Time's Hinges Halt Poem by gershon hepner

Back glances hooked, time’s hinges halt
and we review the photo-ops
we’ve store in sentimental vaults,
and digitize in photo-shops,
trying to repackage them,
transferring them to disks where they,
rebuking us ad hominem,
reveal to us how we decay.

Julie Bosman writes about a long forgotten bundle of snapshots of Hollywood in the early 1960 taken by Barry Feinstein, who persuaded Bob Dylan to write prose poems inspired by them (“Dylan’s Poetic Pause in Hollywood on the Way to Folk Music Fame, ” NYT, August 16,2008) :
Barry Feinstein, the rock ’n’ roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he came across a long-forgotten bundle of pictures, dozens of dark, moody snapshots of Hollywood in the early 1960s. And tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan. “It was the lost manuscript, ” Mr. Feinstein recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Woodstock, N.Y. “Everybody forgot about it but me.” The poems were so lost that Mr. Dylan, when told of the discovery, had forgotten that he had written them. (In his defense, it was the ’60s.) But after languishing in storage for more than 40 years, the text and photographs will be published in November in a collection titled “Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript.”It is the latest installment in Mr. Dylan’s seemingly never-ending body of work, which includes more than 50 albums, a critically acclaimed autobiography and a recently published collection of arty sketches called “Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series.” The new book, to be published by Simon & Schuster, includes more than 75 of Mr. Feinstein’s photographs and 23 of Mr. Dylan’s prose poems, which are each marked alphabetically to correspond to a photo….
In the text accompanying a photo of Marlene Dietrich appearing stricken at Gary Cooper’s funeral in 1961, Mr. Dylan wrote: “t dare not ask your sculpturer’s name/with glance back hooked, time’s hinges halt.” After the photos and text were pulled together into a rough manuscript, Mr. Dylan and Mr. Feinstein took it to a publisher, Macmillan, where executives expressed interest but were afraid that the pictures would bring a lawsuit from the studio. So the manuscript was put aside, and Mr. Feinstein kept it for more than four decades in his vast collection of photographs, books and other papers. “I knew it was an important document, ” he said. “So I kept it in the back of my head all that time.” Mr. Feinstein went on to develop a close collaboration with Mr. Dylan. He shot the cover photo for “The Times They Are A-Changin, ” and dozens of photos of Mr. Dylan throughout the years. Through his manager, Jeff Rosen, Mr. Dylan declined to comment on the book, and he is not expected to promote it. But at 67, Mr. Dylan is just as prolific as ever, writing, touring and releasing albums. Just this week, he performed in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in October he is expected to release another collection of songs, “Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol.8.”


8/16/08