help me develop a narrative for my own poetry and develop a pace for it. I would imagine a person moving and that would be the pace and then, what they were doing would be the narrative. Then, finally, the lyrics would serve as the extended metaphor of some kind, and it would be a line or a verse but never the whole song.

What I’m saying is feel free to try that for yourself if you write poetry too. It’s a pretty cool method and you are free to use it.