The seemingly endless excavation of Bob Dylan material continues with Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, which contains 23 Dylan poems written as accompaniment to handsome photos by Barry Feinstein. The poems – though Dylan hesitates to call them that in his included interview – riff on Feinstein’s photos of Hollywood’s funerals and award shows, its weary stars, discarded props, beaten landmarks, and underemployed beauties. The poems and photos are neither mean nor stark; they are honest and resigned, occasionally generous and beautiful.

Feinstein and Dylan were pals in the 1960s, when they toured and road-tripped together. In 1964, Dylan wrote the poems (and they are poems, Billy Collins explains in an included essay, if they get along fine without the music). The lines are short and hasty, stuttering and repetitive. Final letters drop off words. You can almost hear the jangle. The photos are sharp, quick captures of the irretrievable: stumbling high heels in Sophia Loren’s cemented footprints, a radiant, soft Playboy playmate, Pat Crest (before Playboy Playmates turned hard-bodied), Bette Davis sad-eyed and smoking between takes, a Rolls Royce at the unemployment office.

Some of the poems have an easy, direct humor, like the few that are conversations between actors and casting agents or coaches, or a monologue by a hopeful traveler to the Hollywood sign (“there it squats / a million watts / strong an shinin / we go searchin / onward onward”) who leaves disappointed (“off again / away away / go right thru it / make room for the others / comin to it”). Others are loopier, mentioning doors that wear pants and “a jeweled goose” on a dashboard, shouting “gobble gobble.” Some have crackling rhythm and rhyme, like Dylan’s description of guests at the premiere of “Cleopatra”:

furs reserved
perfume for the face preserved
…
hooked an gathered
splendor feathered
spectacle respectable
with laps waitin
tender throated

There are poems for the dead, for Gary Cooper’s funeral and Marilyn Monroe’s passing. To Monroe, whose level of constantly-photographed fame Dylan was only just beginning to attain, he writes a sad, short note, accompanying Feinstein’s heartbreaking photo of Monroe’s two toy puppies abandoned next to her still swimming pool. For Cooper’s funeral, Feinstein captures camera-clicking fans, a sad Marlene Dietrich in a swooping black hat, a tearful John Ford, and, below tall thin palm trees, a row of shiny black cars captained by a hearse. Dylan is at once harsh and poignant in commenting on the spectacle of mourning:

aches an sorrow
pain an sorrow
what good what good
(if even with all its deaths
the world has not become
a gentler world) then
how righteous
can the sight of sadness be?

From here, appropriately, poems and photos take on the Oscars, Hollywood’s attempt at canonized permanence. Next to those concluding photos of hands clutching statuettes, Dylan sighs: “priceless / but for the worthless space it took / I later held it / if for no other reason / just t hold it.”

Further Reading: Real Moments: Photographs of Bob Dylan 1966-1974 and Dylan’s Visions of Sin

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