HAPPY 77th BIRTHDAY, ROBERT HUNTER
Grateful Dead Lyricist, American Poetry National Treasure
BY the time I first heard the space-driven, freeing journey that is the Grateful Dead classic “Dark Star”, by the first time I absorbed all its beguiling words and multitudes of jams, I was already mad for poetry. However, this song, its experimentalism, its wildness, and its writer kept poetry alive for me, when . . .well, when poetry could not.
In a mid-’80s midwest, thanks to the guidance of my cigar-smoking, 6th-grade English teacher, Jo-Ann O’hern, I was exposed to our hometown hero Carl Sandburg, and experimental poets like Emily Dickinson, and E.E. Cummins. Reading them opened possible worlds that lived in a condensed, intimate space of the page. Jo was abrasive, chop-haired, somehow comfortable in her polyester turtlenecks; in a Friday Night Lights town, she was as unpopular as the poetry unit. Having clumsily just failed to make the end-all-be-all Bluestreak cheerleading team, I aligned myself to both teacher and subject.
Poetry soon appealed to, and healed, my growing sense of outcast-ness. By my junior year in high school, I transferred to an arts high school to study poetry. I didn’t know that much about it, but I showed up with lyrics to “Dark Star” scrawled in my notebook. I walked into my first writing workshop at 16 with two tiny, terrible poems titled “Opalescence” and “Translucence.” I got reamed for abstraction. I probably cried. But I never stopped reaching for the mystery, for the feeling “Dark Star” still gives me.
I mean, these lyrics, (the first official collaboration with Hunter), begin with an oxymoron that normally would send poetry lovers pouting:
“Dark Star crashes/ Pouring its light into ashes/Reason tatters/the forces tear us loose from the axis.”
Alas, our disbelief is suspended (how can a star be dark? how can light join ashes?) and yes, “reason” immediately disintegrates. This couplet ensures our spirits are afloat on the assonance of “a” sounds. “Crashes” rhymes with “tatters” and the newly lit “ashes” blaze the “axis.” And, we are off! Luckily, in the next lines, there is a searchlight to keep watch on us, to cast any “delusion” from its cloud.
And then, the most compelling question in music maybe ever: “Shall we go, then, you and I while we can?”
Addressed to the listener, (this move in poetry is called an apostrophe), we are all invited in. Brilliant! With a nod to T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” (Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky), we are fully in the realm of poetry. When experienced live, the band and the audience are agreeing to a contract at this moment — whatever ensues is an adventure embarked upon together. Totally. Take us there.
The song guides us onward: “Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds”—boom! We are transported waaaay elsewhere. Into a verisimilitude of mirrors, formlessness, reflections, glass hands, and “ice petal flowers.” Totally we are lost in a sheen, so much so that we need a “Lady in velvet” that “recedes in the nights of goodbye” to hold onto. A muse appears, even if only to leave. . .yet we are not alone in the chaos.
Thank you, Robert Hunter. Thank you.
Like any boarding school in the 1990s worth their salt, the rebel underbelly relied on the touring act of the Dead to grace their state and make rule-breaking in — or out — of the dorms more possible. Even though I was immersed in reading Confessionalists like Sharon Olds, the Deep Imagists like Galway Kinnell, and the memory narrativists of Louise Gluck and my fly-fishing nature poet-teachers, if not for the work of Robert Hunter (transmitted by the vehicle of Grateful Dead)—even I might have drifted from poetic pursuits.
For I was still craving a line wilder than what I was seeing, more than the sum of its word-parts. I didn’t know it, but like Hunter I had heavily Romantic ambitions for poetry: to preserve the folk, flirt with the occult, work against the machine, to make art against industry, to play with form. To create a poetic line that can change perception. To enjoy the surrealist impulse of the subconscious and strange.
Where else would I have had such massive exposure to the magic capture of the image, that it could emblazon on the backs of my eyelids? Where else but this music would I have encountered the sheer timelessness of the lyric form, but in Hunter’s ability to wrap an abstraction in story or imagery — tapping visceral sensations, as well as felt impressions, sounds, and invisible spaces?
In a way, “Dark Star,” and many other songs of Hunter’s are the poems I memorized, hearkening back to a radio-era America steeped in listening, in sound. The America that raised Hunter and Garcia was close to poetry: radio hours, recitation as parlor games, and poetry scrapbooks as a pastime. And then, of course, would come the populist notions of the Beats.
A poetic line becomes Power when it is read out loud when a poem can be social, and especially when poems are read in recitation or in group mode. When poetry is freed, it is open to interpretation, for the reader to step into. When it can live like a virus and seep into cracks or infect the people, poetry becomes capital — it becomes POETRY. And that freedom was there for me as a balm in spite of the traumas that can exist within a life of poetry stifled in academia. What a wonderful rarity, to share poetry that is known by many.
And so, much like Carl Sandburg, Hunter’s work as an American poet is folkloric, in motion, and largely unrecognized. Gathering and singing Hunter’s words together, as evidenced by the continuing cast of musicians culminating on stage for decades to play the tunes, is just so we can sing them out loud in an exalted choir—one that embodies well an American Songbook. It is the evolution of Sandburg’s American Songbag. Hunter’s work really nears the eternal.
There shouldn’t be a question about Hunter’s place in American poetry. I will continue to fight for it, but for now, I quote our notorious recluse-genius (in his only scene) in Amir Bar Lev’s Oscar-nominated Long Strange Trip: splayed on a couch, Hunter recounts and spouts the lyrics of “Dark Star” in one flow, akin to an oracular source: “What is unclear about that?”
