Jungleland: Issa's Sunday Service, #66

Asbury Park

Outside the streets on fire in a real death waltz

Between what's flesh and what's fantasy 

  and the poets down here 

Don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment

And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded,

  not even dead,

Tonight in Jungleland.

Something of an epic, part of which was used as an epigraph for Stephen King's monumental post-apocalyptic novel, The Stand (the title of which comes from a line above), in its final verses Bruce Springsteen's Jungleland almost seems to transcend the medium itself.  Something I never noticed before is the tip o' the hat to F. Scott Fitzgerald with a line in the previous verse

Beneath the city two hearts beat,
Soul engines running through a night so tender

Anytime a night is described as tender, the lyrical Fitzgerald is recalled. Without getting too carried away, the debt to Dylan is fairly obvious.  What might be less obvious is what I perceive as a Yeats feel.  Maybe it's just me; still, the naming of the characters in this narrative certainly recalls Yeats's Crazy Jane, who was directly referenced in Springsteen's earlier minor epic, Spirit in the Night.  

Then there are these lines from Jungleland:

Man there's an opera out on the turnpike,
There's a ballet being fought out in the alley

For this edition of the Sunday Service, I'll leave it with this great live performance of Jungleland from a 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame show.

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Featured from the archive this week is a poem I believe may have appeared on Facebook and the Twitter feed but not here.  A monostitch in 7 mere words, it opens up worlds:

     childhood:        train track leading into the forest

        M. Kettner

completing
the green mountain
a pheasant cries

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don


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PPS Don't miss a transcendent performance by Skip James over at Miss Late July.  I'm thinking Nick Cave should cover this one.